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.

In the afternoon we passed Ezra's Tomb, which has a beautiful dome of
blue tiles, which in India one would date Seventeenth Century.
Otherwise it looked rather "kachcha" and out of repair, but it makes
an extremely picturesque group, having two clumps of palms on either
side of an otherwise open stretch of river.

Soon afterwards we came to a large Bedouin Village, or rather camp,
running up a little creek and covering quite fifteen acres. They can't
have been there long, as the whole area was under water two months
ago. Their dwellings are made of reeds, a framework of stiff and
pliant reeds and a covering of reed-matting; the whole being like the
cover of a van stuck into the ground and one end closed; but smaller,
about 5ft. × 4ft. × 7ft. There were about 100 of these and I should
put the population at 700.

A whole crowd of boys and some men came out and ran along with us, and