EGYPT TO THE PERSIAN GULF Afloat in an insect-house--Captain Kettle in command--Overcrowding and small-pox--The s.s. _Tower of Babel_--A shark scare--Koweit. Forty-eight hours after disembarking at Alexandria we were steaming down the Gulf of Suez on board a second transport bound for the Persian Gulf. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the vessel which brought us across the Mediterranean and the one that was now carrying us towards the portals of the Middle East. The latter was a decrepit steamer, indescribably filthy, which had been running in the China trade for a quarter of a century. Though favoured by the mildest of weather, the old tub groaned in every joint as she thumped her way down the Red Sea towards the Indian Ocean. Long overdue for the scrap-heap, when the war broke out she was turned into a transport, and thenceforth carried cargoes of British troops instead of Chinese coolies. Her decks and upper works were thickly encrusted with dirt, the careful hoarding of years; and a paint-brush had not touched her for generations. Her cabins were so many entomological museums where insect life {13} flourished. In the worm-eaten recesses of the woodwork lurked colonies of parasites gathered from every corner of the globe, fighting for the principle of self-determination of small nations. The bathroom door, held in place by a single rusty hinge, hung at a drunken angle, and the inflow pipe of the bath was choked with rust. At night, as you slept in your bunk, playful mice, by way of establishing friendly relations, would nibble at your big toe, and a whole family of cockroaches would attempt new long-distance-sprinting records up and down the bedclothes. The Captain of the ship was a sharp-featured ferret-eyed individual who sometimes wore a collar. No one knew his exact nationality, but he bore a tolerable resemblance to Cutcliffe Hyne's immortal "Captain Kettle." Indeed, he was said to cultivate this resemblance by every means in his power. He had a pointed, unshaven chin; he wore a much-faded uniform cap tilted over one ear. On the bridge you would see him with hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets and chewing a cigar. As master of a tramp, he had nosed his way into almost every port in both hemispheres. He had traded from China to Peru, and along the Pacific Coast of America. In his wanderings he had acquired a Yankee accent and a varied and picturesque polyglot vocabulary which, when the floodgates of his wrath were opened, he turned with telling effect upon his Lascar crew or his European officers. He was a man of moods and {14} strange oaths, a good seaman with a marked taste for poker and magazine literature of the cheap sensational kind.