, but exceedingly stubborn about
choosing the direction in which he went. After numerous changes I came
across an excellent syce to look after them. He was a wild, unkempt
figure, with a long black beard--a dervish by profession, and certainly
gave no one any reason to believe that he was more than half-witted.
Indeed, almost all dervishes are in a greater or less degree insane; it is
probably due to that that they have become dervishes, for the native
regards the insane as under the protection of God. Dervishes go around
practically naked, usually wearing only a few skins flung over the
shoulder, and carrying a large begging-bowl. In addition they carry a
long, sharp, iron bodkin, with a wooden ball at the end, having very much
the appearance of a fool's bauble. They lead an easy life. When they take
a fancy to a house, they settle down near the gate, and the owner has to
support them as long as the whim takes them to stay there. To use force
against a dervish would be looked upon as an exceedingly unpropitious
affair to the true believer. Then, too, I have little doubt but that they
are capable of making good use of their steel bodkins. Why my dervish
wished to give up his easy-going profession and take over the charge of my
horses I never fully determined, but it must have been because he really
loved horses and found that as a dervish pure and simple he had very
little to do with them. When he arrived he was dressed in a very ancient
gunny-sack, and it was not without much regret at the desecration that I
provided him with an outfit of the regulation khaki.

My duties took me on long rides about the country. Here, and throughout
Mesopotamia, the great antiquity of this "cradle of the world" kept ever
impressing itself upon one, consciously or subconsciously. Everywhere were
ruins; occasionally a wall still reared itself clear of the all-enveloping
dust, but generally all that remained were great mounds, where the desert
had crept in and claimed its own, covering palace, house, and market,
temple, synagogue, mosque, or church with its everlasting mantle. Often
the streets could still be traced, but oftener not. The weight of ages was
ever present as one rode among the ruins of these once busy, prosperous
cities, now long dead and buried, how long no one knew, for frequently
their very names were forgotten. Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Istabulat,
Nineveh, and many more great cities of history are now nothing but names