Koweit, or Kuwet, is an important seaport on the Arabian side at the south-west angle of the Persian Gulf, about eighty miles due south of Basra, our port of destination. Kuwet is the diminutive form of Kut, a common term in Irak for a walled village, and the port lies in the south side of a bay twenty miles long and five miles wide. Seen through our glasses it did not seem a prepossessing place, for the bare stony desert stretched away for miles behind the town. Yet only by accident had it escaped greatness. In 1850 General Chesny, who knew these parts by heart, recommended it as the terminus of his proposed Euphrates Valley Railway; and, when the extension of the Anatolian Railway to Bagdad and the Gulf was mooted, Koweit was long regarded as a possible terminus. But the War altered all that, and it is doubtful now if Koweit, which lives by its sea commerce alone, will even achieve the distinction of becoming the terminal point of a branch line of the railway which is destined to link up two continents. {18} The Turks and Germans have long had their eyes open to the great possibilities of Koweit. The former in 1898 attempted a military occupation, but were warned off by the British, and abandoned their efforts to obtain a foothold in this commercial outpost of the Gulf, while the ruling Sheikh was sagacious enough to be aware of the danger of Turkish absorption, and to avert it by placing his dominions under the protection of Great Britain. The German-subsidized Hamburg-Amerika Line made an eleventh hour attempt to capture the trade of the Gulf, and in the months immediately preceding the War devoted special attention to Koweit and Basra trade, carrying freight at rates which must have meant a heavy financial loss. It was all part of the German Weltpolitik to oust us from these lucrative markets of the Middle East, and to secure for German shipping a monopoly of the Gulf carrying trade. With the German-controlled Bagdad Railway approaching completion, one shudders to realize what would have been our fate economically, if the sea-borne trade of Basra and Koweit had passed under the flag and into the hands of the enterprising Hun. Basra lies about eighty miles to the north of Koweit. It is here that the Shatt el Arab (literally the river of the Arabs, or, otherwise, the commingled Euphrates and Tigris) empties itself into the Persian Gulf. Vessels with a greater draught than nineteen feet cannot easily negotiate the bar. Our own transport was bound for Bombay, so it was with a feeling {19} of thankfulness that we quitted her for ever and were transferred to a British India liner, the _Erinrupy_, which since the beginning of the War has been used as a hospital ship. She was spick and span, and the general air of cleanliness was so marked after the filthy tub that had conveyed us from Suez that we trod her decks and ventured into her cabins with an air of apologetic timidity.