ne the sickness increased and work went on
steadily increasing. We had 400 beds in the wards at that time, and it
was necessary to find accommodation for an average of 700 patients.
Anyone who was likely to be sick for any length of time was sent to
India whenever the opportunity arose. Down at the British Hospital on
the river front they were sending cases off that were likely to be more
than three days ill. It was an oriental polyglot scene down there on the
hospital quay in the comparative cool of evening, when the big white
hospital ship lay off the bank and crowds of ticketed patients sat under
the shelters waiting their turn to embark. Now and then a pale nurse,
dressed in white, with white helmet and red-lined parasol would walk
through the throng. Arab _belumchis_, Jews, Persians, Armenians, Sikhs,
Gurkhas, Pathans, and Ghats crowded the bank, voluble and picturesque.
Dhobies thrashed clothes at the river edge. Bhisties drew water in
kerosene tins. Convalescent Tommies in blue dungaree, fished
stolidly--wishing they were bound for India. The roofs of the square
white buildings were filled with nurses taking tea. Launches whirled up
and discharged Staff officers. All down the centre of the stream lay big
vessels. Already the place had a cosmopolitan spirit--a new-born
genius--and one could see it dimly in the future, when the Baghdad
railway runs through it to Kuweit, a white city, garish with painted
promenades and electric lights, with as many languages sounding in the
street as in Port Said.

The dates were now hanging in big masses of oval, greeny-yellow fruit,
some in clusters of two hundredweight and more, and the palm leaves were
turning brown at their points. The scarlet of the pomegranate trees had
vanished from the date groves and the floods were beginning to fall. It
had been necessary to surround the hospital clearing with a mud wall, or
bund, about four feet in height, in order to keep out the water, for at
times there is as much as a six foot rise when the tide comes up the
Shatt-el-Arab.

At any simple job of this kind the Arabs are quite good. They can
plaster mud on a roof, or make a bund, or run up a mud and reed hut, or
raise the level of the flooring of a ward, and they take their time over
it. But anything that savours of machinery is usually beyond them. It
was a common saying amongst the Arabs that sickness stopped as soon as
the dates were gathered in. That proved to be untrue. It was a l