Chapter 5 and 6, pp. 66-80 Summary and Analysis

Chap. 5- Most women are dressed in body length veils. There is no beer or alcohol for sale. The author is joined in the dining car by someone intent on looking at a woman in modern dress. This Englishman is an engineer who works in an isolated town and rarely sees women. The man studies Farsi in his spare time and is thinking of becoming a Muslim. The author hears the story of this man's desperate attempts to meet a woman but thinks that his attempts will be unsuccessful. Meshed appears with its mosques and is at the end of the line. His next stop is Afghanistan. There are no trains in Afghanistan and the author is with the two hippie boys in a kind of no-man's land hotel on the frontier. Afghanistan just had...