Four hours from Kirkuk, whose gardens were visible as a dark line on the horizon, we passed a ruined caravanserai, which a native of Kirkuk, jogging along on an ass, assured me was the remains of a caravanserai built by Shah Abbas of Persia, some 300 years ago. Wheat was growing in some places along the roadside, but a swarm of small black locusts covered the road with their hopping millions, which were making havoc among the young stalks. Farther on, we were alarmed by the sight of some black tents, the abodes of nomads, and we were not reassured when two horsemen cantered up from behind a fold in the plain. They were Kurds in dress and appearance, but persisted in talking Arabic as they rode along, probably to conceal their dialect. Our suspicions of course at once made them Hamavands, and the one or two of us who possessed rifles slipped a cartridge in. But they either heard or saw a signal in the hills we had crossed, for leaving us suddenly they put their horses to a gallop, and soon disappeared among the hillocks. We were quite close to Kirkuk, where the roads, short and long, converged, and as we came to the junction, an Arab, who had come from Altun Keupri by the short route, told us that our horsemen were two of a gang which had looted a caravan that morning in the hills. It appeared that this band, an outlying one of the Hamavands, patrolled the long road one day, and the short one the next. Our luck had sent us along while they were engaged elsewhere. [Sidenote: ARRIVAL AT KIRKUK] Kirkuk, which lies at the end of this range, is invisible till nearly approached, for, forced by the necessity of getting near the water-supply, it has taken a position by the river-bed (which is dry half the year), and is quite hidden by the hillocks around, except from the east side, where the ground slopes gradually down to it. It possesses a mound, upon which part of the town is built, the remainder being round the south of its base. We entered an outlying village, passed between gardens to a huge barrack where the garrison is quartered, then by a line of coffee-houses full of idle, uniformed creatures, over a long stone bridge, and turning to the right, plunged into the gloom of a short arched bazaar of extraordinary height and width, and out again along a busy street to a clean, new caravanserai.