BAGHDAD BAHNHOF 1. Angels on Wheels You sit in a garden outside of the American Bar on Tigris bank under some scrawny palms. At the foot of the grey mud bank the Tigris runs almost the color of orangepeel in the evening light. At a fire of palmstalks an Arab with his skirts girded up is frying Saratoga potatoes in a huge pan of boiling grease. As fast as he fries them he hands them out on plates to vague khakied Anglo-Saxons who sit limply drinking Japanese beer and talking about malaria, sandfly fever and dysentery. Round boats of wickerwork and skins (see Xenophon) navigate the swift river, spinning as they go. An occasional long wherry with a lantern in the bow shoots out from under the bridge of boats modelled on the one with which Cæsar crossed the Rhine. In the drinking of a glass of Japanese beer the day flares up yellow like a guttering lamp and goes out, leaving night, the scudding lanterns of the wherries, the arclights on the bridge and the dense Chaldæn sky embossed with stars.
