The huge, high-prowed mahailas, the
crazy wooden galleries skirting the river, the quaint, squat minaret
appearing over the flat roofs, and the dim light of lamps reflected in
the still water made a picture at twilight that it would be difficult to
beat for mystery and romance. A man in black with a fire of brushwood in
the bow of a mahaila added a touch of magic to the scene.

I don't know in the least what he was doing with this pillar of fire,
but it was extraordinarily effective, and it made you feel you were
getting your money's worth out of the show.

Or, again, for mystery and romance, here is another scene on the Tigris
between Amara and Kut.

The evening is still. No breeze stirs the sliding surface of the river.
On every side immeasurable plains stretch from horizon to horizon, "dim
tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom of leaden-coloured even,"
save where the misty blue ridge of the Persian mountains links heaven to
earth, gleaming with a ghostly chain of snow beneath a rose-flushed sky.
A few marsh Arabs' reed huts and a distant fire are the only signs that
the world is inhabited. A faint rhythmical beating is growing more
distinct, the herald of the slow progress of an up-coming steamer.

Before night is fallen she has passed--a strange object with high funnel
and clattering stern paddle, an apparition it would seem from our
Western world of a hundred years ago, moving slowly across the crowded
stage of modern war's necessities. I observed her number was S 31, but I
believe she is known by her intimate friends as "Puffing Billy."

[Illustration]

IX

THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD

[Illustration: THE WALLS OF HIT]

[Illustration]

THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD

Since I have returned to England I constantly run up against people who
ask me, sometimes jokingly and sometimes almost seriously, if I have
brought back any sketches of the Garden of Eden, and a conversation
invariably follows as to the authenticity or otherwise of the
traditional site. Is it true that Mesopotamia was the cradle of the
human race, and, if so, are the descriptions in the book of Genesis
concerning the world known to Adam and Noah, however figuratively they
may be taken, in keeping with the natural conditions of such a land?
However much Paradise may have been lost, can the traveller see in
Mesopotamia any signs of beauty and richness of verdure out of which the
artist and the poet could visualiz