On Lake Maggiore the cork and cedar trees and the oleanders rose above the early mist that enshrouded the Borromean Islands.
At Milan there was plenty of time to buy a Corriere and stock up with Chianti, prosciutto di Parma, salame di Felino, black olives and the white bread called pane di pasta dura, for whatever periods of enforced abstinence awaited us in the Balkans.
Here, too, at Milan, a restaurant car was attached, in which you could eat delicious pasta al forno and drink Barbera, while the train drove on through the pianura, the great plain of Northern Italy. Then, some four hours outward-bound from Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, dying city in the Lagoon, which there was no time to visit.
After Venice we crossed rivers that in the First World War had literally run with blood – the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo.
After Trieste there was the Yugoslav Customs with rather smelly officials rooting in our luggage before the train climbed into the great limestone wilderness of the Carso, 1,200 feet above the sea; and from there it ran down through the Javornik Range, the densely wooded Slovenian mountains in which wolves and bears still lived. No more restaurant cars on the Direct-Orient after Trieste until we reached Turkey – we were glad of the food and drink we had bought at Milan Station. The conducteur brewed us tea and coffee. Things were better ordered on the Simplon-Orient – at least there was a Yugoslav dining car as far as Belgrade.
After Ljubljana, the train ran down the valley of the Sava to Belgrade behind a big steam engine that howled as it went, as if to express its feelings about the human condition. From now on it was steam all the way and it was difficult to sleep and everything became grubbier and grubbier. We spent hours talking with the conducteur of our wagon, who was from La Villette, behind the Gare de l’Est, and could by now have done with a shave.
He told us stories about such eminences grises as Gulbenkian père and Zaharoff, the armaments king, both of whom commuted on these trains; tales of the express being snowed up and attacked by bandits in Thrace; and girls being put on, and later taken off, the train. It was very cold now and he spent much time stoking the coal-burning stove in what was now, after Belgrade, the sole remaining wagon-lit on the train. Whenever the train stopped at a station, it was besieged by country people carrying huge, crumbling paper parcels in lieu of luggage. In the fields we saw men and women clustered around fires, wearing thick waistcoats and tall fur hats.
At Nis, 2,216 kilometres from Paris, the guide book said that there was a tower constructed with Serbian skulls by a Serbian despot in 1808, but it was invisible from the railway, and when we finally contrived to visit it years later, rather disappointing. At Dimitograd Bulgarian Customs officials were more friendly, less prying than the Yugoslavs. Perhaps they were too cold to care. Here, a huge steam locomotive was attached to the train which panted up with it through a rocky defile and in thick snow to the Dragoman Pass.
We were beginning to be hungry now. Our Italian food was finished and we had no Bulgarian leva to buy anything with: huge queues at the stations made money-changing impossible.
After Sofia lay the wildest country of the entire route, on the borders of Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. Then, from Edirne (in Turkey further great difficulties with money) with a Turkish dining car attached at last, across the windswept, snowy plains of Eastern Thrace, past Çorlu, where the train was snowed up in 1929, and down to the Sea of Marmara. Then round the seaward walls of Istanbul and out to Seraglio Point, where the Sultan used to have his unwanted odalisques drowned in weighted sacks, and into the Sirkeci Station 3,041 kilometres from the Gare de Lyon.
Under the Crust of Coober Pedy
In 1971 Wanda and I flew to Coober Pedy in the Stuart Range, in South Australia, the location of the world’s biggest opal field.
As we came in to land, Coober Pedy and its environs looked like Verdun after five months under artillery fire; what appeared to be shell holes were shafts of workings which went down 20 feet or so beneath the surface, into the desert sandstone in which the opals lurk and are found, or not, according to the skill and luck of the miners. Other holes in the earth’s crust, not distinguishable at this height, were the chimney and air inlets of the underground houses in which the majority of the permanent inhabitants lived troglodytic lives, having dug their multi-roomed residences out of the sandstone and equipped them with every imaginable and unimaginable convenience (one of the more unimaginable being a revolving bed surrounded by mirrors, whose owner, a half-French, half-Hungarian gentleman, proudly demonstrated it to me).
The remaining unfortunates, who included the majority of the Aborigines, lived on the surface in the unimaginable horror of corrugated-iron huts or else in caravans, some of which were equipped with air-conditioning. Unimaginably horrible because in summer here the temperature rises to a shattering 140°F, shade temperatures reach the high 120s, and life is only tolerable underground, where the temperature never rises much above 80°F – less with air-conditioning. In winter the temperature outside sinks to the low 40s – the lowest ever recorded was 26°. Coober Pedy is a rugged place.
There was no surface water in the town. What water there was, which was very salty, was pumped from 350 feet underground into a solar still. The inhabitants were rationed to 25 gallons a week, not that many of them actually drank water. Until 1966 it was carted all the way from Mathesson’s Bore, 80 miles to the north.
There was not a lot to see on the surface of Coober Pedy (even the pretty little Roman Catholic church, which was like a catacomb, was underground) once we had seen the excellent hospital, the motels, the two or three eating places, played cricket on the cricket pitch, and had drinks in the Italian club to which we had been lucky enough to get an introduction. Even the buildings on either side of the dirt road which was the main street only had a skyline at dawn and at dusk. In the evening the great clouds of dust thrown up by the trucks and cars whirling into town against the sunset were a marvellous sight. By that time many of the Aborigines who spent their days scratching for opals among the spoil of abandoned diggings, the half-castes and the completely decayed white men, were all lying semi-comatose against a fence surrounded by empty port bottles.
There were few Australians born and bred among the miners. Almost all of them were Europeans who emigrated to this distant land because they found life intolerable in their own – Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, Greeks, East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, all dreaming of the day when they would make a strike and take the next plane out.
Anyone could become an opal miner. No experience was necessary. All you needed were lots of guts, a partner you could trust when he was down the mine alone with the opals, and a Miner’s Right which you could buy for 50 cents at the Post Office. It entitled you to prospect a claim 50 yards by 50 for a month, after which, if you wanted to continue working it, you had to register your claim at a cost of under Aus$10 a year. You also needed a pick, shovel, hand auger, carbide light, windlass and ladders.
Professional opal buyers came here from all over the world. The miners would accept nothing for their opals but cash; not even traveller’s cheques would do. And they gave no receipts for fear of being identified by the Inland Revenue. All buyers were forced to have large quantities of cash about their person. Most buyers were therefore armed, but in spite of this some buyers still disappeared.
Digging started at dawn and soon after noon most miners had had enough. Then the long bar in the Opal Motel (men only) filled up and stayed full until about 10 p.m., by which time Slovenes, Poles, Irishmen, Czechs and even an occasional Englishman were either slithering to the floor or else collapsing
