During this time considerable activity prevailed throughout the Basra region. Near by, on Makina Plain, a vast flat expanse of bare earth beyond the shadow of the palm plantations, a perpetual dust arose. Transport columns, guns and troops were always on the move, and the camps grew in size until the whole place was dotted with white canvas and yellow matting huts. The skirling of the pipes, the beating of the drums, the sound of the bugle and the tramp of feet continually came from the road that ran along the bank opposite the hospital. Wagons rumbled over the wooden bridge, and the deep note of the incoming steamers reverberated over the groves. But a difficulty began to arise. All these incoming troops that were concentrating on the plain were new to the country. The heat was increasing rapidly. It had long passed the limits of the most intense English summer, and the mercury was now rising above 100 degrees in the shade. The sky was cloudless and brassy. The floods each day left great areas of damp, steamy marsh when the tidal river fell. Mosquitoes were beginning to fill the night with their thin screaming. Small, almost impalpable, colourless insects, whose bite is like a red hot wire and who can penetrate the meshes of an ordinary mosquito net with ease, began to infest the place. These were sand-flies. They are surely the most successfully maddening insect ever designed by the Lord of Flies. They give rise to a malady known as sand-fly fever, which is like influenza and drains the body of all vitality for many days. In addition to this, either the food, the water, the dust, or the day flies were spreading about a form of diarrhoea which rapidly turned into dysentery. The day flies were a swiftly growing army. Breeding grounds in the surrounding camps, in the horse lines, the bullock lines and native villages were numerous. They were nothing like the flies at Mudros when the whole roof of a tent at night might be uniformly black with them, and eating was in the nature of a free fight. A couple of hundred or so to each tent was perhaps the average, but they made rest a matter of difficulty. The Red Cross fortunately supplied us with instruments of fly destruction, and later on fly experts were sent out. [Illustration: THE HOSPITAL WASHING.]