ruins of ancient Babylon. The rainy season was just beginning, and it was
obvious that the patrolling could not be continuous, for a twelve-hour
rain would make the country impassable to our heavy cars for two or three
days. We were fortunate in having pleasant company in the officers of a
Punjabi infantry battalion and an Indian cavalry regiment. Having
commandeered an ancient caravan-serai for garage and billets, we set to
work to clean it out and make it as waterproof as circumstances would
permit. An oil-drum with a length of iron telegraph-pole stuck in its top
provided a serviceable stove, and when it rained we played bridge or read.

I was ever ready to reduce my kit to any extent in order to have space for
some books, and Voltaire's _Charles XII_ was the first called upon to
carry me to another part of the world from that in which I at the moment
found myself. I always kept a volume of some sort in my pocket, and during
halts I would read in the shade cast by the turret of my car. The two
volumes of Layard's _Early Adventures_ proved a great success. The writer,
the great Assyriologist, is better known as the author of _Nineveh and
Babylon_. The book I was reading had been written when he was in his early
twenties, but published for the first time forty years later. Layard
started life as a solicitor's clerk in London, but upon being offered a
post in India he had accepted and proceeded thither overland. On reaching
Baghdad he made a side-trip into Kurdistan, and became so enamored of the
life of the tribesmen that he lived there with them on and off for two
years--years filled with adventure of the most thrilling sort.

I had finished a translation of Xenophon shortly before and found it a
very different book than when I was plodding drearily through it in the
original at school. Here it was all vivid and real before my eyes, with
the scene of the great battle of Cunaxa only a few miles from Museyib.
Babylon was in sight of the valiant Greeks, but all through the loss of a