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Milan is passed by midmorning. Venice as you top off luncheon with coffee and liqueurs; Trieste for tea, then the long run through Yugoslavia with Zagreb at midnight and Belgrade, the capital, for second-day-out-breakfast. Just before high-noon you are at Nish, parting of the ways, where the Simplon Orient splits into two sections. To the right and it is Salonika at bedtime, and Athens at 10:15 a. m. To the left and you are at Sofia for tea, and Istanbul in the misty Turkish dawn at 7:47 a. m.
If you are still bound East, your sleeping car does not enter Istanbul Station but is switched off to the rim of the Golden Horn. There the only swank ship in sight waits to ferry Wagons-Lits passengers (and no one else; over to President Kemal's gleaming, modernistic Hadair-pasha Station where New Asia begins. On the platform stands the Anatolic Express —same de luxe sleeping cars as on the Simplon Orient but much newer. On the destination board is Dictator Kemal's proud whimsy, leading Turks of the hinterland to imagine that this same train has run clear through from England: "Anatolic Express: Londres, Paris, Ankara."
If you are going farther south, the board reads Taurus Express. In this you can take a shower bath as you enter the Holy Land, then make short bus connections to the railways now sprouting from Baghdad. Damascus and even Persia's capital. Teheran. In six days, entirely on land except for crossing the Golden Horn, you may speed 3,490 miles from Paris via the Holy Land to Cairo.