They are all women who do the selling—­weird figures in black carrying baskets of eggs and occasionally chicken.  Gesticulating, shouting, shrieking, they rush along beside the up-going steamer and keep even with it.  In the middle of a bargain the steamer may edge away until a great gulf is fixed between the bargainers.  Sometimes it will slide along the other bank and a fresh company of yelling Amazons will try and open up negotiations for eggs while the frenzied and now almost demented sellers left behind rend their clothes and shout imprecations at their rivals.  Another turn of the current, however, and the vessel again nears the shore of the original runners and the deal is finished.

[Illustration:  The Sirens of the Narrows.]

One girl kept up for miles and at last sold her basket of eggs.  She got a very good price for them, but apparently she wanted her basket back again.  The buyer insisted that the basket was included, and the seller shrieked frantically that it was not.  She kept up with us for some miles, making imploring gestures, kneeling down with her arms outstretched as though she was begging for her life, and yelling at the top of her voice, tears streaming down her cheeks.  The basket would be worth twopence or less and she had made many shillings on the deal.  Finally, a soldier good-naturedly threw it to her and it fell in the water about three feet from the shore.  She hurled herself upon it waist deep in the water and seized it, then waved her arms and leaped about in a dance of ecstatic triumph that would have made her fortune at the Hippodrome.

Another feature of the Narrows is the reed villages.  This, of course, does not exclusively belong to this region, but it is here, when tied up to the bank, that the best opportunity of a close view is taken.

That houses can be built in practically no time and out of almost anything has been abundantly claimed at home by numerous enterprising firms by ocular demonstration at the Building Trades and Ideal Home Exhibitions.  Cement guns and climbing scaffolding, we are assured, will raise crops of mansions at a prodigious pace, and the housing problem is all but solved.  If we have not noticed many 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.