After the sun had set we dined outside the tents, and afterwards reclined on our carpets to enjoy the cool balmy air of an Eastern night. We slept under the open sky, making our beds in the field. July had set in, and we were now in "the eye of the summer." My companions had been unable to resist its heat. One by one we dropped off with fever. The Doctor, after long suffering, had gone with Mr. Walpole to the cooler regions of the Kurdish hills, there to wait until the state of the excavations might enable me to join them. Mr. Cooper, too, had so much declined in health that I sent him to the convent of Mar Metti, on the summit of the Gebel Makloub. Mr. Hormuzd Rassam and myself struggled on the longest, but at length we also gave way. Fortunately our ague attacks did not coincide. We were prostrate alternate days, and were, therefore, able to take charge alternately of the works. By the 11th of July I had sent to Busrah the first collection of sculptures from Kouyunjik, and on that day, in the middle of the hot stage of fever, and half delirious, I left Mosul for the mountains. While necessarily absent, I determined to visit those parts of central Kurdistan not yet explored by European travellers, to devote some days to the examination of the ruins and cuneiform inscriptions in and near the city of Wan, and then to return to Mosul through the unexplored uplands to the south of the lake of Wan, and by such of the Nestorian valleys as I had not seen during my former journey in the mountains. I should then spend the hottest part of the summer in the cool regions of Kurdistan, and be again at Nineveh by September, when the heats begin to decline. As few European travellers can brave the perpendicular rays of an Assyrian sun, we struck our tents late in the afternoon, and got upon our horses at the foot of the mound of Kouyunjik as the sun went down. With me were Hormuzd, my old servants, and the faithful Bairakdar. Mr. Cooper was to join us on the following day, and we were to seek the Doctor and Mr. Walpole at Akra. Five hours' ride over the plain brought us to the small Turcoman village of Bir Hillan (the well of stone), which stands on the south-eastern spur of the Makloub hills. After two hours' rest we continued our journey, and crossed this spur before morning dawned. Leaving the Gebel Makloub, we descended into a broad plain, stretching from it to the first Kurdish range, and soon found ourselves on the banks of the Ghazir, here a clear sparkling stream clothed with tall oleanders, now bending under their rosy blossoms. We sought the shade of some spreading walnut-trees, during the heat of the day, near the small Kurdish village of Kaimawa.