Take a very tattered, colourless, and ill-fitting dressing gown, without a girdle and flopping about untidily.  Wear long black curly hair to shoulder.  Put plenty of grease on.  Then knock handle off a round-bottomed saucepan, very sooty, and place on your head.  Dirty your face and you might walk about Abadan without attracting notice.

I daresay if I knew something technical about the refining of oil I should not find these works so fascinating.  There is always a glamour about a thing only half understood.  Probably the retorts and boilers and all the apparatus here are of the very latest pattern, yet so strangely unlike modern machinery do they seem that I find myself wondering if I have gone back into some previous age and unearthed strange things of prehistoric antiquity.  These solemn-looking turbaned Indians might be tending the first uncouth monsters of engineering—­the antediluvians of machinery.  These serried ranks of tall iron funnels, these rude furnaces fed by crawling snakes of piping, these roaring domes of fire might be crude steam engines evolved by Titans when the world was young.

[Illustration]

II

The Venice of the east.

[Illustration:  In Ashar creek.]

[Illustration]

THE VENICE OF THE EAST

Before the war, when Mesopotamia was a more distant land than it is to-day, Basra was often referred to as the Venice of the East.  Few travellers were in a position to test the accuracy of the comparison, and so it aroused little comment.  No Venetians had returned from Basra burning with indignation and filled with a desire to get even with the writer who first thought of the parallel, probably because no Venetian had ever been there.

A few simple souls, who had delighted in the mediaeval splendours of Venice, dreamed of a Venice still more romantic—­a Venice with all her glories of art tinged with the glamour and witchery of the Arabian Nights, a Venice whose blue waterways reflected stately palms and golden minarets.  Other souls, like myself, less simple and sufficiently salted to know that these Turnerian dreams are generally the magical accidents of changing light and seldom the result of any intrinsic interest in the places themselves—­even they had a grievance when they saw the real Basra.  Was this the Venice of the East, this squalid place beside soup-coloured waters?  Was this the city that reveals the past splendours of Haroun Alraschid as Venice reveals the golden age of Titian and the Doges?

The first general impression of Basra is that of an unending series of quays along a river not unlike the Thames at Tilbury.  The British India boats and other transports lying in the stream or berthed at the wharves might be at Gravesend and the grey-painted County Council “penny steamboats” at their moorings in the river look very much as they looked in the reach below Charing Cross Bridge.