[Illustration:  Sunset, Old Basra.]

I hired a bellam manned by two fearsome-looking pirates and explored unending waterways in and around Basra.  The main thoroughfares run at right angles to the river, but there are numerous narrow branches communicating from one to the other, in some places forming a network of little channels.  Some of these were beautiful beyond description.  The tide is felt in all these waters, and sometimes, during a spring tide, the effect of some of these date palm plantations, with the ground just covered, is strange.  Hundreds of palms seem to be growing up out of a lake, and the glades reflected in the still water is dream-like and enchanting, recalling Tennyson’s nocturne—­

  “Until another night in night
   I enter’d, from the clearer light,
   Imbower’d vaults of piller’d palm.”

The pirates were quite jolly fellows who pointed out various things to me as being worthy of interest.  By this time the natives have got up, in a most superficial way, the things which they think will interest the Englishman.  Every group of palm trees more than twenty in number is pointed out as the Garden of Eden, every bump of ground more than six feet high is the mount on which the Ark rested, and every building more than fifty years old is the one undoubted and authentic residence of Sinbad the Sailor.  An old house in Mesopotamia in which Sinbad the Sailor had not lived would be equivalent to one of England’s ancient country mansions in which Queen Elizabeth had never slept.  The fact that Sinbad the Sailor is a literary creation doesn’t discourage the Arabs in the least.

During this voyage of mine by bellam through the multitudinous creeks of Basra a remarkable thing happened.  Under the circumstances it was a providential happening. I ran into Brown.

[Illustration:  “....  The solemn palms were ranged above, UNWOO’D of Summer wind”—­Recollections of the Arabian Nights]

Now I do not expect the readers of some previous notes of my sketching escapades[1] to believe this.  It is almost too wonderful that a chronicler of travels in desperate need of some comic relief to save his book from dulness would be so lucky as to pick up such excellent copy as Brown, without previous intrigue.  Nevertheless I do solemnly state that I had not the slightest idea where Brown was doing his bit in the war.  I had last heard of him in France in the Naval Division.  That we should both have travelled half across the world to meet with a crash in a backwater at Basra was one of the strangest freaks of fortune I have come across.

My two pirates were poling along quite merrily when we took a right angle turn in fine style.  It is evident that the low foliage had hidden the side channel into which we shot, and they had not seen what became evident too late, a motor-boat at right angles across the creek, apparently stuck fast.