I was surprised that he seemed to take great delight in my sketching, and several times, when I was making notes of some quaint latticed windows overhanging the narrow road, so that they nearly met, he became quite excited, chuckling and laughing to himself, as if in the enjoyment of some tremendous joke.

I discovered afterwards that Brown’s native servant had been pulling the leg of our worthy slave, by telling him that these nightly expeditions were for the purpose of carrying off some ravishingly beautiful lady from one of the harems.  No doubt he thought my sketching merely a blind.  Measurements with a pencil were obviously part of some incantation.

While on the subject of sketching, especially quick note-taking under difficult conditions, I want a word with my fellow-craftsmen should they chance to take up this book.  The difficulties of drawing by twilight, lamplight, and the still greater difficulty of drawing in colour under blazing sunlight, cannot easily be exaggerated.  How many times has a sketch done in a failing light looked strong in tone, only to go to pieces when seen under normal conditions?  How often the sunlight on your paper flatters your colours, so that you think you are improvising in a most joyous way, and when you get home you find nothing but dinginess and mud!

[Illustration:  “By Baghdad’s shrines of fretted gold,
                High-walled gardens, green and old.”]

Probably you have thought it out and found some solution as I did, but in case these difficulties are still formidable I will tell you of one way to reduce them to impotence.  I take with me, on all occasions where there is to be great uncertainty of light, some coloured chalks.  About six colours, picked to suit the kind of work attacked; either chalk pencils or hard pastilles will give you certain colour values in whatever light you find yourself, and even if you can hardly see what you are drawing these must, to some extent, standardize your values, so that your rough work can be washed over and brought up to any pitch of detail subsequently, without danger of the main tones of your sketch being wrong.  The speed with which a sketch can be carried forward in this way, and the “quality” obtained by the rapid fusion of the chalk with the colour wash, are both pleasant surprises when experimenting in this medium.

Night after night we sallied forth and roamed about the narrow ways and tortuous turnings of old Baghdad.  The bazaars are mostly covered in with arched masonry, and the effect is that of a long side aisle in a very untidy and greatly secularized cathedral.  From time to time glimpses of the dark-blue, star-filled sky showed through openings overhead, and sometimes a quaintly framed view of a dome or minaret.