only draw six feet. They have
two decks and an awning, and there was just room for our 200 men to
lie about. Altogether there were on board--in the order of the amount
of room they took up--two brass hats, 220 men (four Hants drafts and
some odds and ends), a dozen officers, four horses and a dozen native
servants and a crew.

Altogether I had to leave four sick men at Basra, all due more or less
to that barge episode, and I have still two sickish on my hands, while
two have recovered.

There was a strong head-wind and current so we only made about four or
five knots an hour. The river is full of mud banks, and the channel
winds to and fro in an unexpected manner, so that one can only move by
daylight and then often only by constant sounding. Consequently,
starting at noon on Monday, it took us till 5 p.m. Wednesday to do the
130 miles. It is much less for a crow, but the river winds so, that
one can quite believe Herodotus's yarn of the place where you pass the
same village on three consecutive days. Up to Kurna, which we reached
at 7 a.m. Tuesday, the river is about 500 yards to 300 yards broad,
and the country mainly poor, bare, flat pasture; the date fringe
diminishing and in places altogether disappearing for miles together.
At the water's edge, as it recedes, patches of millet had been and
were being planted. The river is falling rapidly and navigation
becomes more difficult every week.

Kurna is aesthetically disappointing. The junction of the rivers is
unimpressive, and the place itself a mere quayside and row of mud
houses among thin and measly palms. It is of course the traditional
site of Eden.

Above Kurna the river is not only halved in width, as one would
expect, but narrows rapidly. Most of the day it was only a hundred
yards wide and by evening only 60; and of the sixty only a narrow
channel is navigable and that has a deep strong current which makes
the handling of the boat very difficult.

In the afternoon we passed Ezra's Tomb, which has a beautiful dome of
blue tiles, which in India one would date Seventeenth Century.
Otherwise it looked rather "kachcha" and out of repair, but it makes
an extremely picturesque group, having two clumps of palms on either
side of an otherwise open stretch of river.

Soon afterwards we came to a large Bedouin Village, or rather camp,
running up a little creek and covering quite fifteen acres. They can't
have been there long, as the whole area was under water tw