shown in the
sketch facing page 16, to the ubiquitous bellam. Old Basra lies up here.
As I approached it one evening, with the sun going down, it looked most
gorgeous. Palms and gardens on the right and the buildings of the town
on the left, and boats approaching, dream-like In the sunset glow. I
have sketched the effect roughly in the line drawing on page 21.

Some of the regions up these creeks are extremely beautiful. For once
there was nothing disappointing even in comparison--although
comparisons, as we have seen, are odious--with Venetian waterways. For
once we have something that can surpass in beauty anything that Venice
can show. Basra can boast no architecture, but Nature, coming to her
assistance, can produce, between sunshine and water, vistas of
orange-laden trees overtopped with palms and all reflected in the still
canal. I have known seven kinds of fruit to overhang the banks of one
creek at the same time.

[Illustration: Sunset, Old Basra.]

I hired a bellam manned by two fearsome-looking pirates and explored
unending waterways in and around Basra. The main thoroughfares run at
right angles to the river, but there are numerous narrow branches
communicating from one to the other, in some places forming a network of
little channels. Some of these were beautiful beyond description. The
tide is felt in all these waters, and sometimes, during a spring tide,
the effect of some of these date palm plantations, with the ground just
covered, is strange. Hundreds of palms seem to be growing up out of a
lake, and the glades reflected in the still water is dream-like and
enchanting, recalling Tennyson's nocturne--

"Until another night in night
I enter'd, from the clearer light,
Imbower'd vaults of piller'd palm."

The pirates were quite jolly fellows who pointed out various things to
me as being worthy of interest. By this time the natives have got up, in
a most superficial way, the things which they think will interest the
Englishman. Every group of palm trees more than twenty in number is
pointed out as the Garden of Eden, every bump of ground more than six
feet high is the mount on which the Ark rested, and every building more
than fifty years old is the one undoubted and authentic residence of
Sinbad the Sailor. An old house in Mesopotamia in which Sinbad the
Sailor had _not_ lived would be equivalent to one of England's ancient
country mansions in which Queen Elizabeth had never slept. The fact t