AND NOW THE journey was almost over. To-morrow we should reach Manchuli. The train pulled out of Irkutsk, got on to the map at the beginning of this book, and ran along the river Angara until it debouched into Lake Baikal. At the mouth of the river men were fishing, each in a little coracle moored to a stake at which the current tugged. It was a clear and lovely evening.
Lake Baikal is said to be the deepest lake in the world. It is also said to be the size of Belgium. Its waters are cold and uncannily pellucid. The Russians call it ‘The White-Haired’, because of the mist which always hangs about it. To-night the mist was limited to narrow decorative scarves which floated with a fantastic appearance of solidity far out above the unruffled waters. Out of the mist stood up the heads of distant mountains, dappled with snow. It was a peaceful, majestic place.
Contrary to general belief, the railway round the southern end of Lake Baikal is double-tracked, as indeed is the whole Trans-Siberian line from Chita westward to Omsk, and doubtless by now further. This is however a very vulnerable section. The train crawls tortuously along the shore, at the foot of great cliffs. The old line passes through about forty short tunnels, each lackadaisically guarded by a sentry. The new line skirts round the outside of the tunnels, between the water and the rock. This is the weakest link in that long, tenuous, and somewhat rusty chain by which hangs the life of Russia’s armies in the Far East. In 1933 her military establishments on the Amur Frontier totalled about a quarter of a million men, including reservists.
There is no more luxurious sensation than what may be described as the End of Term Feeling. The traditional scurrilities of
‘This time to-morrow where shall I be?
Not in this academee’
have accompanied delights as keen and unqualified as any that most of us will ever know. As we left Baikal behind and went lurching through the operatic passes of Buriat Mongolia, I felt very content. To-morrow we should reach the frontier. After to-morrow there would be no more of that black bread, in consistency and flavour suggesting rancid peat: no more of that equally alluvial tea: no more of a Trappist’s existence, no more days entirely blank of action. It was true that I did not know what I was going to do, that I had nothing very specific to look forward to. But I knew what I was going to stop doing, and that, for the moment, was enough.
I undressed and got into bed. As I did so, I noticed for the first time that the number of my berth was thirteen.
For a long time I could not go to sleep. I counted sheep, I counted weasels (I find them much more efficacious, as a rule. I don’t know why). I recited in a loud, angry voice soporific passages from Shakespeare. I intoned the names of stations we had passed through since leaving Moscow: Bui, Perm, Omsk, Tomsk, Kansk, Krasnoyarsk. (At one a low-hung rookery in birch trees, at another the chattering of swifts against a pale evening sky, had made me home-sick for a moment.) I thought of all the most boring people I knew, imagining that they were in the compartment with me, and had brought their favourite subjects with them. It was no good. My mind became more and more active. Obviously I was never going to sleep. …
It was the Trooping of the Colour, and I was going to be late for it. There, outside, in the street below my window, was my horse; but it was covered with thick yellow fur! This was awful! Why hadn’t it been clipped? What would they think of me, coming on parade like that? Inadequately dressed though I was, I dashed out of my room and down the moving staircase. And then (horror of horrors!) the moving staircase broke. It lurched, twisted, flung me off my feet. There was a frightful jarring, followed by a crash. …
I sat up in my berth. From the rack high above me my heaviest suitcase, metal-bound, was cannonaded down, catching me with fearful force on either knee-cap. I was somehow not particularly surprised. This is the end of the world, I thought, and in addition they have broken both my legs. I had a vague sense of injustice.
My little world was tilted drunkenly. The window showed me nothing except a few square yards of goodish grazing, of which it offered an oblique bird’s eye view. Larks were singing somewhere. It was six o’clock. I began to dress. I now felt very much annoyed.
But I climbed out of the carriage into a refreshingly spectacular world, and the annoyance passed. The Trans-Siberian Express sprawled foolishly down the embankment. The mail van and the dining-car, which had been in front, lay on their sides at the bottom. Behind them the five sleeping-cars, headed by my own, were disposed in attitudes which became less and less grotesque until you got to the last, which had remained, primly, on the rails. Fifty yards down the line the engine, which had parted company with the train, was dug in, snorting, on top of the embankment. It had a truculent and naughty look; it was defiantly conscious of indiscretion.
It would be difficult to imagine a nicer sort of railway accident. The weather was ideal. No one was badly hurt. And the whole thing was done in just the right Drury Lane manner, with lots of twisted steel and splintered woodwork and turf scarred deeply with demoniac force. For once the Russians had carried something off.
The air was full of agonizing groans and the sound of breaking glass, the first supplied by two attendants who had been winded, the second by passengers escaping from a coach in which both the doors had jammed. The sun shone brightly. I began to take photographs as fast as I could. This is strictly forbidden on Soviet territory, but the officials had their hands full and were too upset to notice.
The staff of the train were scattered about the wreckage, writing contradictory reports with trembling hands. A charming German consul and his family – the only other foreigners on the train – had been in the last coach and were unscathed. Their small daughter, aged six, was delighted with the whole affair, which she regarded as having been arranged specially for her entertainment; I am afraid she will grow up to expect too much from trains.
Gradually I discovered what had happened, or at least what was thought to have happened. As a rule the Trans-Siberian Expresses have no great turn of speed, but ours, at the time when disaster overtook her, had been on top of her form. She had a long, steep hill behind her, and also a following wind; she was giving of her best. But, alas, at the bottom of that long, steep hill the signals were against her, a fact which the driver noticed in the course of time. He put on his brakes. Nothing happened. He put on his emergency brakes. Still nothing happened. Slightly less rapidly than before, but still at a very creditable speed, the train went charging down the long, steep hill.
The line at this point is single track, but at the foot of the hill there is a little halt, where a train may stand and let another pass. Our train, however was in no mood for stopping: it looked as if she was going to ignore the signals and try conclusions with a west-bound train, head on. In this she was thwarted by a pointsman at the little halt, who summed up the situation and switched the runaway neatly into a siding. It was a long, curved siding, and to my layman’s eye appeared to have been designed for the sole purpose of receiving trains which got out of control on the hill above it. But for whatever purpose it was designed, it was designed a very long time ago. Its permanent way had a more precarious claim to that epithet than is usual even in Russia. We were altogether too much for the siding. We made matchwood of its rotten sleepers and flung ourselves dramatically down the embankment.
But it had been great fun: a comical and violent climax to an interlude in which comedy and violence had been altogether too lacking for my tastes. It was good to lie back in the long grass on a little knoll and meditate upon that sprawling scrap-heap, that study in perdition. There she lay, in the middle of a wide green plain: the crack train, the Trans-Siberian Luxury Express. For more than a week she had bullied us. She had knocked us about when we tried to clean our teeth, she had jogged our elbows when we wrote, and when we read she had made the print dance tiresomely before our eyes. Her whistle had arbitrarily curtailed our frenzied excursions on the wayside platforms. Her windows we might not open on account of the dust, and when closed they had proved a perpetual attraction to small, sabotaging boys with stones. She had annoyed us in a hundred little ways: by spilling tea in our laps, by running out of butter, by regulating her life in accordance with Moscow time, now six hours behind the sun. She had been our prison, our Little Ease. We had not liked her.
Now she was down and out. We left her lying there, a broken buckled toy, a thick black worm without a head, awkwardly twisted: a thing of no use, above which larks sang in an empty plain.
If I know Russia, she is lying there still.
It was, as I say, an ideal railway accident. We suffered only four hours delay. They found another engine. They dragged that last, that rather self-righteous coach back on to the main line. From the wrecked dining-car stale biscuits were considerately produced. In a sadly truncated train the Germans, a few important officials and myself proceeded on our way. Our fellow-passengers we left behind. They did not seem to care.
Two hours later we reached the Russian customs post, just short of the frontier. In 1931, I remembered, there had been some formality with regard to photographs. What was it? … Oh yes. Instructions had been passed along the train that we were to give up all films exposed on Russian soil. The young Australian had one in his camera, to which he instantly confessed. But there was an interval before the collection of the films took place, and, not without trepidation, he adopted my suggestion that he should show up an unexposed film, rewound. This daring and elaborate ruse was carried out successfully. The Australian kept his film.
It never occurred to me that the procedure might have been altered, the regulations tightened up. The proud possessor of (as far as I know) the only photographic record of a derailment on the Trans-Siberian line made by a foreigner, I took no steps at all to hide the two films in which it was embodied. They lay, side by side, plain to be seen by anyone who opened my dispatch case. I awaited the customs officials with composure.
They came on me suddenly: five large inquisitive men, commanding between them about as much English as I knew of Russian. It was instantly apparent that they meant business. My suitcases were systematically disembowelled. What was the number of my typewriter? Had I a permit for my field-glasses? Above all, had I any cameras or films?
But yes! I cried, I had indeed. I thrust into their hands a tiny Kodak, still rusted with the waters of the Amazon. I heaped upon them an assortment of unexposed films, whose virginity they tested by removing the tropical packing. I was playing for time.
Anyone can play for time with words, but my vocabulary was too limited for effective obstructionism. To decoy them into the subtler irrelevancies of debate was impossible, seeing that everything I said was either redundant or incomprehensible. This they quickly grasped. They were men of action. They ceased to listen to me. And all the time their search brought them nearer to that dispatch case, which lay on the end of the seat farthest from the door.
Words failing me, I fell back on inanimate objects. The train, I knew, must leave within a certain time. Every minute that I could delay them would make the closing stages of their search more perfunctory. So I showed them my shoes and my books. I made them all in turn sniff at my hair-oil. I pressed aspirins upon them, and potted meat. I demonstrated the utility of pipe-cleaners, and the principles on which sock-suspenders are designed. But the search went on. They were not to be fobbed off. Under the seat they had found the discarded packing of a film; they felt – and rightly – that they were on to a good thing.
It was very hot. My coat hung on a peg. And in the pocket of my coat (I suddenly remembered) was that photostat copy of Ian’s letter from Stalin. I took the coat down and produced the letter.
It had no great success, though it checked them for a moment. A few polite exclamations, and the search was resumed. But in the meantime I, with an aggressively careless gesture, had flung down the coat upon the dispatch case, and the dispatch case was no longer in sight. Presently, with a great parade of exhaustion and impatience, I sat down heavily, sighing, upon the coat, the dispatch case, and the films.
Nothing would move me. Defiantly anchored, like a brooding hen, I watched the hounds draw blank. I signed the forms they gave me to sign. I handed over, protesting loudly, one partially exposed film containing photographs of my grandmother. The officials were puzzled, suspicious. They had seen everything there was to see? Yes, I said firmly, they had seen everything there was to see. Still puzzled, still suspicious, they withdrew. The train started. I had had them with me for three-quarters of an hour.