The 8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames

Author:Andrew Eames [EAMES, ANDREW]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV015000/TRA004010
ISBN: 9781590209165
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

HUBBLE-BUBBLE ON THE TOROS EKSPRESI

In her 1928 journey Agatha Christie experienced a life-enhancing moment of great beauty on the descent of the Taurus Express from Konya to Adana.

The Express was on its second evening out of Istanbul, plunging down through the Taurus mountains on the far side of the Anatolian plateau, when it stopped and everyone piled out to admire the sunset. The place was called the Cilician Gates, she wrote in her autobiography; she was to stop there again on many subsequent journeys, sometimes in the early morning and sometimes in the middle of the night, but she would always remember that glorious sunset moment of her first trip. She even made mention of it in Murder on the Orient Express, having the wistful Mary Debenham gaze through the Gates and murmur, ‘How beautiful.’

I caught the rattly old day train from Konya to Adana for the express purpose of seeing those Cilician Gates by daylight, so that I too could get a glimpse of what had moved Agatha so. It was an optimistic plan, because my pre-journey research had found no scheduled stop called anything remotely like the Cilician Gates. There was nothing of that name on the map and the railway staff had no idea what I was talking about when I tried to explain what I wanted. So I sat myself on the side of the carriage that should eventually have a view out over the Cilician (now Çukurova) plain and kept my nose pressed hopefully against the window as the old local started to squeal downwards off the Anatolian plateau, into a succession of tunnels and hand-carved embankments. I was hoping for a magical moment where the train driver, approaching a pair of Ozymandias-like Byzantine pillars which framed some tremendous view, would depart spontaneously from his script to allow us to refresh our souls with the uplifting power of nature, but no such moment came. The train ground interminably on, slow, uncomfortable and getting steadily hotter as we descended. There was a fair bit of brutal mountain scenery, all of it misty, and we stopped at every other lamppost, but not one of them bore the legend ‘Cilician Gates’.

My nose was well out of joint by the time we finally reached Adana, a hot, uninteresting commercial capital on Turkey’s most uninspiring stretch of Eastern Mediterranean coastline. The city was full of school students wearing tartan, all of whom seemed to find the sight of a sweaty foreigner more unusual than a street full of teenage clan McTurks. It took me ages to find a hotel anywhere near the station – one which apparently doubled up as a student boarding-house to make up for the lack of passing trade.

It seems that few foreigners ever came this way, because a humourless, hard-faced man with a handbag and a piercing stare was waiting for me in the foyer when I came down on my way to find something to eat. Perhaps he was the students’ guardian, summoned to verify that I hadn’t swanned into town to check that nothing unsuitable was being worn under the kilt.

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