I have in the past been very fortunate, when I
come to think of it, in the variety of my means of locomotion. When I was very small I travelled in a padded box swung upon the back of a mule across the Persian mountains. I have travelled so
slowly that between dawn and sunset we crept no further than fifteen miles. I have travelled so quickly that I breakfasted in Egypt and dined at Brindisi, that I breakfasted at Brindisi and dined in Pall Mall. I have travelled in great liners and in little Greek steamers which chugged across the Aegean. And I have come to this conclusion, that luxury does not matter and that privacy matters very much indeed. The luxury, for instance, of the Normandie ' was stupendous. The little lift-boys dashed about in uniforms as fulgent as the scarlet anemone. The carpets were of the thickest pile, and the stewards handed round sandwiches of foie gras and caviare at half-past eleven. There was a chapel in which they held services in three distinct denominations,- a gymnasium in which electric saddles creaked and bucketed, a swimming-bath complete with cocktails and a sun-deck designed like a Riviera café with coloured lights. Yet all this, after the first few hours of astonished appreciation, was a mortification to soul and body. In the vast dining-room the glass panels would start chattering suddenly to the reverberation of the distant engines ; the wine-list was a weighty volume in quarto ; the food was such as one had experienced only at the Pre Catalan. Yet what was all this compared to the sour milk and the apricots of the Balchtiari hills? Nor, when one comes to compare comforts, were the great European expresses, the Orient Express or the Rome Express, so very luxurious ; no sleeping- car that I have ever encountered can compare in comfort to those of the L.M.S. The wagons-lit were ill-designed. The peacock- coloured brocades with which they were panelled retained the smell of countless dead cigars ; the windows admitted either no air at all or else all the dust of Lombardy ; and in the dark and dripping lavatory one was confronted by the whispered notice: " Unter diesem Lavabo befindet stch em Topf."
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