I will not attempt to explain the processes of oil refining.  I am merely concerned in narrating what it looks like.  I know little beyond the fact that the crude oil arrives by pipe from the oilfields by means of several pumping stations and that it is cooked or distilled over furnaces and converted into different grade oils from petrol to heavy fuel oil.  As a spectacle, however, I found a journey through this weird region most fascinating and mysterious.  At night it appears as a vast plain gleaming with lights and studded with dark objects, half seen and suggesting primitive machinery of uncouth proportions.  Huge lengths of pipes creep from the shadows on one hand into the far-off regions of blackness on the other.

Armed with an electric torch, which the Chief carried, and a large sketch-book which I regretted taking almost as soon as we started, we set out on our quest of Dantesque scenery.  At first our road ran along the quays by the river side.  A camouflaged Admiralty oiler was loading fuel oil by means of three pipes that looked like the tentacles of an octopus clutching on to the side of the ship.  Near this quay was a gate, and we entered the wire fence that surrounds the works and the area of the tanks and struck out over a dark waste.

The novice who roams about this place in the dark spends a lot of time falling over pipes.  They are stretching all over the place without any method that is apparent.  The Chief showed up most of them with his torch, and so I fell about only just enough to get used to the feel of the ground as a preliminary to what was coming later.  It had rained heavily two or three days before, consequently there were lake districts, slimy reaches of mixed oil and mud and dried, hard-looking islands that were in reality traps to the unwary.  The top only was firm, and it had the playful property of sliding rapidly on the greasy substratum and thus sitting you down without warning when you thought you had reached dry land.

[Illustration:  “A mysterious-looking furnace tower.”]

Had I known more about Abadan before I started I would have taken a course of lessons in tight-rope walking, for that seems to be a great asset in getting along.  The Chief was quite a Blondin.  He could walk or run any length of pipe and never swerve.  Much practice had made him an adept.  There were places where the only alternative to walking in mud and water was this balancing feat along the pipe lines.

When I had fallen several times and covered myself with a mixture that looked like grey condensed milk mixed with butter and felt like a poultice, I got my second wind.  I was still recognizable as a human being.  All fear of making myself in a worse mess had vanished, and thus, freed from nervousness, I began to get quite daring.  The Chief saw in me the making of a first-class pipe walker, and prophesied that I should be able to attain the speed of three miles an hour.  I still fell off, however, enough not to get a swelled head on the subject.