little farther on they encountered two cars coming in the opposite direction. All three stopped and the drivers held a consultation, giving each other recommendations and advice.
In the other cars were a woman and a baby, a young French officer, an elderly Armenian and two commercial looking Englishmen.
Presently they went on. They stuck twice more and again the long, laborious business of jacking up and digging out had to be undertaken. The second wadi was more difficult of negotiation than the first one. It was dusk when they came to it and the water was rushing through it.
Joan asked anxiously:
‘Will the train wait?’
‘They usually give an hour’s grace. They can make up that on the run, but they won’t delay beyond nine-thirty. However the track gets better from now on. Different kind of ground—more open desert.’
They had a bad time clearing the wadi—the farther bank was sheer slippery mud. It was dark when the car at last reached dry ground. From then on, the going was better but when they got to Tell Abu Hamid it was a quarter past ten and the train to Stamboul had gone.
Joan was so completely done up that she hardly noticed her surroundings.
She stumbled into the rest house dining-room with its trestle tables, refused food but asked for tea and then went straight to the dimly lit, bleak room with its three iron beds and taking out bare necessaries, she tumbled into bed and slept like a log.
She awoke the next morning her usual cool competent self. She sat up in bed and looked at her watch. It was half past nine. She got up, dressed and came out into the dining-room. An Indian with an artistic turban wrapped round his head appeared and she ordered breakfast. Then she strolled to the door and looked out.
With a slight humorous grimace she acknowledged to herself that she had indeed arrived at the middle of nowhere.
This time, she reflected, it looked like taking about double the time.
On her journey out she had flown from Cairo to Baghdad. This route was new to her. It was actually seven days from Baghdad to London—three days in the train from London to Stamboul, two days on to Aleppo, another night to the end of the railway at Tell Abu Hamid, then a day’s motoring, a night in a rest house and another motor drive to Kirkuk and on by train to Baghdad.
There was no sign of rain this morning. The sky was blue and cloudless, and all around was even coloured golden brown sandy dust. From the rest house itself a tangle of barbed wire enclosed a refuse dump of tins and a space where some skinny chickens ran about squawking loudly. Clouds of flies had settled on such tins as had recently contained nourishment. Something that looked like a bundle of dirty rags suddenly got up and proved to be an Arab boy.
A little distance away, across another tangle of barbed wire was a squat building that was evidently the station with something that Joan took to be either an artesian well or a big water tank beside it. On the far horizon to the north was the faint outline of a range of hills.
Apart from that, nothing. No landmarks, no buildings, no vegetation, no human kind.
A station, a railway track, some hens, what seemed to be a disproportionate amount of barbed wire—and that was all.
Really, Joan thought, it was very amusing. Such an odd place to be held up.
The Indian servant came out and said that the Memsahib’s breakfast was ready.
Joan turned and went in. The characteristic atmosphere of a rest house, gloom, mutton fat, paraffin and Flit greeted her with a sense of rather distasteful familiarity.
There was coffee and milk (tinned milk), a whole dish of fried eggs, some hard little rounds of toast, a dish of jam, and some rather doubtful looking stewed prunes.
Joan ate with a good appetite. And presently the Indian reappeared and asked what time the Memsahib would like lunch.
Joan said not for a long time—and it was agreed that half past one would be a satisfactory hour.
The trains, as she knew, went three days a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It was Tuesday morning, so she would not be able to leave until tomorrow night. She spoke to the man asking if that was correct.
‘That right, Memsahib. Miss train last night. Very unfortunate. Track very bad, rain very heavy in night. That means no cars can go to and fro from here to Mosul for some days.’
‘But the trains will be all right?’
Joan was not interested in the Mosul track.
‘Oh yes, train come all right tomorrow morning. Go back tomorrow night.’
Joan nodded. She asked about the car which had brought her.
‘Go off this morning early. Driver hope get through. But I think not. I think him stick one, two days on way there.’
Again without much interest Joan thought it highly probable.
The man went on giving information.
‘That station, Memsahib, over there.’
Joan said that she had thought, somehow, that it might be the station.
‘Turkish station. Station in Turkey. Railway Turkish. Other side of wire, see. That wire frontier.’
Joan looked respectfully at the frontier and thought what very odd things frontiers were.
The Indian said happily:
‘Lunch one-thirty exactly,’ and went back into the rest house. A minute or two later she heard him screaming in a high angry voice from somewhere at the back of it. Two other voices chimed in. A spate of high, excited Arabic filled the air.
Joan wondered why it was always Indians who seemed to be in charge of rest houses like this one. Perhaps they had had experience of European ways. Oh well, it didn’t much matter.
What should she do with herself this morning? She might go on with the amusing Memoirs of Lady Catherine Dysart. Or she might write some letters. She could post them when the train got to Aleppo. She had a writing pad and some envelopes with her. She hesitated on the threshold of the rest house. It was so dark inside and it smelt so. Perhaps she would go for a walk.
She fetched her thick double felt hat—not that the sun was really dangerous at this time of year, still it was better to be careful. She put on her dark glasses and slipped the writing pad and her fountain pen into her bag.
Then she set out, past the refuse dump and the tins, in the opposite direction to the railway station, since there might, possibly, be international complications if she tried to cross the frontier.
She thought to herself, How curious it is walking like this … there’s nowhere to walk to.
It was a novel and rather interesting idea. Walking on the downs, on moorland, on a beach, down a road—there was always some objective in view. Over that hill, to that clump of trees, to that patch of heather, down this lane to the farm, along the high road to the next town, by the side of the waves to the next cove.
But
