Orient Express Read Online Free PDF Page B

Constantinople, very good. It is a city of misery and decay. We will make Angora our capital. We were not made to live in cities. Our life is in the fields and on the plains. If they drive us out of Angora we will go back to the great plains of central Asia, where we came from. Tell that to your high commissioners and your Meester Veelson. You have been to Stamboul. Did you see any Turks there? Only old people, beggars, Armenians and Jews, riffraff. The Turks are all in Angora with Mustapha Kemal.
    â€”Are you going to Angora?
    They nodded gravely—We are going to Angora.
    3. Inexplicable Staircases
    We are at anchor in the bay in front of Trebizond. I wear out the upper deck walking up and down. The authorities won’t let any one ashore, as the Ckilkis shelled the town this morning. There’s a rumor that they are carrying out reprisals on the remaining Greeks and Armenians, so I wear out the upper deck and stare at the town till my eyes are ready to pop out of my head.
    A pink and white town built on arches, terracing up among cypresses, domes and minarets and weather-gnawed towers against a mother-of-pearl sky piling up over the shoulder of a bulky escarped hill. Further along, dull vermilion cliffs zigzagged with inexplicable white staircases climbing up from the sea and stopping suddenly in the face of the cliff.
    Black luggers are coming out over the grassgreen water to unload the cargo.
    Trebizond, one of the capitals of my childhood geography, a place of swords and nightingales and a purple-born princess in a garden where the trees grew rubies and diamonds instead of flowers, a lonely never-to-be-rescued princess bright and cold and slender as an icicle, guarded by gold lions and automaton knights and a spray of molten lead and roar and smoke of Greek fire.
    And what is happening in this Trebizond under the white mask of walls and domes? There’s no smoke from any of the houses, no sound comes across the water. I walk up and down wearing out the upper deck wondering at the white staircases that zigzag up from the sea and stop suddenly in the face of the cliff.
    At sunset we hove anchor and started nudging down the coast into the gloom eastward.

IV. RED CAUCASUS
    1. The Twilight of Things
    Behind a cracked windowpane mended with tapes of paper, Things sit in forlorn conclave. In the center is the swagbellied shine of a big samovar, dented a little, the whistle on top askew, dust in the mouldings of the handles. Under it, scattered over a bit of mothchewed black velvet two silver Georgian sword-scabbards, some silver cups chased with a spinning sinewy pattern, a cracked carafe full of mould, some watches, two of them Swiss in tarnished huntingcases, one an Ingersoll, quite new, with an illuminated dial, several thick antique repeaters, a pair of Dresden candlesticks, some lace, a pile of cubes of cheap soap, spools of thread, packets of pins. Back in the shop a yellowfaced old man droops over a counter on which are a few bolts of printed calicos. Along the walls are an elaborate Turkish tabouret inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a mahogany dressing table without its mirror, and some iron washstands. The wrinkles have gathered into a deep cleft between the old man’s brows; his eyes have the furtive snarl of a dog disturbed on a garbage pile. He looks out through narrowed pupils at the sunny littered street, where leanfaced men sit with their heads in their hands along the irregular curb, and an occasional drovshky goes by pulled by bony racks of horses, where soldiers loaf in doorways.
    The old man is the last guardian of Things. Here possessions, portable objects, personal effects, Things, that have been the goal and prize of life, the great center of all effort, to be sweated for and striven for and cheated for by all generations, have somehow lost their import and crumbled away and been trampled underfoot. The people who limp hungrily along the rough-paved streets never look in the windows of the