I only had time to scrawl a short note last night before the mail went.  But I wrote to Papa the day before we left Basra.

Our embarkation was much more sensibly managed this time, a Captain Forrest of the Oxfords being O.C. troops, and having some sense, though the brass hats again fixed 10 a.m. as the hour.  However he got all our kits on the barge at 7 and then let the men rest on the big ship till the time came.  Moreover the barge was covered.  We embarked on it at 9.30 and were towed along to the river steamer “Malamir,” to which we transferred our stuff without difficulty as its lower deck was nearly level with the barge.  The only floater was that my new bearer (who is, I fear, an idiot) succeeded in dropping my heavy kit bag into the river, where it vanished like a stone.  Fortunately that kind of thing doesn’t worry me much; but while I was looking for an Arab diver to fish for it it suddenly re-appeared the other side of the boat, and was retrieved.

These river boats are flat-bottomed and only draw six feet.  They have two decks and an awning, and there was just room for our 200 men to lie about.  Altogether there were on board—­in the order of the amount of room they took up—­two brass hats, 220 men (four Hants drafts and some odds and ends), a dozen officers, four horses and a dozen native servants and a crew.

Altogether I had to leave four sick men at Basra, all due more or less to that barge episode, and I have still two sickish on my hands, while two have recovered.

There was a strong head-wind and current so we only made about four or five knots an hour.  The river is full of mud banks, and the channel winds to and fro in an unexpected manner, so that one can only move by daylight and then often only by constant sounding.  Consequently, starting at noon on Monday, it took us till 5 p.m.  Wednesday to do the 130 miles.  It is much less for a crow, but the river winds so, that one can quite believe Herodotus’s yarn of the place where you pass the same village on three consecutive days.  Up to Kurna, which we reached at 7 a.m.  Tuesday, the river is about 500 yards to 300 yards broad, and the country mainly poor, bare, flat pasture; the date fringe diminishing and in places altogether disappearing for miles together.  At the water’s edge, as it recedes, patches of millet had been and were being planted.  The river is falling rapidly and navigation becomes more difficult every week.

Kurna is aesthetically disappointing.  The junction of the rivers is unimpressive, and the place itself a mere quayside and row of mud houses among thin and measly palms.  It is of course the traditional site of Eden.

Above Kurna the river is not only halved in width, as one would expect, but narrows rapidly.  Most of the day it was only a hundred yards wide and by evening only 60; and of the sixty only a narrow channel is navigable and that has a deep strong current which makes the handling of the boat very difficult.