ABSTRACT
WHY, I wondered idly, had Haji Rikkan asked me to disembark at the little town
of Kumait, some fifty or sixty miles north of the marshes which were his usual beat? I should soon know, for the steamer on which I had come from Baghdad was bearing full-speed downstream on the top of a spring flood, and the clump of willows and solitary date-palm which mark Kumait were already in sight.
