Chapter XVIII: The End of the Raft

We were now only sixty-five miles from Baghdad, and with luck we should reach it next day. We travelled on all night, and on waking up next morning found ourselves floating past cultivated banks and creaking waterwheels, and sighted in the distance dark patches of palm-groves.

But, in spite of Ali's prayers to the "God of the favouring breeze," our enemy the wind rose up once more and compelled us to put to shore. From this point it was only a few hours by land to Baghdad. We could faintly see the town itself on the distant horizon line to the east, separated from us by a great expanse of sandy desert. We were told, however, that the river wound in and out so much that it was still a day's journey off by water.

We kicked our heels disconsolately on shore--a sandy shore this time; little sandy hillocks alternated with patches of struggling tufts of grass. We sat there all day. The sand blew into our faces, and the river rolled on past us--and just behind me a rat put its head occasionally out of a hole to see if we were still there. Arten also at intervals put his head out of the hut and held up his hand in the hurricane to feel if the wind was blowing. "There is still much wind," he would say, and as no one paid any attention to his original remark he retired again into the hut, and the rat looked out of his hole. I always mixed up Arten with rats after that day. By and by a goufa appeared on the scene. A goufa is a native boat made of pomegranate branches laced together with ropes and covered inside and out with bitumen. It is like a circular coracle, eight to ten feet across and about four feet deep, and is propelled with a single paddle. The crew disembarked just above us. First came half a dozen Arabs, then a veiled woman, then a donkey, then a buffalo, then another woman, then three more men. One donkey still remained inside with two men. He refused to be jumped over the side like his predecessors. All the people on shore yelled at him and the men in the boat hit him. Hits and cries were of no avail; he sneered at the yellers and kicked at the hitters. The donkey on land gazed mournfully at his companion and brayed. Finally the offender put his two fore feet on the edge of the boat and the men behind seized his hind legs and heaved him overboard. He rolled over in the water, shook himself unconcernedly, and started to browse the withered grass. Then everybody disappeared behind sandy hillocks, the goufa floated past us, and we were once more left alone with the wind and the rat.

Towards sunset we made a start again, and floated on most of the night. Small mud villages and plantations of palms and orange-trees were scattered thickly on each side of the river. We seemed to be quite close to Baghdad; gilded domes and minarets stood up on the sky-line above confused masses of flat-topped houses and groups of palm-trees. But all the morning we wound slowly round and round endless loops of the river and hardly seemed to get any nearer to our destination. The banks now teemed with life; goufas shot across past us from one bank to another with mixed consignments of men and animals; mules plodded up and down drawing skins of water over windlasses; groups of Arabs lay about on the sunny banks and shouted inquiries at the kalekjis as we passed. The houses, which had been mud hovels higher up the river, now looked more substantial, and were each surrounded by high walls enclosing shady orange gardens. Finally we hove in sight of the bridge of boats which guards the entrance to the town, and ran into the shore just above it. The bridge, we learnt, had to be broken down before the raft could pass through, and as this seemed likely to take some hours we landed and drove up to the Consulate. H.M. Vice-Consul was away, and so we proceeded to the Babylon Hotel.

Baghdad can be reached in a normal way up the Persian Gulf to Busra and from thence by the weekly mail steamer; it contains, therefore, certain concessions to the ideas of occasional European agents and commercial travellers. The Babylon Hotel is one of these concessions. There was a dining-room hung all round with the framed self-assertions of various wine and spirit merchants whose names, strangely familiar, mocked us from the wall as a first greeting from the borders of civilisation. Hassan stood in the middle of the room and gazed at them open-mouthed. These were to him English works of art, decorations of great English houses, in keeping with the gaudily covered chairs and meaningless glass ornaments. Each one had unmistakable pictorial aspects of the bottle. He pointed at first one and then another.

"Ingilhiz," he said in a tone of congratulation. He was always pleased when we met with anything which would seem to remind us of our native land. We were irresponsive; he studied them further.

"Raki?" (Whisky) he added, the note of inquiry tinged with apologetic scorn.

The hotel was built, like all the better modern houses, along the banks of the river, with overhanging balconies. I escaped from the further evidences of Western vulgarity, and, leaning over the rail of the balcony, let the passing river wash them away from the disturbed crevices of my brain. Just beneath, on one side, the narrow street which led to the hotel was continued past it down to the shore; and here came an incessant stream of natives; women with waterskins to fill and men with mules carrying baskets of town refuse to empty; the same spot served admirably for both purposes. The Eastern has an overwhelming love for "taze su" (fresh water); he drinks it, he sings to it, he worships it, he makes an emblem of it, and yet--with his extraordinarily consistent inconsistency--he makes the town midden and the town watering-place one and the same spot.

A nearly naked child sprawled about amongst the dirt and rubbish, unearthing hidden treasures in the form of bright tin lids. The mules strayed about at the water's muddy edge, putting in a drink on their own account whilst their masters, having emptied the loads, filled waterskins for the return journey.

A big, lumbering sailing boat was being unloaded just below me; the men swung themselves to and fro together as they pitched heavy bales overboard.

"Allah, Allah, Allah," they sang out as they swung. Round their heads circled and swooped white gulls talking of the sea.

And now, through the distant broken bridge, clumsily floating down the current, came our raft, square and stubborn amongst the twirling, swiftly paddled goufas. Like a great, uncertain, bewildered animal, turning now this way and now that, guided by the unwieldy poplar poles, it lurched up the watering-place and stuck on the midden.

From every corner of the narrow, winding street sprang out half-clothed, jabbering Arab forms; gesticulating, fighting, jostling, they proffered their services in the task of unloading.

In a few moments all our belongings were removed; the cooking-pots, the rugs, the beds, all the personal requirements which had made it into our home for so many weeks. Stripped and deserted, looking almost ashamed of itself, it lay there in all its naked clumsiness. By to-morrow even this vestige of our journey will have disappeared for ever from the realms of historic evidence. The felt strips, the walls which have sheltered us through so many stormy nights, will be sold to the highest bidder; they will serve henceforth as carpets in some native hovel, on which the Mahomedan will kneel to say his prayers or squat to smoke his pipe. The poles and oars will go as firewood; and the skins, deflated, will return to the country we have left. Nothing will remain but the memory of it to a few human minds. We are glad that it is to be so; as it has been exclusively ours in the past, so will it remain ours only in the future. We made it what it was, and without us it will cease to be.

The waters gave it a farewell lap as they passed on. We had stopped; but they went hurrying on, taking with them all those mixed memories of peace and danger, of contemplation and exertion, of idleness and hurry which they, and they only, had shared with us. They had borne us from the wilds and fastnesses of the unconquered East to the gateway of the Western invasion; through the dreariness and desolation of desert lands, through the magnificent isolation of gorgeous mountain scenery, past the ruined evidences of ancient Western civilisations still mocked by the persistence of squalid tribal huts; and now, having deposited us to draw our own conclusions in this decayed city of the Khalifs, they hurried on, lapping scornfully in their course at the rocking pleasure-boat of Messrs. Sassoon's representatives and the white steam launch of H.M. British Vice-Consulate.

Impartially, as they had borne us up, so down here they bore up alike the brass trinkets shipped in their thousands from Manchester, the emissary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the golf clubs and society papers for the English Club; and with an indescribable roar, as of grim laughter, rushed headlong into the salt blue waters of the Persian Gulf, where, surrendering irretrievably their own bounded individuality, they merged themselves in the larger life of the untrammelled Eastern seas.