ion and an Indian cavalry regiment. Having
commandeered an ancient caravan-serai for garage and billets, we set to
work to clean it out and make it as waterproof as circumstances would
permit. An oil-drum with a length of iron telegraph-pole stuck in its top
provided a serviceable stove, and when it rained we played bridge or read.

I was ever ready to reduce my kit to any extent in order to have space for
some books, and Voltaire's _Charles XII_ was the first called upon to
carry me to another part of the world from that in which I at the moment
found myself. I always kept a volume of some sort in my pocket, and during
halts I would read in the shade cast by the turret of my car. The two
volumes of Layard's _Early Adventures_ proved a great success. The writer,
the great Assyriologist, is better known as the author of _Nineveh and
Babylon_. The book I was reading had been written when he was in his early
twenties, but published for the first time forty years later. Layard
started life as a solicitor's clerk in London, but upon being offered a
post in India he had accepted and proceeded thither overland. On reaching
Baghdad he made a side-trip into Kurdistan, and became so enamored of the
life of the tribesmen that he lived there with them on and off for two
years--years filled with adventure of the most thrilling sort.

I had finished a translation of Xenophon shortly before and found it a
very different book than when I was plodding drearily through it in the
original at school. Here it was all vivid and real before my eyes, with
the scene of the great battle of Cunaxa only a few miles from Museyib.
Babylon was in sight of the valiant Greeks, but all through the loss of a
leader it was never to be theirs. On the ground itself one could
appreciate how great a masterpiece the retreat really was, and the
hardiness of the soldiers which caused Xenophon to regard as a "snow
sickness" the starvation and utter weariness which made the numbed men lie
down and die in the snow of the Anatolian highlands. He remarks naively
that if you could build a fire and give them something hot to eat, the
sickness was dispelled!

The rain continued to fall and the mud became deeper and deeper. It was
all the Arabs could do to get their produce into market. The bazaar was
not large, but was always thronged. I used to sit in one of the
coffee-houses and drink coffee or tea and smoke the long-stemmed
water-pipe, the narghile. My Arabic was no