"Well, let me see. Old Shammo has been acting as cook and guide around here for twenty-five years. He boasts that he conducted a funeral party down the Shat-El-Chebar and over to Me-Schwad twenty years ago. He may be lying about that, but I think for the price you offer he will stick to you. Then Moses is a daring fellow, whom you can rely upon. You ought to know him; he just came up on the boat with you. He has been to Africa, has he not? He will help you, as he speaks a little broken English. I think by what I can learn, he is the best fitted man in Bagdad for you. Alker his half-brother, will probably stick by you also. Tatus, the wealthy man's son, is anxious to learn about the south, and will probably go where Moses goes and stay where Moses stays. I think they are all Shea-Mohammedans, and while they are looked upon with suspicion they are in much less danger than you are. "You see, I have your passport signed and sealed by the Turkish authorities, so you must exhibit that continually, and if the Sheiks are not able to read one word of it they will recognize the quail tracks, and think it is an order from Constantinople for you and your escort to pass through. Then with our arrangements for Nim Burr's old solid-wood-wheeled stage and the six mounted police, you will get through to Babylon all right, that is if they do not lay down on you and make you pay them over again. I think if you furnish, as you seem to be doing, a quarter of mutton to each man for lunch, they will go through all right, for it cannot be more than thirty or forty miles to Babylon. "From Hille, which is built from the ruins of old Babylon, to Chuffel, with a good mounted squad, you will make it easily, for they will think you are rabbinical tourists to Burr's Nimrod and Ezekiel's tomb. "If you could be satisfied to visit Karbilla, where there is also a temple for the Mohammedan dead, you could probably run across the desert from Burr's Nimrod in safety, but if you approach the wealthy interior city called Me-Schwad or Nazzip, where the temple is, in which they claim Allah, the brother-in-law of Mohammet, was buried, you may find a decidedly warm reception and you may not--I do not know. I often thought I would like to go there myself. "You may think it strange, Mr. Richardson, that there is no map of that district, or statistics, or census of the inhabitants of so vast a country and city, which like the sphinx of the Nile, sits with its face to the broad valley before it and its back to the great desert, which is inhabited by roving Bedouins, who respect no law, pay no taxes, and love their horses more than they do their wives and children, but it is practically true.