The Orient Express

"I was Sitting ... in the outer seat of a table for four in the Pullman dining car of the Orient Express. On a curve just outside Munich, owing to a rail's being out of place, our carriage suddenly leaned over hard to the left and I was forced violently against my companion. When the carriage righted itself, I found that an Austrian couple had both fallen over, making a complete somersault. The lady's head (concluded on page 146)The Orient Express(continued from page 137) 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.

"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. 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. 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. Those 1800 miles of track between Paris and Istanbul are like flypaper to the romantic traveler.

So now let us see what it is like to travel on the famous train 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 minutes. Along the Direct Orient platform, one searches for the one sleeping coach that bears the word Istanbul. 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 journey, the great train slides off.

"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; chromium fittings everywhere. Everything opening and shutting into everything else, in a fine essay of compactness.

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 "E pericoloso 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.

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."

Then, in a blaze of color -- Maggiore, Italy. 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. Better just lower the sun blind and taste the noonday shade.

We now approach Trieste and soon afterward the Yugoslav frontier -- which is, though, no Iron Curtain but, as it were, Tito's Venetian blind. 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. 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.

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.

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 snowcapped, and just the right distance away.

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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. 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.

And now a big moment -- the reedy rural end of an inlet from the Sea of Marmara. The sea, the sea! And at last the broken towers and walls of old Byzantium. 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. On the right-hand southern coast, Asia ten minutes away.

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 in the night clubs.

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." 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 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.

"After 1800 miles, five religions, seven borders and God knows how many peaked caps, there is more."