ver and from the
main streets. All round and in every unbuilt on space are endless
groves of date palms, with masses of yellow dates. The creeks are
embanked with brick and lined with popular cafe's where incredible
numbers of Arabs squat and eat or drink huggas and hacshish and the
like. The creeks and river swarm with bhellums and mahilas. A bhellum
is a cross between a gondola and a Canada canoe: and a mahila is a
barge like the ones used by King Arthur, Elaine or the Lady of
Shallott: and its course and destination are generally equally vague.

We stayed six days at B. mainly on a captured Turkish pilgrim ship. I
suggest a Turkish pilgrimage as a suitable outlet for the ascetic
tendencies of your more earnest spikelets. It was hot, but nothing
fabulous. My faithful thermometer never got beyond 104 in my cabin. The
disadvantage of any temperature over 100 indoors is that the fan makes
you hotter instead of cooler. There are only two ways of dealing with
this difficulty. One is to drink assiduously and keep an evaporation
bath automatically going: but on this ship the drinks used to give out
about 4 p.m. and when it comes to neat Tigris-cum-Euphrates, I prefer it
applied externally. So I used to undress at intervals and sponge all
over and then stand in front of the fan. While you're wet it's
deliciously cool: as soon as you feel the draught getting warm, you
dress again and carry on. This plan can't be done here as there are no
fans. I suppose you realised that Austen Chamberlain was only indulging
his irrepressible sense of humour when he announced in the H. of C. that
in Mesopotamia "The health of troops has on the whole been good. Ice and
fans are installed wherever possible," _i.e._ nowhere beyond Basra. The
hot weather sickness casualties have been just over 30% of the total
force: but as they were nearly all heat-stroke and malaria, it ought to
be much better now. Already the nights are cool enough for a blanket to
be needed just before dawn. Of course they run up the sick list by
insane folly. When we moved to our Turkish ship there was every hour of
the day or night to choose from to do it in, and plenty of covered
barges to do it in. So they selected 10 a.m., put 150 men into an open
barge, gave them no breakfast, and left them in the barge two hours to
move them 600 yards, and an hour unloading baggage afterwards! Result,
out of my forty-nine, three heat-strokes on the spot, and four more sick
the next day.