“But what a game it is going to be, this fight for the old Garden of Eden,--with the high-banked canals and the crumbling walls of Babylon and Hitt serving for trenches and forts, and the _khans_ which sheltered Ali Baba and Haroun-al-Raschid as outposts! Why, the ‘G.C.C.’ and I have even discussed how we are going to use that isolated old _tepe_ of Birs Nimrud--which some call the ‘Tower of Babel’--when the time comes! “Our transport for the new campaign will probably be the most remarkable thing of the kind ever assembled. The fact that the country into which we are advancing will be largely under water will compel us to become practically amphibious. On land we are using camels, horses, mules, and donkeys, while on the water the services of everything, from the native _balems_, _gufas_, and _kaleks_ to shallow-draught gunboats and river-steamers, will be in demand. The old Bagdad side-wheelers have all been converted into gunboats, but even their slight draught of five or six feet is too great for all but the main river-channels. One of these, by the way, went into action the other day with an armour improvised from mats of dried dates. Of course the Turkish shrapnel made an awful mess of it, and, I am sorry to say, also of the chaps behind it. “The direction of the training of our men in the use of the native watercraft has been one of my recent duties. The _balem_ is a gondola-like sort of boat which has long been used for passenger transport on the canals and rivers of this region. It may be rowed, sculled, or paddled, and since it is of fairly stable equilibrium, the men are not long in mastering it. The _gufa_, however, is quite another matter. It is a slightly flattened ball of woven reeds covered with pitch, having a hole from five to ten feet across at the top to receive passengers and freight. It is propelled by paddling, now on one side, now on the other, and two or three old hands can make very fair progress with it. A novice, however, can do little more than make the thing spin on its own axis. Moreover, he invariably renders himself still more helpless by laughing at his own uselessness; and although some of the more serious-minded Sepoys have made considerable progress in handling the _gufa_, I am afraid we shall never be able to make Thomas Atkins, or his equally frivolous comrade-in-arms, the Ghurka, take it as other than a perpetual joke.