BAGDAD REALLY HAPPENED TO us, like a toothache, or a punctured tire, or burglars. One minute we were comfortable, clean and civilized; the next we were on our way to the setting of Douglas Fairbanks’ recent triumph, and were none of these.
It was all well enough for Mr. Fairbanks. He could romp around Bagdad all day, and at night he could climb his hill near Hollywood to a cold shower and a good dinner and Mary Pickford. But when evening came scuttling across the Tigris and brought with it a breath of air and a cloud of mosquitoes, we roused from a coma, climbed down our two flights of outside wooden stairs, looked away from the kitchen as we passed it, brushed a sparrow or two off the table in the dining room and sadly, morosely, ate what was put before us.
Bagdad is not as it was in Mr. Fairbanks’ time.
On the terrace at Shepheard’s one day we met two English aviators. They had, it developed, just flown over from Bagdad, and they surveyed Cairo from the tea table with eyes at once disillusioned and condescending.
“Civilized!” they said. “Might be Paris. Might be anywhere. Why don’t you come to Bagdad?”
“Where is Bagdad?” we inquired. “And how do you get there?”
“Well, it was easy enough, according to their idea. I dare say anything seems simple when you have just reached Egypt in an aeroplane, after engine trouble and having to spend a night in a hostile desert, covered with sand to keep warm.
And then they were happy too; the Arabs had not stolen the plane during the night. Apparently they did not even know it was around, for when the aviators wakened in the morning there it was safe and sound!
Anyhow, they said that all one had to do was to go to Beirut in Syria, and start from there. The rest took care of itself. Some brave soul, fifteen months before, had decided it would be possible to take an automobile along one of the old camel caravan routes, and moreover had gone ahead and done it. Now it went regularly, a convoy of two or three cars, and it made in three days across the Syrian Desert and northern Arabia what had formerly taken three weeks by sea and river, to Bagdad.
Three days! And the camel caravans take from one month to two!
Moreover, it was new country to the tourist, virgin country. New, that is, to the modern world. In the past the armies of the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, the Greeks and the Turks knew it well. Across it they used to travel on those vast excursions for plunder, slaves and tribute which were the ancient wars. Out of it, also, had come that strange delegation of Arabs to the then Christian city of Constantinople, in the name of a new and unknown prophet named Mohammed, calling on it to renounce the Holy Trinity, and to believe in one God.
A new world, infinitely old.
Five minutes later we were in Cook’s office in Cairo, sending a telegram to the Eastern Transport Company at Beirut for reservations for the following Monday. And we were no more than back in our own hotel than the papers announced the holding up of the Eastern Transport Company’s convoy by Bedouins the day before, about half way across the desert, and the killing of the wife of the French vice-consul to Bagdad.
Our first fine flame of enthusiasm began to flicker; our faith in the magic carpet to die. A three-days jaunt to the Euphrates and the Tigris was one thing; a flight between groups of murdering Arabs was quite another. And unfortunately just as that time I picked up a book which stated that the Bedouins of northern Arabia remained hostile to Europeans and were untrustworthy in the last degree.
However, the Head was doing a bit of reading also, and the Paris edition of the Herald reported the holding up of a Pullman train just outside Chicago and the successful looting of the passengers.
“Personally,” he said, “I think we’d better stay out of America and be safe.”
So in the end we went, crossing the Suez Canal at night at Kantara, the Gateway of the Desert, where begins the great caravan route across the Desert of Sinai to the site of old Babylon. The oldest caravan route in the world, it was along it that Moses guided the Israelites, and Napoleon led his army into Palestine. Here too came Joseph and Mary, with the Infant, on the flight from Herod.
And now through its sands cuts the great canal, and laden camels stare at ships where once was only desert and thirst, and the bones of men and animals bleaching in the sun.
Across this strange waterway we were ferried in the moonlight, to expose the private contents of Egypt to the troops in that forlorn and waterless land.
American pipe it was, too, that line which went forward with the British army, pipe sent over for some commercial purpose by the Standard Oil Company, and now exalted. The water was first cleared with alum, settled in tanks and then chlorinated. As the pipe line grew in length and the advance proceeded, new pumping stations were built in the desert, until seventeen of them were scattered along the line.
“When the Nile flows into Palestine, then shall the prophet from the west drive the Turk from Jerusalem.” Old Arab proverb.
We got some sleep, now and then arising to gather the bedding from the floor, and at five in the morning we were put off at Ludd. We had no notice; we were summarily ejected with most of our clothing in our arms. And in the cold gray dawn we finished our dressing on the station platform and waited for a train to Haifa, while the one we had left remained twenty-five minutes longer.
We had traveled in one night over the desert which it had taken the British army a year to cross.
Owing to a rule of long standing in the family that nothing said before breakfast is to count, we remained in a state of armed neutrality until our two suit-cases in the customs house, and in due time to settle ourselves into a waiting train on the other side, while innumerable gentlemen we had never seen before clamored outside the windows for emolument. I fancied the engineer and fireman of the train were among those present, but perhaps I am doing them an injustice.
We closed the windows, locked the compartment door and looked about us. Three seats on either side, the lifting of the arms provided us with two narrow, slippery leather divans, and on these couches, scantily provided with bedding, we spent the night.
But who could complain? We were passing through that desert where, along the very route we followed, the British army had struggled forward toward Jerusalem. No train then; no railroad. Thousands of camels, wagon transports, guns and ammunition, troops and supply trains, they made their desperate advance. Men and animals died like flies, thirst dried and heat burned them. They sank to the knees in the deep sand, and sometimes stuck there, until some genius conceived the idea of making a road by laying down meshed or chicken wire, as we know it, and on this humble terrain they were able to advance! And another genius built a pumping station at Kantara, and through a great pipe line across the Canal and the desert carried the sweet waters of train arrived. And if we contemplated those strange early days of the railroad before us, with Egyptian labor troops pushing the line forward a mile a day and English locomotives with English engineers calmly startling the natives into hysteria, it was in silence. Then——
Ham and eggs in a dining car, civilization in a strip the exact width of the train! And on either side the unchanged country and its unchanged inhabitants! The plows they are using in their tiny fields are of wood, without any metal whatever, their clothing is scant and thin, their camels, oxen and horses look ill-nourished and badly cared for.
But a new era has come. The Turk has gone, after enriching the sultan and his favorites for four hundred years. It is no longer necessary to cut down the trees to avoid paying the tax on them. The British military roads now serve peaceful purposes, and after all these centuries of water sold from dirty sheep-skins, or caught on the flat roofs and then stored in stagnant tanks in cellars, the cities have a water supply.