A detailed account of our many wanderings would spoil the perspective of this diary. We went on through the nights and through the days; through dust-storms and heat, by night passing the fires of Arabs who awaited the stragglers, sometimes camping by Bedouin tents or pebbly water-courses, always following the trail of dead, for every mile or so one saw mounds of our dead soldiers by the wayside. We left Hammamali, a village of sulphur-baths, on the 14th June, and stumbling over rocky ground for some hours we reached far-famed Mosul, and with great delight saw again a few trees. Then appeared the mounds of Nineveh and the mounds of the palace of the great King Sardanapalus. But even the shades of Sargon, Shalmaneser and Sennacherib scarcely interested us. In the foreground we saw a great tomb which we were told was John the Baptist's! And Alexander's great battlefield of Arbela lay on the eastern plain. The impression of life in Mosul is bad. We have some rooms in an appalling dirty barracks among gangs of Kurds in chains. Every day or so one of these is hung. Down below in the basement our men are dying wholesale. They are the survivors of previous columns. We have been compulsory guests of a Turkish officers' club. They charged us three times as much as the town did, and generally neglected us. General Melliss, however, told us to-day to go to the town. We quoted his high authority freely and went to a most excellent little Italian restaurant. The proprietor was from Naples, and we had some conversation of his old haunts. He did us very well and quite reasonably, actually cashing a cheque or two for us. _Nisibin, June 26th._--After many false rumours of wagons and carts for transport and the usual half-dozen false starts we left Mosul on June 20th. Early in the morning before starting I slipped out in the confusion of preparing the columns and did the round of Mosul absolutely unattended. With the little Turkish I had picked up and French here and there, I visited the bank quarter to try to raise some money by cheque. There was no chance of this, but I succeeded in changing the notes I had for smaller. The notes were not accepted in the bazaar, and one was charged for paper change. I had not the fortune of meeting one likely person or I should not have returned, but to attempt to escape without help in such a place with the desert all around was too hopeless. I saw merely bazaar and squabbling Arabs.