The Orient Express

"I was Sitting ... in the outer seat of a table for four in the Pullman dining car of the Orient Express. Another man was seated on my left, and the two-seat table ... on the other side of the gangway was occupied by an Austrian lady and gentlemen. On a curve just outside Munich, Owing to a rail being out of place, our carriage suddenly leaned over hard to the left and I was forced violently (continued on page 100) (continued from page 97) against my companion. When the carriage righted itself, I found that the Austrian couple had both fallen over, making a complete somersault. The lady's head had got underneath our table and her legs were upright in the air. While the other ladies in the carriage screamed with laughter and the men endeavored to keep grave faces, I grappled with the difficult task of holding the inverted lady's petticoats together and at the same time freeing her head from the table legs.

"After I had succeeded in disentangling the lady, her husband thanked me and handed me his card. He was an archduke. I handed him mine and thought the matter was at an end. But three days later, in Vienna, I received a pressing invitation from the archduchess, asking me to call at her house at the hour of afternoon coffee, as she wished to thank me personally for the service I had done her. When I went into the room, the archduchess got up from her chair and came forward to meet me, telling her guests, who were chiefly ladies, 'This is my English friend, who saved my life, and has seen more of me than my husband himself.' "

Thus wrote the good Colonel Crompton in his Reminiscences of golden days long before the Kaiser came to mess up Europe. Since then, over the 85 years and the millions of bumpety-bump, polyglot miles it has traveled, the Orient Express has become a legend. Like other legends, it is both true and changeable. Sure enough, the great train ran, and runs, all the way from la ville lumiere of the West down across Europe to the first topaz glow of the minareted East. Sure enough, you can still tap its iron wheels with your portable hammer. It is there.

But with the years, with changes of economics and society, the long, luxurious snake has played the chameleon. In fact and fiction, it pops up decade after decade, according to the virtuosity of its storyteller, either glaring with gas and pearls or fulminating with electricity and spies. One moment it tinkles with bone china, dons a deceptive diesel the next; flowers with a turn-of-the-century chef du cordon-bleu, years later abases itself to a salami sandwich; glitters in the 1880s with diamonds, smirks in the 1930s with the rolled gold of smuggled watches. Yet whatever its quality, it still attracts. Those 1800 miles of track between Paris and Istanbul are like flypaper to the romantic traveler.

Curiously, a key to its character and appeal is not found best in the first days of grand dukes and high courtesans---but, rather, in the mid-1920s, when a French novel, La Madone des Sleepings, was written by Maurice Dekobra. The book was a shocker at the time, and a thumping success. Today, the period detail is an eye opener. Even in Dekobra's potted biography at the beginning of the book, one comes slap up against an astonishing exploit: The author "made an extended automobile tour of central Europe for the Figaro." Parbleu! Sapristi! What intrepid safaris were then afoot? It is, indeed, salutary to look back on this fairly recent-sounding period between the Wars and find that even the automobile was still an individual. Yet it was an era already modern in many of today's senses---jazz, abstract painting, high explosives, short skirts, ferroconcrete. However, here was the automobile playing the knight-errant. Even more important, there was no public air transport to speak of. The wheels were still It, which underlines the vital need then of these wagons-lits that in their thousands streamed bluely through the European night---allowing the lovely Lady Wynham. tireless heroine of The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, up-to-the-minutely modish in her little hat and her whole risque aura of eau de Nil, to say: "In the course of my peregrinations of Continental railways, I have experienced every thrill that a woman can know" and to be feared by a rival as "one of those beautiful English women who travel, those sleeping-carpets who carry a Pekingese in their arms and a lover at their beck and call."

But it was not only in fiction that intriguing liaisons occurred. There is a story of the Mystery Man of Europe, international financier and arms merchant Sir Basil Zaharoff, who was walking one night through the Orient Express when a young woman fell through a doorway into his arms, crying, "Save me! My husband is about to kill me!" Zaharoff saved her, found out that her husband was a duke, that she had been married to him for only 24 hours, that her name was Maria de Pilaranjile Patricimo Simonia del Mosiso Iborate and that he, Zaharoff, was in love with her. So he gave the duke a check for £ 1,000,000 and kept the lady for himself. So the story goes.

The femme fatale has always been much of the tale of the Orient Express. But women were only a part of a more general luxury, for there is no doubt that from the 1880s right through to World War Two, the Orient Express was the fastest and smartest way to get to the Near East. Let us go back to 1883, when the first Orient Express stood blazing with gas under the electroliers of the Gare de l'Est. Its brown teak-and-brass carriages gleamed richly. It showed, through large glass windows, a wondrous luxus of white table linen, silver, lincrusta, gaseliers and polished mahogany. Real furniture on wheels! Beds that went hurtling through the night! The nearest to this before, apart from private and royal trains, had been the equipage of a steamboat. (And, indeed, the French novelist Edmond About, invited to take the trip that year, considered taking with him antiseasickness tablets.) And so, off into the night this amazing edifice would go, laden with ladies in huge hats and gentlemen in toppers and bowlers, all bound for the long, luxurious, but also arduous, journey to the minarets of old Constantinople, and possibly thereafter points farther East.

Constantinople was not only a terminus but also a point of departure. Beirut and Baghdad beckoned, or it could be the junction for a ship to Egypt or India. The political shadow of Berlin's Drang nach Osten was at work with dreams of further railways to the East. And from all over Europe, from St. Petersburg and Warsaw and Berlin and Prague, the trains came shunting through the Balkans to that remarkable terminus where one moment you may walk on European pavements and the next ferry across the Bosporus to the first solid earth of Asia; whence, given the time and the footwear, you could presumably walk to China.

Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest---the original way of the Orient Express was studded with capitals of character and kinds of glamor. Even before Austria and the Balkans, one passed through three separate Germanies: the grand duchy of Baden and the two kingdoms of Württemberg and Bavaria. Each provided its own locomotives to haul all that international bedding, those sleeping princesses and snoring swains, lulled, as a London Times correspondent put it, "by the berceuse of the wheels." The snorting great locomotives of the day resounded with sonorous names of their provenance ... "of the Lines of Communication of the Kingdom of Bavaria," "of the Royal General Management of the Romanian Railways"; and this, of course, meant a little opera of different-colored uniforms, highly brassed and polished, at each frontier. It must have been a regular peacock run. One looked out of the carriage window at Budapest and expected to see a blue hussar or two; the stop at Karlsruhe saw the spiked Pickelhaube and trailing scabbard; Bucharest showed elegant Romanian cavalry officers with rouged lips. Even today, such main railway stations, relatively uniformless, smell of their countries---Vienna of old coffee urns, Paris of black Gauloise tobacco, Milan of sooty pomade, matters seldom to be noticed in an airport.

Off then, in the 1880s, across 1800 miles of a bemedaled Europe, with two lavatories per 20 persons. When we think of such journeys today, it is in terms of mohair suits and light underwear. The experience then was much (continued on page 118)Orient Express(continued from page 100) different, with dresses and furbelows of very great volume, with hatboxes and pins and, for the men, with sticks and hats and spats and shawls and ankle-length overcoats. All this took up room. The very acres of cloth must have stuffed those early compartments with fussation, asthmatic fog. The ladies steamed with scent---patchouli, opopanax---and with rice powder. Moreover, the journey had its athletic interruptions. Everybody and all the luggage had to leave the sleepers in Romania, take a ferry across the Danube, enter a further train to the port of Varna on the Black Sea and then sail for 15 hours down the coast to Constantinople. Moreover, there was a real possibility of being snowed up for days somewhere on the Balkan way. In 1907, the Orient Express was marooned in snow drifts in Turkey. The train's heating system broke down and cold crept inexorably into the splendid comfort of the carriages. The story has it that an Indian maharaja who was ensconced in a special car with seven wives found that their filmy clothing was no protection against such an intrusion. He had to use solid gold to buy clothes for them from other passengers. Just as well---it was ten days before a snowplow arrived and the Express moved on to Constantinople. There was also a difficult mountainous part of Romania, where trains were sometimes derailed by shiftings of slag subsoil. Added to this, a lot of minor disturbances were probable in a not-too-tame terrain (even within the past dozen years, a Bulgarian peasant threw a brick through one of the windows, in retaliation for the death of a goat by the Express some days earlier). Yet this was the chosen route of the haut monde of traveling society; though, of course, despite their frills and flounces, they were, on the whole, a hardier lot than today's transients, being only a generation removed from the merry upheavals of horse and carriage.

Had James Bond traveled in those days, he would have had a fine time with the esoteric detail of those haulage engines that were changed at every border. His technical romancing might have run: "The whole length of the great teak-and-iron snake shuddered. Bond felt the new, giant pull of the 104-ton Golsdorf Compound 2-10-0, which would take them across Servia. First, third and fifth axles allow one-inch side play, he mentally noted, and sniffed the pungent fumes of the thinner Slav coal through the snow-crisp window draft." Or: "He awoke with a start. A smell of burning wood! Fire? Bond turned peacefully over to his other side and slept. They were in wood-burning Bulgaria. The basin-shaped funnel of a Four-cylinder Compound would be curving through the Balkan night and the reassuring knowledge of a wire-mesh-work spark arrester quietened Bond's dreams." And Hemingway might have had a go, too: "Now it was good. They were not in the mountains now. Between Avricourt and Paris, they made it at 46 miles the hour. Bill filled the glasses. They felt fine."

The real literature of the Orient Express always brings us to espionage and murder. Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and, in cinematic terms, Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes set a tone not officially substantiated by the facts. Records, in fact, show only one unnatural death---when an American military attaché left the train in a tunnel in the Austrian Alps: No one, it is said, yet knows how or why. However, much else might have occurred and gone unrecorded. After all---so many different countries, so many decades, so many different politics and police. Such an international train is an obvious milieu for keeping quiet about what might have happened---even supposing it was ever discovered. Heaven knows how many near misses there might have been; or what tales the lonely lavatories could tell; or what torsos vanished into whose trunks. "The gentleman has been taken ill," so it is quite reasonable for him to be "helped" out by "friends" at some place sounding like Grch. And the gentleman, he is never seen anywhere ever again.

But such affairs are no concern of the civil passenger. And, as we know, spies these days spend all their time in parks and shopping centers, handing each other packages. Let us be more concerned that, as we book for the Orient today, we get the right express. The one that goes all the way to Istanbul has a new title---the Direct Orient. There are still other "Orient" expresses going only as far as Prague or Budapest, for the Orient to a Parisian has always begun around Vienna---a reasonable assumption when one remembers that only a few hundred years ago Hungary and Romania were Turkish provinces.

So now let us see what it is like to travel on the Direct Orient today.

At 11:30 on either of only two scheduled nights a week, passengers for Istanbul and stations en route begin to gather at the Gare de Lyon in Paris for the moment of departure, 23 hours, 50. So---nearly midnight, and the great gray station already has a tired, deserted look. Cafè tables are piled up. Only groups of serious long-distance travelers are now left to sidestep the avaricious electric luggage trucks that have been trying all day to overturn the wary boulevardier of the platforms.

Along the Direct Orient platform, one searches for the one sleeping coach that bears the word Istanbul. And there it is, a dark-blue and yellow house on wheels bearing the momentous facia Compagnie Intrenationale des wagons-lits et des Grands Express Européen and a white sign on its side defining the long route through Bern, Interlaken, Lausanne, Stresa, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia to Istanbul---each station carefully announced in its own national language.

Special private smoke belches from the roof of this one wagon-lit. One's immediate thought: Is the sleeping carriage on fire? Will this mean sitting up for three nights somewhere else in the train? No. It is only the coal fire that heats our private hot water and central heating. But it is the first of a number of private anxieties that invest this whole route, which is so long and crosses so many frontiers that each passenger, as one may clearly read from his or her face, is sure that something somewhere must go wrong. Yet, the wagon-lit attendant in his chocolate-brown uniform and smart kepi is a reassuring sight: He takes our "bulletins" ("tickets" or "billets" are infra-dig words on a sleeping car) and personally ushers each passenger to his allotted bunk.

And who are these people who eschew the quicker way by air? First, there will always be people who hate flying; then there are those who, for some physical reason, cannot fly; and there are those taking too much luggage to fly. But only these---the cautious, the lame and the burdened? Add to them the mildly adventurous, the curious; and the occasional philosopher who knows that here, close to the earth, lies the true sensation of travel, the passing of time and of different landscapes. The original clientele of hallowed memory---the rich, the lovely, the criminal, the diplomatic---are en avion above the clouds: butterflies, hornets, bees returned to their airy element.

Within immediate eye-view, we have a fierce-looking Balkan gentleman wearing the wide trousers of middle-aged communism; an English family going to live in Turkey; an elderly American couple on a roundabout trip to Russia; several French and Italians due for easier stations on the way. And along the platform there buzzes a huge brown-skinned party of men and women with string-bound luggage, all speaking a language difficult to define at first---possibly Turkish, possibly Serbo-Croatian---who turn out to be destined for a second-class upright night, for the train is a mixed one of all classes and many non-sleeping carriages.

Otherwise---subdued partings. It is late. None of the midday bustle. And at last, as the hand of the electric clock whips round like a cane to 11:50, somebody peeps a little whistle and, imperceptibly, most casually for such a long (continued on page 182)Orient Express(continued from page 118) journey, the great train slides off.

We face the night and a corridor of pale, neat plastic doors. Initial impression---a sort of health clinic. The corridor is softly carpeted and the wagon-lit attendant, in his special uniform, has something of the careful benevolence of a uniformed hospital porter. Quietly attentive, he strips us of our bulletins and passports---in fact, of our identity. It is an immediately unnerving castration. But a little later, it induces a sort of repose, a sense of nothing-more-you-can-do-about-it. Then this new father figure presents a long form to fill in, all about your age and home address and how much currency you are carrying. Everybody retires to his cubicle with this homework, determined to do well. As for myself---carrying, as a precaution, small sums of six different currencies, I am at it for some time, and do splendidly, only to find out three days later that a few French francs or Italian lire or other internationally acceptable currency would equally well have seen me through.

"Bonne nuit," says the keeper. "I'll call you tomorrow at Lausanne." The door closes and that's that. Beds already made up, two to a compartment; the day back rests slung down, mattressed, sheeted, blanketed and pillowed. Snug---even, once in bed, spacious. Reading light in right position. Chromium fittings everywhere. Everything opening and shutting into everything else, in a fine essay of compactness. And under the Formica-covered washbasin, a little cupboard with a unique chamber pot shaped like a sauceboat, one more reminder of our new, clinical situation.

And would some last-minute madonna of the sleeping cars, all fur and rouge and violet eyes, come to occupy the other bunk? No. Unmarried ladies and gentlemen are distinctly segregated. And, anyway, she is a few thousand feet up there through the white curved ceiling and the clouds, in a plane, if she exists at all. (My own last madonna was encountered on a French train, in a couchette compartment. At three in the morning, I awoke with a profound wish to go out to the little boys' room along the corridor, but found two ancient female eyes also awake---and glaring hard at me. "Would the gentle monsieur---monsieur est bien élevé---kindly assist me to the toilette?" The gentleman in me rose. This plainly had to be done. She was past 80. Together we limped along the corridor. And then I had to wait ... and wait ... before, at long last, the return escort; and then back, at a run, to my other duty.)

So to sleep, with the wheels beneath playing something like the opening of Beethoven's Fifth over and over again. A useful lullaby. Before you can say "Epericoloso sporgesi," the long night is gone, and there is a tap on the door and the words, "Lausanne, monsieur."

Up with the washbasin, off with the pajama top. Up with the blind. Down with the blind. Forgot we were in Lausanne station, with a line of gray Swiss commuters staring straight in the window. Quick wash-over---remember, no bath now for two more nights---and dress and along the corridor to big cups of coffee and buttered rolls and cherry jam in a Swiss-served restaurant car of Italian origin. A brass notice plate appeals to us as Sigg. Viaggiatori; we begin to feel pretty international. And this is a reassuring old mahogany and brass dining car, a relic of the sumptuous years, now a bit battered but refreshed with brilliant white tablecloths. The sun and the white Alps roll along outside as we follow the blue flank of Lake Leman. All seems well, but little do most people know that it is their last sight of a dining car for the rest of the journey.

We know better. We have taken the simple precaution, valuable on any European journey, of asking beforehand. And we find that eating arrangements vary from country to country. Thus, in this second day through Italy, a cold tray will twice be provided in your carriage by a wagon-lit concessionaire; but on the second day through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, there is no food at all, except what you may pick up from station buffets at the longer stops. So we have brought a hamper with us.

A hamper, a picnic, is vital---and, anyway, a delight. Since you start in Paris, you have the best cold food in the world to choose from. For the loaded purse, the first choices are obvious: Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, truffled game, and so laudably forth. But any fair-sized Parisian charcuterie will provide you with a tongue-twisting assortment of pâtés de campagne or foie gras or rilletles, tins of blackbird or thrush pâté (de grives) and tins of dreamy chopped whitefish and herbed oil, the redoubtable Provençal brandade. Tins of much else, and quiches lorraines, and sausage from Lyons, and ham from Bayonne, and Normandy butter and packets of toast. It should all keep; and keep you pleasantly diverted on that second complete day, when, with so much effortless time and space passing, you will want to busy yourself a bit.

Now through green valleys lush with vine and orchard, high mountain walls going straight up to either side. The fast gray rivers of Switzerland flow backward past us, a smart new Swiss ordinary ticket collector flows forward in his pressed dark-gray uniform. Looking up at the snow-capped monsters above, one of the English says placidly, "I wonder if we're in Switzerland yet." We heave with silent superiority; and later pass through Sion, remembering that this twin-castled valley town---near which Rilke, the Austrian lyric poet, lived---has a mysterious rain record similar to that of the Sahara. And soon there is Brig, with the golden balls of the Stock-alper Palace and a nice new version of old-harmonizing-with-new---Swiss linesmen in old-fashioned smocks yet harnessed with pale-gray plastic traveling radio apparatus. Somewhere from over the roofs, a military band blares nostalgia to the sunny skies and white slopes of Zermatt far, far out of earshot above.

Not long, these small intermediate stops that will occur throughout the journey. And now the black Simplon Tunnel takes us; we roar like a flaming worm into thousands of tons of rock and emerge miles and miles later to see the green, red and white flag of Italy masted at Iselle. Meanwhile, the beds have been swiftly made up: We return to a daytime-looking carriage that no one might ever have slept in but for the curious inconsequence of a handy washbasin.

More tunnel, and into Italy proper, remembering we have a time change of one hour forward. Such little matters become supremely important; they are red-letter moments of our relaxing days. And now a short stop in an old station with iron girdering and a few potted plants to signify Italy, along with the strangely funereal black overalls of the assumably gaudy-minded Italian linesmen and the primly straight squashed caps of officials. And then, in a blaze of color---Maggiore.

It looks like heaven. Why on earth go on all that way to the wretched Orient? Wide blue waters, distant mountains, little red-roofed lakeside towns, islands, the first flowering of the palm alongside a cool pleasantry of darker firs. The station at Stresa is covered with roses and hydrangeas---difficult, indeed, not to fling oneself off. But then---our keeper would be angry. Better not offend that chocolate-colored livery in whose satchels reside passports, bulletins and liberty itself: Better just lower the sun blind and taste the noonday shade of Italy, until, hey presto, Milano.

An hour layover here. Passports back, in case you have the courage to hurry down the long platform and go out to kiss the heroic marble-and-granite façade of il Duce's monumental passè-modern station. If you do, or sit clown at the station restaurant for a quick dip into the pasta, it will be ten to one you will find on your return that the train has disappeared. Wild spaghetti-dribbling inquiries, angst at a high pitch---but she has only been shunted to another platform, and there at last she is, your long blue bungalow on wheels, and all is well. It has been for a few desperate moments like the anxiety not to miss a cruise-ship. For your liberty has been of your own election, there is no paternal roll call to save you; the train simply leaves on the peep of the appropriate whistle, This all brings about the birth of a strange kind of loyalty. You begin to love your carriage with a slavish gratitude and adoration usually reserved for such persons as lifeboatmen.

Italian carriages are mostly painted in the two colors of cappuccino coffee and milk chocolate, and we now have a number of these edible beauties attached as the resuscitated train diesels off over a well-poplarized Lombardy plain. A young god in a peaked cap takes our order for wine and lunch: this, cold, comes on a tray, airlines-fashion. Salami, boiled chicken and flakes of fried potato and cheese and an apple. Coffee follows. It is enough, according to contemporary habits. But is it a feast? I carried in my case a copy of an old Orient Express menu from ampler days. It read:

Hors d'Oeuvres Variés

Consommé á la Duchesse

Filets de Sole au Vin Blanc

Aloyau de Boeuf Rôti

Haricots Verts

Poulet de Grain

Salades

Sonfflé

Glaces

Fromages Desserts

Café Liqueurs

And now you may settle down for a tantalizing day with the window. First, the cypress-lined stations of Lake Garda; then the towers and river of Verona, at whose station the red-and-gold crown of the Rome-Copenhagen express makes us feel yet more in the excitable middle of outer things. A little later, Vicenza, with the concrete Jolly Hotel rearing up and not a sign of a Palladian villa; then Padua and more towers rising above a treasure of Giottos. Tantalizing, nevertheless, the view and the feeling of Italy come strong through the window. The window, wide as it is, frames a picture---and so time and again stabilizes for you a vision of a pink campanile and a brown village, a medieval fortress sleeping on its grassy hill, a group of young people bright with the vitality and gracious deportment of their Latin land. In one way, you see Italy more purely than on Italian soil; for you are spared the omnivorous motor traffic that spoils and sours so much of everywhere today. Here in your window passes Italy as it was, and the scene convinces. The railway is a great insulator.

Now the factory chimneys of Mestre and off out to sea to the island of Venice, flat water to the side and the causeway beneath unseen, so that the Direct Orient seems magically transformed into a hydrofoil as it enters the sunset-gold Venetian dream.

There are no intimate Venetian views for, plainly, the train cannot run in among the canals; but one has a good prospect of the smooth mirror of the wide inner lagoon, of the black guide poles like lonely reeds, of a speedboat surfing its sense of holiday across the evening calm---and one has a last view of our French keeper as a new, Italian conductor takes over, demanding a further sacrifice of our bulletins. These attentions are no longer unwelcome; they begin to form happy little interruptions to the long day. But no more homework? None. Unbelievable, since we now approach Trieste and soon afterward the Yugoslav frontier---which is, though, no Iron Curtain but, as it were, Tito's Venetian blind---presumably, a place given to official form filling. Yet no declarations of anything? We would have liked to have made some, feel robbed. But feelings are diverted by the arrival of another meal, again airlines-tray fashion, with a carefully different selection of cold food.

The great bay of Trieste and the big green angel on its pillar, waving down the pink Adriatic. A pretty sunset, an imposing halt among dock sheds and a southern hubble-bubble of swarthier southerners---even a group of Moslem-capped Yugoslav workmen---and off, with watches one hour forward, into the dusk and Tito's liberalized communism. Trieste had offered on the platform a couple of carabinieri in their black half-moon hats, white gloves, faultless blue-and-red uniforms. Now in the dark of Sežana, equally faultless dove-gray uniforms invade the corridor, and one of these Croatian police, with a ruby-red star on his cap, takes our passports away, muttering affably, "Visa, visa." But was it really affably? What about the velvet glove? Passports and night and unknown frontier offices bode no good.

There is the true story of a woman somewhere on some other European border who was so deeply, but so mistakenly, suspected by customs officials that she was taken off the train by female police and made to strip. Vulture cries of eureka and I-told-you-so when the lady sleuths saw the naked posterior of the unhappy Venus: for both moons were scored all over with strange lettering in an unintelligible code. Only very much later, after chilly hours had been spent trying to break this unfortunate code, did the lady remember that she had recently visited the traveling toilette and, before settling to rest, had placed pages of a freshly printed newspaper round the seat. The news had made its impact.

With such thoughts in mind, an anxious half hour passes and the by-now-pajama-clad passengers keep popping their heads out into the corridor and saying, "But we understood no visas were necessary." Then, at last, the Croat comes back, smiling, with the passports freshly visaed. No charge, only part of the game. And off we go, for another eight hours of Beethoven's Fifth.

Early morning and over the broad brown Danube to Belgrade---or Beograd, as in Cyrillic letters the battered old station-building pediment declares. An hour's wait and we descend to look for breakfast in the station buffet. Waiter service, as anywhere else. But no café au lait. Everyone is sitting around at this early hour drinking little cups of Turkish coffee and plum brandy (šlivovitz). Tito's photograph framed on the wall, new red-painted chairs in a restaurant whose basic-brown walls might have seen the créme de la créme off the old Express, when Belgrade was the capital of the kingdom of Servia. Immediate impression of the people is of a fresh, bourgeois lot: gone the elegance, the fleshpot look of the West. Little, if any, lipstick on women's faces, and men in unpressed suits and with, it seems, very wiry hair disinclined to lie down. Something of a down-to-earth energy in all this. The station itself is gray and old-fashioned, with one little line of modern plate-glass shops, and otherwise illuminated only by a merry apple-green express carriage from Moscow.

Once more the Direct Orient has disappeared: It is a familiar little joke; we can now smile with fond understanding. And wait. And perhaps again get a little nervous as we wait, smelling the new Slav coal smoke on the morning air and watching a man go the length of the East Berlin express, tapping the wheels with his little hammer. Whatever the politics, those little hammers are truly international. We are all tinkling brothers. And our own train comes pumping busily back, having taken on several carriages newly arrived from Germany.

Off we glide through the modern suburbs of Belgrade, glance a moment at a rust-brown river and one high baroque-towered church, and then away south and east on parallels now with Genoa and Warsaw. It was along another river, south of here, that the conductors of this anecdotal train at one time had instructions to lower the blinds to save the passengers' blushes, as the local ladies had a habit of enjoying the river quite naked. But in 1960, it was a driver who was in need of blinkers: Captivated by the sight of a Grecian beauty promenading in a bathing suit somewhere between Mount Olympus and the sea, near Platamona, in fact, he managed to ram the Orient Express into the less appealing rump of another train.

Rolling green country now, not so heavily cultivated as yesterday's, almond and plum trees and grazing land, old peasants in round fur caps and their women in head scarves in the fields; oxcarts, and each house with its well bucket raised on a long skyward boom, so that from a distance, the village looks like a port full of feluccas at rest. All a little different, the small, slower-looking stations denominated in both Cyrillic and Roman characters, local roads empty of motor traffic, and our new diesel locomotive painted a virulent yellow and green, like a snake's head to our long international body, and appropriately bleating like a half-swallowed sheep.

Now sometimes miles of maize, sometimes a cutting into mountains and, well after midday, Nis, with a big green Orthodox church and a few gypsies on the line trying to sell terrible, fresh-baked plaster statuettes. But not for eating. Now comes the picnic hour, the setting out of all those delicacies from Paris; and, if you have been lucky in the buffet in Belgrade, a bottle of hocklike žilavaka from Herzegovina, best of Yugoslav wines (there are also riesling-called wines, light and good---but avoid a sweet, thick fellow with the appealing name of Grk). Now, too, so much time has passed that the sense of clinical seclusion has been dissipated. Doors are opening and closing with the vivacity of a French farce, bottles are popping, food parcels crackling. People are chattier, too. One catches sentences of French blowing out of the compartments. Such French dialog seems always to contain the words "le cinéma" and "le ski." I've heard it again and again. And now even the fierce-faced Bulgarian has begun to smile; he's seen someone buy a bottle of šlivova, and midafternoon will see his own border, after Dimitrovgrad.

Officials at passing stations are growing long black Balkan mustaches, becoming sallower, looking more contemplative and intense. Reformed bandit chiefs? And eventually, Dimitrovgrad arrives, and a long wait. A trolley comes alongside with bread and hard-boiled eggs and, curiously, the offer of a tin of sardines. And which femme fatale carries a sardine-tin opener in her stocking top? I well understand now what a friend meant when he heard I was going by train to Istanbul and, with a horrible hollow laugh, rasped: "So you're taking the casse-croÛte route?" Well, some people have been cassering croÛtes, all right---but not us, the wise and not so virgin in these matters.

Meanwhile, the customs people are going through the second-class carriages, though they hardly seem to be interested in ours. Yet an adjoining compartment is stacked with crates of amplifiers belonging to a young Italian musician bound for Turkey. He is having Italian kittens about his crates. But no need to worry: No more than a jolly-looking Bulgar in a blue-serge uniform comes to stamp our passports, and that is that.

So we are off behind the Curtain, which is demarked on the nearby motor road simply by two white modern motels, both bright with plate glass and, with a sense of holiday, flying their ownflags. Goodbye to the red, white and blue of Yugoslavia; hello to the green, white and red of Bulgaria---land, I've often heard, of roses. And so it is. The wayside stations all have their little rose-filled gardens. And otherwise, the only changes seem to be a switch from gold to silver teeth, taller geese, the greater use of Cyrillic letters---giving us an adventurous Russian feeling---and a difference in the surface of the motor roads, which the Italian musician shows me are all nonskid cobbled, as in Paris, and so, he says, make a fearful noise when you are driving over them. And who on God's earth is he to talk about noise, with all those amplifiers?

A word here about the vaunted Curtain. It might not, objectively from the carriage window, exist. There are neither walls nor barbed wire nor apparent military emplacements. And the only noticeable difference in the people is, as we saw in Belgrade, of a bourgeois, orderly, less decorated nature. The percipient traveler must call upon his associative knowledge, the maps and guidebooks of the mind, to create a sense of I-am-thereness. This is, after all, what anyone does inside a bistro in Paris: Often there is nothing visible to tell the eye it is not in Dijon---yet the mind is full of the Paris feeling. But occasionally, here in Bulgaria, there will be a glimpse to heighten your sensibility---such as an army officer with Russian-type tabs to his uniform, or a train from East Germany. But much weightier than these will be older national qualities---casts of face, changes of vegetation, the long tresses plaited down a peasant woman's back, and hereabouts the overwhelming fact that we have passed from the northern Yugoslavian fields into a southern land with southern verve.

Sofia greets us somewhere around six, and with an instant air of gaiety. A bright evening crowd welcomes the train. Kisses, yelps, hoots, laughter everywhere, several girls with bouquets to greet descending passengers---we are suddenly like an evening ship coming into an island port. And there is, indeed, an essence of the island in Sofia's position. Nobody had ever told me that this city is situated in a basin prettily surrounded with mountains, some of them snow-capped, and just the right distance away. Clocks go one hour forward again; there seem to be many more porters than on any other platform yet; and beyond their bright-blue overalls, you see the little Dutch white curtains all along the windows of yet another bright-green Moscow express.

Two soldiers stroll along, slung with polished tommy guns, the only quiet ones of the evening crowd; and then, after a bit of shunting, we are off again with a new engine that hoots like an owl, or something bigger, a Stanley Crane in rut. These are the tracks, we remember, along which Boris, the last king of Bulgaria, used to mount the footplate and drive his country's trains. And dusk falls again for the third night, with passengers now quite broken in, a little punch-drunk, perhaps, and some people still licking Yugoslav sardine tins. But hopefully, like good little philosophers, they will be counting their compensations. For instance, freedom from that aforesaid automobile traffic for two lovely days! And, on a more profound note, we have experienced a great sense of space and a diversity of people. Village after unknown village has passed hour after hour: Each lonely village, each lonely figure in the fields seems encompassed by its own most personal solitude of passing time. This very amount of lives and land is marked on no map; it can only be truly sensed from such a train as this.

For the first time, we are awakened in the night. At some ungodly time, we touch Pythion, on the Greek outward border, and a soft-voiced gentleman without a uniform pokes his head in and takes away the passports. All right, the hell with them at such an hour, but it is dawn and worth a quick look through the window at the Greek white-and-blue flag, a little gray wooden station and, again, a change of lettering into Greek. Further evidence of how far we have come and how complicated Europe still is. All innocence, we have been traveling through immortal Greece without knowing it: The cradle of Western civilization's only lullaby was Beethoven's potent miss-a-beat Fifth. However---nice to see the old place. But no evzones in skirts and pompons. Simply the evidence of an early-morning life, people slowly going about the new day, a clucking of hens and the wide silent echo of all the country all around.

Back to sleep, but another call in an hour's time. The passports back, and out of the window a suddenly different scene: the red flag of Turkey, with its white crescent and star, and, sure enough, the penciling of a minaret. A woman in baggy cretonne trousers, clutching her headcloth round her face; everybody about much browner. There are a lot of soldiers in Chinese-looking forage caps having their boots cleaned; and under shady acacias, the normal early risers of this small Turkish country town are sitting at the lineside café---no, careful, not café; in Turkey it is usually a teahouse. The Turk grows tea and drinks it in little glasses all day. Coffee is secondary.

So now again, a change of lettering back to Atatürk's Latin characters, and another change of religion. In the last days, we have passed through the ambiance of at least four main religions---Roman Catholic, Swiss Protestant, Serbian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox. Now Islam. And as we jangle away over the wide rolling Thracian heath, each brown-roofed village pokes up its white minaret like a lighthouse. White and black storks patrol the fields or clack their bills like machine guns on chimney-pot lookouts. It was here during the Thracian upheavals of the early 1890s that one of the few authenticated holdups of the Orient Express took place. The train was carefully derailed and four gentlemen of the Berlin Travel Bureau were kidnaped. They were later released---on payment of 100,000 francs' ransom. A few rice fields and men paddling up to the knees in cool liquid mud---one of the few agricultural pursuits that looks, to the hotfoot layman, an enviable delight. But now a more tangible pleasure blessedly arrives; the Turks have put on a real buffet car, and soon a real breakfast of cheese and olives and bread and butter and jam and tea is brought by a black-smocked waiter whose smile reveals what seems to be all the gold of Byzantium---and might very well be part of it, melted down and passed from mouth to mouth over the years.

As the last hours of gorse and scrubroll by, as we fondle our new Turkish lira notes decorated with the torso of Atatürk in full evening dress, it is time to recoup the immediate past. Lesson one: The Orient Express is no longer a train de luxe, though, apart from the food question, which we have solved, it is pretty comfortable. And lesson two is not ever to think you can get on and off these sleepers as spontaneously as you please, staying at, say, Venice or Belgrade on the way. The train is quite heavily booked; and unless you book according to your on-and-off schedule some time before, you may be unlucky.

And now a big moment---the reedy rural end of an inlet from the Sea of Marmara. The sea, the sea! Contact at last! And soon suburbs of various kinds begin to pass, the bathing resort of Florya, then a colored towering of modern apartment blocks, then a poorer quarter of those dark wooden houses that make patches of Turkey look like bits of a kind of hot Norway. Somewhere here, too, is Yesilköy and the airport where all those femmes fatales may at this moment be arriving, freshly powdered and rouged and quite oblivious of our faithful passing presence.

And at last the broken towers and walls of old Byzantium. And we are into Istanbul: and literally what that word means---"into the city.'' Immense gray mosques, many domed, like giant schools of stone bubbles, show themselves to the left; then the venerable high dome and yellow walls of St. Sophia; and rounding the point, the great Seraglio of the Grand Turk, fortress of felicity and murderous intrigue, its kitchens for 10,000 people fretting the sky with chimneys, and a huge buzzard slowly wheeling above the surrounding trees. Now to the right the Bosporus; big ships passing on fast flowing waters come from the Danube, the Don, the Volga, to mingle with the Marmaran salt. On the right-hand southern coast, Asia ten minutes away by ferry---and, standing out very clearly, the big barracks where Florence Nightingale lit the lamp of nursing.

Sirkeci station, the terminus. And out into a milling, sweating, battering crowd that declaims that Asia has come to Europe: no need for geographical niceties about the Bosporus neatly dividing two continents. And into a taxi and across the Golden Horn to your hotel---and what? Lashings of Circassian chicken? Grilled swordfish? The sweetmeat called Lady's Navel? Or true navel---for, as once the dervishes whirled, now hired navels from all over the Near East rotate each night in a hundred danses de ventre down in the night clubs. Or just a row of iced rakis on the marble quay of a restaurant by the Bosporus?

After 1800 miles, five religions, seven borders, three literations and God knows how many peaked caps, there is all this offered to the person of him described now on his Turkish return bulletin as "Sansom Bey." And there is also the expected great architecture of mosques and of Byzantine relics, and the vaunted Covered Bazaar, and the Seraglio now made into a museum, with its amazing treasure of jewels, its wealth of porcelain and costumes and coaches and everything else that went to make up the pleasure dome of the sultan---including a moment that marks the epitome of royal indolence, that garden once filled with rare tulips where, in the warm dusk, the sloe eyes of the Grand Turk watched tortoises race, each with a candle upon its back. Add all the rest that the guidebook promises of a complex, ancient city. Yet there is always more to be found. Thus, not only bare dancers but dancing bears, trapped in local forests. And an island of peace an hour away---Büyük, where only horse traffic is allowed and the horses must wear silent rubber shoes. And, in mighty contrast, one of the loudest man-made musics on earth, a performance in high-turbaned costume of old Turkish military marches, remorseless, composed largely to inspire terror---at one time, the drums were so large they had to be played on elephantback. And, in season and beyond belief, wrestling matches between camels. And, in any season on the chance menu, a foodstuff called amanex. Amanex? Ham and eggs. No end to the subtle tricks of the wily Turk. The journey was worth it. It would have been madness to descend at Maggiore.