The Best Times by John Dos Passos

Author:John Dos Passos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504011433
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Next morning I was awakened long before dawn. The stars crackled in the cold. The camp was a struggling confusion of drivers holding their camels’ necks to the ground while the packs were being fastened to their backs. The camels writhed and groaned and waved their snaky necks about. The drivers cursed and yanked and kicked.

I found Jassem crouched over the last embers of the fire warming his hands. He was laughing quietly to himself. I crouched beside him and embarked on a speech I’d been making up out of my vocabularies about how I had run out of provisions and needed to buy food and possibly to establish a credit for the purpose. Still laughing he shook a long finger at me and handed me a last drop of coffee in one of his thimble cups.

Fahad brought Rima. She jerked to her feet and we were off at a jogtrot toward the Dipper. Jassem was trying to shake off his tormentors by striking to the north of the regular caravan tracks. We rode all morning through grassy uplands to a great waterless canyon along a scarcely marked trail that wound down around the face of red sandstone cliffs and then up across the opposite rim to a pancake flat desert. We traveled eleven hours at top speed and made camp in the dark, wolf hungry and dog tired.

Before I had a chance to get up a sentence in Arabic about buying food Jassem had me sitting at his right hand eating with his men. He furnished my grub for the rest of the trip. The trouble was that the Agail ate so very little. A handful of dates and rice was a day’s ration for a desert Arab. And it was bad manners to eat more than the next man. Night after night I dreamed of roast goose.

Jassem kept up his forced marches through a badlands country of eroded mesas and stony gulches. I was pretty well worn out by the time he finally gave us a chance to rest and to bathe by camping early one afternoon beside a water hole in a dry arroyo. Each man retired modestly behind his own separate rock to wash himself.

Bathing when you have been deprived of it for many days becomes an exquisite pleasure. I can still remember the special sense of wellbeing I had that night sitting at Jassem’s campfire, watching the moon rise through the fragrant dark green smoke of the aromatic herbs they were burning. The coffee tasted unusually good. We sat over it unusually long.

When the wind changed and blew the smoke in our faces they all laughed at me because my eyes watered. Hassoon could hold his face in the thickest smoke without blinking. Didn’t we have any campfires in America? they asked me. Some of the Agail had been to America and had come back telling of great cities and much money. The coffee we were drinking came from Santos and they imagined I must live where the coffee came from.

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