Read Eastern Approaches for Free Online Page A

as inconspicuously as possible, and boarded the train.
    The three days’ journey from Moscow to Baku was so uneventful as to be monotonous. Once again I had a palatial first-class sleeping-compartment to myself. The sheets were clean; at intervals the conductor brought me glasses of tea from the samovar, and there was a dining-car in which I consumed copious meals in company with a nondescript collection of officials and Red Army officers. After several attempts to eat at ordinary Western European times, I gave up and went over to the Russian time-table: luncheon at eleven, dinner at five, supper from midnight onwards and glasses of tea at all hours of the day and night. Apart from this concession to local usage and the uncertainty of my ultimate destination, I might not have been in the Soviet Union.
    For the first two days there was little change in the landscape. We travelled southwards at a leisurely pace through green, fertile country to Kharkov, and then through the eastern Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don. Even the towns we passed through seemed familiar — like Moscow on a smaller scale, the onion-shaped domes of the Middle Ages mingling incongruously with the solidly ornate official and industrial style of the nineteenth century and the utilitarian austerity of the modern skyscraper.
    After Rostov the railway crosses the Kuban Steppe, the home of the Kuban Cossacks, born cavalrymen, descended from the Cossack garrisons sent by the Tsars in the eighteenth century to guard what were then the frontiers of the Empire against the inroads of marauding tribes. That night we skirted eastwards along the northern foothills of the Caucasus and woke next morning to find ourselves travelling south once more along the shore of the Caspian, between the smooth, grey sea and the wild mountains of Daghestan. Here Shamyl, the leader of the Caucasian tribes in their struggle for independence, held out against the Russians until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Already the names of the towns, Makhach-Kalà and Derbent, had an Eastern sound.
    Even before you reach Baku, the derricks of the oil wells and the all-pervading smell of oil warn you that you are approaching the town. Oil is the life of Baku. The earth is soaked with it and for miles round the waters of the Caspian are coated with an oily film. In ancient times Persian fire-worshippers, finding flames springing from the ground at places where the oil-sodden earth had caught fire, founded a holy city here.
    On alighting from the train, I put myself in the hands of an elderly Tartar baggage porter and together we walked to the nearest hotel. The manager, however, after looking doubtfully at my passport, announced that his establishment was ‘not suitable for foreigners’ and suggested that I should seek accommodation at the big new square white hotel on the sea front. This turned out to be run by Intourist, the State Travel Agency for Foreigners, and although at the moment there were no foreigners in it the management clearly knew exactly how to deal with them. I was given a room and my passport was at once taken away from me. It was not, I was beginning to discover, as easy to stray from the beaten track as I had thought it might be. Still wondering what my next move should be, I had dinner and went to bed.
    I had been asleep for some hours when I was abruptly awoken by the blare of music and by a series of cataclysmic crashes. It was clearly useless to try to sleep and so I got up and went upstairs to see what was going on.
    The room above mine was, it turned out, a restaurant, and at a point which must have been just above my bed a team of six solidly built Armenians were executing, with immense gusto, a Cossack dance, kicking out their legs to the front and sides and springing in the air, to the accompaniment of a full-sized band and of frenzied shouting and hand-clapping from all present. There was no hope of sleep. I ordered a bottle of vodka and decided to