Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'The ashram?' Auroville, a kind of spiritual Levittown dedicated to the memory of Sri Aurobindo and at that time ruled over by his ninety-year-old French mistress (the 'Mother'), is located near Pondicherry, in South India.

'Yes. I want to stay there as long as possible.'

'How long?'

'Years.' He regarded a passing village and nodded. 'If they let me.'

It was the tone of a man who tells you, with a mixture of piety and arrogance, that he has a vocation. But Moto-Guzzi had a wife and children in California. Interesting: he had fled his children and some of the girls in his group had fled their parents.

Another fellow sat on the steps of the bogie, dangling his feet in the wind. He was eating an apple. I asked him where he was going. 'Maybe try Nepal,' he said. He took a bite of the apple. 'Maybe Ceylon, if it's happening there.' He took another bite. The apple was like the globe he was calmly apportioning to himself, as small, bright, and accessible. He poised his very white teeth and bit again. 'Maybe Bali.' He was chewing. 'Maybe go to Australia.' He took a last bite and winged the apple into the dust. 'What are you, writing a book?'

It wasn't a challenge. He was contented – they all were, with one exception. This was the German marathon runner. He could be seen at any hour of the day doing isometric exercises in second class. His addiction was yogurt and oranges. He wore his track suit, a blue zippered outfit, and walked on the balls of his feet. 'I am going crazy,' he said. He was used to running twelve miles a day. 'And if this train takes very long I am going to get out of shape.' For a reason I did not grasp he was going to Thailand to run. He had been to Baluchistan. He told me the trains were running to Zarand. He smiled at the thought of it: 'You will be very dirty when you get to Zahedan.'

A bump that night roused me to look out the window and see the disappearing station signboard of Eskisehir. At six in the morning we were at Ankara, where the marathon runner leaped from the train and jogged furiously up and down beside the shunting engines. At lunch, in Central Turkey, the marathon runner told me he had enough yogurt to see him to the Afghanistan border, where there would be more.

Then we stared out of the dining-car window in silence. There was little to remark upon. The landscape was changeless and harsh: long strings of treeless hills lay at the horizon; before us was an arid plain, streaming with the fulvous dust the Lake Van Express had raised. The desert glare hurt my eyes. The only variation I saw were uninteresting acts of God, evidence of floods, droughts, and sandstorms, dry riverbeds in eroded gullies and exposed outcrops of rock. The rest was a waterless immensity that continued for hours under a clear blue sky. The people I saw were like those pathetic figures in a Beckett play, made absurd by their worried movement in a landscape of unheeding devastation. From nowhere a little girl in a charming skirt hobbled with two pails of water, a futile example of the desert's emphasis; standing in a dry sluice, like a weed, was a Turkish man in his pinstripes, woollen golfer's cap, V-neck sweater, and tie, his big moustache framing his big grin. Miles from that spot we passed some houses, six of them, built like adobe huts with log butts sticking in a trim row from the roof. This was the Central Plateau, and descending it after lunch we saw signs of irrigation, some green oases, and, far off, the dusty outlines of high mountains. But it was a strain to look out the window, for the glare and the heat increased. By late afternoon the temperature was in the 90s and suffocating dust collected on every surface.

'It looks more or less like this all the way to Pakistan,' said the marathon runner. 'The same, very flat and brown, but of course much hotter and dustier.'

I went to my compartment and lay down, like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee. To cheer me up still further, a small spotty-faced Australian girl from one of the third-class cars wandered by my couchette and asked if she could have a drink. I offered her raki; she wanted water. There were six people in her compartment. The previous night one had crept away – she didn't know where – 'so it wasn't so bad with five. I mean, I slept for a couple of hours, but tonight there'll be six again, and I'm buggered if I know what I'm going to do.' She looked around my couchette and smiled. 'I'm Linda.'

'I'd ask you to stay here,' I said, 'but the thing is, Linda, it's so small we'd be on top of each other in no time.'

'Well, thanks for the drink.'

She was a student and, like the others, had a student card to prove it. Even the oldest, most ragged and drugged chieftain had a student card. And for good reason: a card got each one a 50 per cent reduction on the ticket. The spotty Australian girl was paying nine dollars to get from Istanbul to Teheran. My own ticket cost fifty dollars, which was ridiculously cheap for two thousand miles of travel in a private compartment with a fan, a sink, and enough pillows so that I could prop myself on my berth like a pasha and consult Nagel on the passing towns.

One was Kayseri, formerly Caesarea. It appeared at the window that hot afternoon. It had known a number of conquerors since the year a.d. 17, when Tiberius made it the capital of Cappadocia: the Sassanids in the sixth century, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth; it was Byzantine in the ninth, Armenian in the tenth, and the Seljuks captured it a year after the Battle of Hastings. Eventually it was taken by Bayezid, whom some English lecturers know as Bajazeth, Tamburlaine's crazed captive who brains himself against the bars of a cage in the first part of Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great. It was after the historical Tamerlane defeated Bayezid at the Battle of Angora (1402) that Caesarea was annexed; then it was occupied by the Mamelukes and in the sixteenth century became part of the Ottoman Empire. But dust does not hold the footprints of conquerors, and not even the bright name of Tamerlane makes this monotonous-looking town interesting. The successive conquests only robbed it of its features, leaving it nothing marvellous except a mosque that might have been built by the architect Sinan, a genius who put up the greatest mosques of Istanbul and is best known for having repaired Saint Sofia's with ingenious and massive buttresses. The pencil-like minarets of the mosque in Kayseri are just visible between the grotesque tenements, and farther from the town, beyond rows of poplar trees with pale spinning leaves, there are straggling suburbs of doghouses with crooked windows and fatuous little bungalows where Tamerlane's inheritors are lounging in their gardens, dolefully scanning the horizon for another conqueror.

It is dusk, the serenest hour in Central Turkey: a few bright stars depend from a velvet blue sky, the mountains are suitably black, and the puddles near the spigots of village wells have the shimmering colour and uncertain shape of pools of mercury. Night falls quickly, and it is all black, and only the smell of the dust still settling reminds you of the exhausting day.

'Mister?' It is the green-eyed Turkish conductor on his way to lock the sleeping-car door against the marauders he imagines in the rest of the train.

'Yes?'

'Turkey good or bad?'

'Good,'I said.

'Thank you, Mister.'

From Malatya that third day we crossed the upper reaches of the Euphrates River, to Elazig and beyond, pushing slowly towards Lake Van, stopping often, and, as the whistle's echo died, starting again. The houses were still square, but were made of round stones and appeared like cairns showing the way to a carefully irrigated oasis. Farther on there were sheep and goats on the humpy plain; if there had been any grass in evidence one would have said they were grazing. But there was no grass at all, and the battered features of these animals matched the battered ground they stood upon. At several halts children chased the train; they were blond and lively and might have been Swiss, except for their rags. The landscape repeated, becoming bigger, drier, emptier with repetition; the distant mountains had massive volcanic wrinkles, some very green, and the closer hills had these folds as well, but they were brown and scorched, like overbaked pie crust.