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Busra, our destination, lies about sixty miles from the mouth of the Shatt el Arab, which is the name given to the combined Tigris and Euphrates after their junction at Kurna, another fifty or sixty miles above. At the entrance to the river lies a sand-bar, effectively blocking access to boats of as great draft as the Saxon.
Indians of every caste and religion were turned into drivers, and although it seemed sufficiently out of place to come across wizened, khaki-clad Indo-Chinese driving lorries in France, the incongruity was even more marked when one beheld a great bearded Sikh with his turbaned head bent over the steering-wheel of a Ford. Modern Busra stands on the banks of Ashar Creek.
Zobeir is a desert town of ten thousand or so inhabitants, situated fifteen miles inland from Busra. The climate is supposed to be more healthful, and many of the rich and important residents of the river town have houses there to which they retire during the summer months. To an outsider any comparison would seem only a refinement of degrees of suffocation.
As soon as we landed I wandered off to the bazaar "suq" is what the Arab calls it. In Busra there are a number of excellent ones. By that I don't mean that there are art treasures of the East to be found in them, for almost everything could be duplicated at a better price in New York.
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