ed for eight hundred years under the irises, which wave their green
sabres crowned with royal purple in the whispering twilight.

Near by, the mud and timber walls of a ziarat stand, softly brown,
supporting a deeply overhanging, grass-grown roof, blazing with scarlet
tulips. Through its very centre, and as though supporting it, pierces the
gnarled trunk of a walnut tree, reminding one of Ygdrasil, the Upholder of
the Universe.

_May_ 27.--What an improvement it would be if a house-dounga could be
fitted with torpedo netting! Jane finds herself in the most embarrassing
situations, while dressing in the morning, from the unwelcome pertinacity
of the merchants who swarm up the river in the early hours from their
lairs, and lay themselves alongside the helpless house-boats.

By 10 A.M. we have to repel boarders in all directions. Mr. Sami Joo is
endeavouring to sell boots from the bow, while Guffar Ali is pressing
embroidery on our acceptance from the stern. Ali Jan is in a boat full of
carved-wood rubbish on the starboard side, while Samad Shah, Sabhana, and
half-a-dozen other robbers line the river bank opposite our port windows
and clamour for custom. A powerful garden-hose of considerable calibre
might be useful, but for the present I have given Sabz Ali orders to rig
out long poles, which will prevent the enemy from so easily getting to
close quarters.

_June_ 17.--It is quite curious that it should be so difficult to find
time to keep up this journal. Mark Twain, in that best of burlesques, _The
Innocents Abroad_ affirms, if I remember rightly, that you could not
condemn your worst enemy to greater suffering than to bind him down to
keep an accurate diary for a year.

It is the inexorable necessity for writing day by day one's impressions
that becomes so trying; and yet it must be done daily if it is to be done
at all, for the only virtue I can attain to in writing is truth; and
impressions from memory, like sketches from memory, are of no value from
the hand of any but a master.

The time set apart for diary-writing is the hour which properly intervenes
between chota hasri and the announcement of my bath; but, somehow, there
never seems to be very much time. Either the early tea is late or bath is
early, or a shikar expedition, with a grass slipper in pursuit of flies,
takes up the precious moments, and so the business of the day gets all
behindhand.

The fly question is becoming serious. Personally, I do not