If this neighbourhood could certainly be identified with Eden, one could supply an entirely new theory of the Fall of Adam.  Here at Amarah we are 200 miles by river from the sea and 28ft. above sea level.  Within reach of the water anything will grow:  but as the Turks levied a tax on trees the date is the only one which has survived.  There are little patches of corn and fodder-stuff along the banks, and a few vegetable gardens round the town.  Otherwise the whole place is a desert and as flat as this paper:  except that we can see the bare brown Persian mountains about forty miles off to the N.N.E.

The desert grows little tufts of prickly scrub here and there, otherwise it is like a brick floor.  In the spring it is flooded, and as the flood recedes the mud cakes into a hard crust on which a horse’s hoof makes no impression; but naturally the surface is very rough in detail, like a muddy lane after a frost.  So it is vile for either walking or riding.

The atmosphere can find no mean between absolute stillness—­which till lately meant stifling heat—­and violent commotion in the form of N.W. gales which blow periodically, fogging the air with dust and making life almost intolerable while they last.  These gales have ceased to be baking hot, and in another month or two they will be piercingly cold.

The inhabitants are divided into Bedouins and town-Arabs.  The former are nomadic and naked, and live in hut-tents of reed matting.  The latter are just like the illustrations in family Bibles.

What I should be grateful for in the way of literature is if you could find a portable and readable book on the history of these parts.  I know it’s rather extensive, but if there are any such books on the more interesting periods you might tell Blackwell to send them to me:  I’ve got an account there.  My Gibbon sketches the doings of the first four Caliphs:  but what I should like most would be the subsequent history, the Baghdad Caliphs, Tartar Invasion, Turkish Conquest, etc.  For the earlier epochs something not too erudite and very popular would be most suitable.  Mark Sykes tells me he is about to publish a Little Absul’s History of Islam, but as he is still diplomatising out here I doubt if it will be ready for press soon.

As for this campaign, you will probably know more about the Kut battle than I do.  Anyway the facts were briefly these.  The Turks had a very strongly entrenched position at Kut, with 15,000 men and 35 guns.  We feinted at their right and then outflanked their left by a night march of twelve miles. (Two brigades did this, while one brigade held them in front.) Then followed a day’s hard fighting as the out-flankers had to storm three redoubts successfully before they could properly enfilade the position.  Just as they had done it the whole Turkish reserve turned up on their right and they had to turn on it and defeat it, which they did.  But by that time it was dark, the troops were absolutely exhausted