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Updated: June 20, 2025
A strange person was in the low, dark space whom he had never smelled. Clad in a single shift and lying on a coarse grass-mat spread upon a pile of tobacco cases and fifty-pound tins of flour, was a young black girl. There was something furtive and lurking about her that Jerry did not fail to sense, and he had long since learned that something was wrong when any black lurked or skulked.
At the close of August, 1915, Nasiriyeh had been made habitable by the British engineers and a large part of the force departed for Amara on steamers and barges, most of the soldiers wearing only a waist-clout and still suffering from the intense heat, as they crouched under the grass-mat shelters that had been provided.
It was earth-floored, with a few homemade chairs, and a bed with board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this was suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after a supper of jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. Dakin and I found it more than crowded, even after Ems had spread a petate, or grass-mat, on the ground.
But the contractor settled accounts when he felt inclined, and at irregular intervals. Pay-day was a very stormy one. Its advent was notified by the arrival of the money-box, much resembling the old-fashioned wooden desk of the last century. The contractor sat on the ground on a bit of old carpet, under the shade of a grass-mat, with the box before him.
The only article of furniture in each of these "apartments" is a bed, which is really a broad, low platform covered with a grass-mat, for in a land where the mercury not infrequently climbs to 120 in the shade, there is no need for bedding. Here they eat and sleep and make their toilets, the women preparing the meals for their men and for themselves in ovens out-of-doors.
His clothing consisted of a very finely plaited grass-mat, hanging like a mantle from his shoulders, and a girdle round his waist. His head was enveloped in a piece of white stuff, in the manner of a turban.
Bashti sighed wearily, and wearily wrapped the heads in their grass-mat coverings all but Van Horn's; and hoisted them up in the air to hang from the roof-beams to hang as he debated, long after he was dead and out if it, even as some of them had so hung from long before his father's and his grandfather's time.
Baram Singh hurriedly finished his work and left the marquee by the passage leading to the kitchen. Ballantyne waited with his eyes upon that passage until the grass-mat screen had ceased to move. Then taking a bunch of keys from his pocket he stooped under the open writing-flap of the bureau and unlocked the lowest of the three drawers.
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