CHAPTER III

THE CITY OF SINBAD

Arrival at Basra--A city of filth--Transformation by the British--Introducing sport to the natives--The Arabs and the cinema.

Basra or Busra, the Bastra of Marco Polo, and for ever linked with the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, is one of the most important ports of Asiatic Turkey, and sits on the right bank of the Shatt el Arab a short distance below the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

It is built on low-lying marshy land where the malarial mosquito leads an energetic and healthy life. Basra proper is about a mile from the river, up a narrow and malodorous creek, and when the tide is out the mud of this creek cries out in strange tongues. The natives, however, seem to thrive upon its nauseating vapours. It is at once the source of their water supply and the receptacle for sewerage. In this delectable spot, as indeed throughout Asiatic Turkey and Persia, sanitary science is still unborn, and the streets are the dumping-ground for refuse.

The long, narrow bellem, with its pointed prow, in general appearance not unlike a gondola, is the chief means of communication between the Shatt {21} el Arab and Basra itself. If the tide is low, the Arab in charge poles up or down stream, and when you arrive at your destination you generally pick your way through festering mud to the landing-place.

One's first feelings are of wonder and bewilderment that the entire population has not long ago been wiped out by disease. Going up and down stream at low tide I have seen Arab women rinsing the salad for the family meal side by side with others dealing with the family washing. Then the bellem boy, thirsty, would lean over the side of the craft, scoop up a handful or two of the water, and drink it. As successors to the dirty and lazy Turk the British in occupation of Basra have set themselves to remedy this state of affairs, but it is uphill work. Manners and customs of centuries are not easily laid aside, and your Asiatic sniffs suspiciously at anything labelled Sanitary Reform, while the very mention of the word Hygiene sounds to him like blasphemy against the abominations with which he loves to surround himself. The Turk never bothered his head whether the inhabitants lived in unhealthy conditions. When an epidemic broke out and carried off a certain proportion of the population, the Turkish Governor would bow his head in meek resignation before the inscrutable will of Allah.

The architecture of Basra is of a distinctly primitive type. The houses are built chiefly of sun-dried bricks, and the roofs are flat, covered with mud laid {22} over rafters of date-wood and surrounded by a low parapet.

Basra had been used as the British base for the advance against the Turks on the Tigris. From here had been rationed the army and the guns that reconquered Kut and opened the difficult road to Bagdad. The magician's wand of the British soldier-wallah wrought wonders in the place. Malarial swamps were filled in, and hospitals and administrative buildings erected. Wharves equipped with giant cranes sprang into being on the quayside, and, as we were landed, the busy river scene, with fussy tugs towing huge laden barges, and the quayside packed with transports, irresistibly recalled some populous port in the Antipodes or Britain itself, rather than the seaside capital of a vilayet in Asiatic Turkey.

That Basra had a great future in store for it as a shipping centre was early recognized by Major-General Sir George McMunn, who for some time held the post of Inspector-General of Lines of Communications at Basra. He was one of those rare soldiers with a genius for organization and a capacity for bringing to bear upon big problems a wide range of outlook, and he was never hampered by those military trammels which often mar the professional soldier and make a good general an exceedingly bad civil administrator. So General McMunn set to work to give Basra an impetus along the path of commercial progress. He planned a model city {23} which was to include residential and business sites, electric tramways, modern hotels, and public parks. It was a stupendous undertaking, but McMunn accomplished much in the face of great financial difficulties. He endowed Basra with a first-class hotel run by a chef and an hotel staff recruited from London, installed electric light, gave the evil-smelling town a vigorous spring-cleaning, and with stone quarried in Arabia buried beneath stout paving the slimy mud of some of the Basra streets.

Ashar which fronts the Shatt el Arab is really the business centre of Basra. Its bazaars running parallel with Basra Creek are dark, evil-smelling, and over-crowded by human bipeds who swarm about ant fashion, and are born, live, and die in these purlieus.

In the course of an hour during the busy part of the day you can count on meeting representatives of all the races and creeds of Asia in the streets and bazaars of Ashar or lower Basra. Here ebbs and flows the flotsam of the East--Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Persians, Chaldeans (merchants or traffickers these!), and coolies from India, Burma, and China, with wanderers from the remote khanates of Russian Turkestan, the latter in quaint headdress and wearing sheepskin coats whose vicinity is rather trying to sensitive noses when the thermometer is well above eighty in the shade.

General Byron, with Major Newcombe of the Canadian Contingent, Captain Eve, some other members of our party, and myself were quartered in {24} the old Turkish cavalry barracks, while the remainder went into camp at Makina, two miles out. The Turks, it is true, were gone never to return, but in the honeycombed recesses of the crumbling dust-covered walls of Ashar barracks their troopers had left behind many old friends who, from the very first, displayed an envenomed animosity towards us, and attacked British officers and men with a vigour which the Turkish Army itself had never excelled. Every night raiding parties, defying alike our protective mosquito nets and the poison-gas effect of Keating's, found their way into our beds; and every morning we would crawl from between the sheets bearing visible marks of these night forays.

It is always said, and generally believed, that the British signalize their occupation of a country by laying down a cricket pitch and building a church. They did all these things and more at Basra. There was a garrison church, a simple building with a special care for the temperature of a Gulf Sunday. There were several sports clubs, and one at Makina, which might be called the suburb of Ashar, had good tennis courts. Beyond, in the desert, was a racecourse where the local Derby and Grand National were run off.

The ordinary native of Iran and of the "Land of the Two Rivers" has not hitherto shown any marked taste for either mild or violent physical exercise. But Basra, I found, was a noted exception to this, and youth of the place were badly bitten by the {25} sports mania. As the doctors would say, "the disease spread with alarming rapidity, and spared neither young nor old." After a few weeks devoted to picking up points as spectators at "soccer" matches, a native team would secure possession of a rather battered football and start work, "Basra Mixed" trying conclusions with "Ashar Bazaar," for example. The rules were neither Rugby nor Association, but a local extemporization of both; and the dress was not the classic costume of the British football field, but a medley of all the garbs of Asia. Stately Arabs in long flowing robes, suffering from the prevailing sports fever, would forget their dignity to the extent of running after a football and trying to kick it. Chaldean Christian would mingle in the scrum with Jew and Mussulman. Individual players sometimes received the kick intended for the ball. Off the field this would have led to racial trouble and perhaps bloodshed, but as a rule these slight departures from the strict football code were accepted in the best possible spirit, being regarded no doubt as part of the game itself.

Of course things did not always run so smoothly. Sometimes the ball was entirely lost sight of, and lay lonely and isolated in some corner of the field, while the players would resolve themselves into a sort of Pan-Asian congress on the ethics of games in general. Everyone spoke at once and in his own tongue. On such occasions a passing British soldier would be summoned to assist at the deliberations, {26} and in "Na Poo" Arabic would straighten out the tangle. Then play would be resumed, everybody bowing to the superior wisdom of the soldier sahib, and accepting his decision unquestioningly.

The youth of Basra, more precocious than their elders, converted the streets of Ashar into a playing-ground where tip-cat, bat and ball, marbles, diabolo, and sundry other forms of juvenile recreation found eager devotees at all hours of the day in narrow streets generally crowded with army transport.

The cinema also exercised a great influence on the native mind. Never quite understanding its working, he accepted it all philosophically as part of the travelling outfit of that strange race of infidels from far away who had chased the Turks from the shores of the Arabian Sea, who seemed to be able to make themselves into birds at will, and who rushed over the roadless desert in snorting horseless carriages. Men such as these were capable of anything, and when the first cinema film arrived, the Arabs filled to overflowing the ramshackle building which served as a theatre. In Basra I often went to the cinema, not so much for the show itself as to watch the joy with which that primitive child of nature, the Arab, followed the mishaps and triumphs of the hero through three reels. How they were moved to tears by his sufferings! And how they shouted with joy when the villain of the piece was hoist by his own petard and his career of rascality abruptly and fittingly terminated!

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One thing, I found on talking to some of these native onlookers, puzzled their minds exceedingly, and that was the morals and manners of European women as shown on the screen. The Arab is a fervent stickler for the conventionalities, and it was a great shock to his religious scruples to see women promenading in low-necked dresses with uncovered faces, frequenting restaurants with strange men not their husbands, and imbibing strong drink. "The devil must be kept busy in Faringistan raking all these shameless creatures into the bottomless pit!" said one Arab to me, when I asked him what he thought of the cinema. It was useless to seek to explain that cinema scenes did not represent the real life of the Englishman or the American, and that all our women do not earn their living as cinema artists.

In Basra I never saw a Mohammedan woman frequenting a cinema performance. Even had she won over her husband's consent to such an innovation, public opinion would veto her presence there, and she would not be permitted to look upon this devil's machine illustrating foreign "wickedness."

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