any new houses it is not for
want of inventors. Yet the best of these efforts is elaborately
cumbersome compared with housing schemes on these flat lands bordering
the Tigris and Euphrates. Not only has the Marsh Arab evolved a style
of dwelling that can be built in a night, but he can boast of a device
still more alluring in its naivity and utility--the _Portable Village!_

[Illustration: A MARSH ARAB REED VILLAGE]

I once made a sketch of a Marsh Arabs' village at evening (reproduced
facing p. 34), and on returning thither on the following morning to
verify certain details, I found it had gone! I succeeded in tracking it
down again by the afternoon, about ten miles from its former situation,
and found the mayor (or whatever the Marsh-Mesopotamian equivalent may
be) inspecting the finishing touches being made to the borough. Of
course it is frightfully muddling, all this moving about of villages, to
the stranger who is not keeping a sharp look-out and marking well such
impromptu geographical activity.

Along the shores of the rivers of Mesopotamia and in the innumerable
lagoons and backwaters that abound can be found large areas of tall
reeds, ranging from quite slight rushes to canes twenty feet high. It is
with such material the Marsh Arab builds. The long rods he bends into
arches like croquet hoops. On this skeleton, not unlike the ribs of a
boat turned upside down, he stretches large mats woven out of rushes. At
the ends he builds up a straight wall of reed straw bound up in flat
sheaves. An opening is left for an entrance, a mat, sometimes of
coloured material, doing duty for a door.

So much for the principal and removable part of the village. However,
the town planner will add to this by improvising mud enclosures for
animals, and an occasional wall and "tower." The mud is mixed with cut
grass and reeds, quickly drying into a hard substance, and sufficiently
permanent for anything that such a temporary village requires.

In the bright sunlight of the Mesopotamian plains, and probably also on
account of their prominence at a distance over the flat land, some of
these mud buildings look quite imposing. I remember once approaching a
city with ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close
inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the most decrepit
kind.

Great changes have been made in the rule of the waterways of
Mesopotamia. Sinbad the Sailor has given place to Sinbad the Soldier,
the