ping with grasshoppers, on which storks were feeding.
Scattered bushes looked in the mirage like enemy patrols. We were
escorted by Fritz, whose kindly interest in our movements never
flagged. We started late, at 6.50 a.m., and without breakfast, the
distance being under-estimated. A zigzagging course made the journey
into over ten miles, in dreadful heat; we were marching till past noon.
When Sumaikchah came in sight, men fell out, exhausted, in bunches and
groups.

[Illustration: (Map) LOWER MESOPOTAMIA]

Though we were unmolested, the countryside was full of eyes. Shortly
afterwards an artillery officer, bringing up remounts, sent a Scots
sergeant ahead to Sumaikchah, with a strong escort, to bring back
rations. The party was fired on by Buddus. The sergeant's report
attained some fame; deservedly, so I give it here:

'We were fired on, sirrr.'

'Did you fire back?'

'No, sirrr. I thocht it would have enrrraged them. But I'd have ye
know, sirrr, that it's hairrrdly safe to be aboot.'

We came, says Xenophon, to 'a large and thickly populated city named
Sittake.' His troops encamped 'near a large and beautiful park, which
was thick with all sorts of trees, at a distance of fifteen stades from
the river.'[1] This description still holds true of Sumaikchah. The
ancient irrigation channels are dry, and the town has shrunken; but it
remains a large garden-village. Here were melons and oranges, fowls and
turkeys, exorbitantly priced, of course; possibly Xenophon's troops got
their goods more cheaply in the year 399 B.C.

Sumaikchah is an oasis with eighty wells. The water was full of salts.
It was bad as water; it was execrable as tea. Many of the wells on the
Baghdad-Samarra Railway have these natural salts. Every one who left
Sumaikchah next morning was suffering from diarrhoea. Here again one
remembers the _Anabasis_ and the troublesome experience which the notes
I read at school ascribed to poisonous honey gathered from the flowers
of _rhododendron ponticum_.

Our brief stay here was unlike anything we had known, except in our
racing glimpse of the flowery approaches to Kut. The village had palms
and rose bushes. A coarse hyacinth, found already at Mushaidiyeh, now
seeding, grew along the railway and in the wheat. We camped amid green
corn; round us were storksbills, very many, and a white orchis, slight
and easily hidden, the same orchis that I found afterwards in Palestine
and in the Hollow Vale of Syria.