ure a land entirely different from Mesopotamia and still stick to
this description. I have met countless men out there who have told me
that they had built up in their minds a wrong conception of the country
and a wrong idea of its character simply by letting their imagination
get to work on insufficient data.

To begin with, the word "desert" generally suggests sand. People who
have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara naturally picture a sandy waste
with its accompanying oases, palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is
a land of clay, of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames and Medway
saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every
direction--this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the riverside
country between Basra and Amara. No blue, limpid waters by Baghdad's
shrines of fretted gold, but pea-soup or _cafe au lait_. Even the
churned foam from a paddle wheel is _cafe au lait_ with what a
blue-jacket contemptuously referred to as "a little more of the _au
lait!_" At a distance it can be blue, gloriously blue, by reflection
from the sky, but it will not bear close examination.

The railway skirts the river here, running from Ezra Tomb to Amara
having started from Basra. Amara must not be confused with Kut-el-Amara.
The names are a source of great confusion to newcomers. When I was told
that the railway did not go any further than Amara, I lightheartedly
pictured myself making my way across the river in a goufa or bellam and
scorned the suggestion that I might have to wait some time for a steamer
to Kut. I thought Kut was on one side of the river and Amara on the
other. It is, however, a twenty-four hours' journey in a fast boat.

It is perfectly true that the country is "as flat as a pancake" in
original formation, but the traces of ancient irrigation systems, to say
nothing of buried cities--Babylon is quite mountainous for
Mesopotamia--make it a very bumpy plain in places.

[Illustration: DAWN AT AMARA]

Now that the British are in occupation of the land instead of the Turk,
the natural assumption of every patriotic Briton is that the desert will
immediately blossom as the rose and the waste places become inhabited.
But the difficulties, which are many--finance being, perhaps, the least
of them--arise on all sides, when a study of the subject goes a little
deeper than the generalizations popularly made about irrigation and its
revival in a land which was once, before all things, dependent for its