made the landing from at Suvla, with a coat of new
paint and the letters ML instead of K--barges, launches, native
dhows--which travel to Mombasa and Bombay--and innumerable lesser craft.
Basra itself lies up a creek, and is invisible from the river. What you
see on the shore is properly called Ashar, but the two places merge into
one another. Owing to the absolute flatness of the country, a sense of
smallness is produced everywhere. There is no background to give
perspective, and the great breadth of the sable river dwarfs the shore.

We dropped anchor a little below the town, near Korah creek. It was
Sunday and at that time it was still the custom of the inhabitants of
Basra to collect on the banks of the creek and hold a kind of social
parade from which the suggestion of a slave market was not entirely
absent. There was a continual procession of boats and painted _belums_,
the native gondola, long and narrow, with curved ends, and either rowed
or poled by two _belumchis_. In them were fair-skinned, unveiled women
with many bangles on their arms, wearing robes of dark brilliant hues.
On the shore, under the palms, wandered a crowd of white-robed Arabs,
with red or blue turbans. Occasionally one saw a khaki uniform. It was
intensely hot and damp. A haze lay over the further reaches of the
river, and the sky had a brassy look unlike the intense turquoise
clarity of the Egyptian sky. The palm fronds seemed metallic. As far as
the eye could see along the right bank lay a confused mass of low white
buildings, tents, huts of yellow matting and piles of stores. Gangs of
Arabs and Indian coolies were at work at the low wooden landing stage,
and over the scene towered the gaunt masts of the wireless station. The
left bank was chiefly palm grove, save for a gap where stood a big
building taken over by our flying men.

[Illustration: TOWING ON THE TIGRIS.]

A military authority came on board, wondering whether we were a cargo
of wood or mules. A hospital had not been expected, and we passed the
next day in idleness. On the third day our four hundred tons of stuff
were swung off into _mahallas_, the native barges, which are wide craft
decorated with carving and paint, both stem and stern pointed and high
out of the water, and amidships close down to the water-line. The Arabs
squatting on the painted poops of these ships seemed sullen. They looked
as cut-throat a lot as you could desire. When the boats were loaded up
they drift