The river is broad and majestic, and strange craft dot its surface. Here is a Kufa, in itself a link with antiquity, a circular boat of basketware covered with bitumen, sometimes big enough to hold ten men and two or three laden donkeys. Its cross-river course is decidedly eccentric. Propelled by crudely fashioned paddles wielded by sturdy oarsmen, its progress from shore to shore is leisurely and cumbersome as, caught into the eddying current, it twirls slowly, with a rotatory movement, like the dying motion of some giant spinning-top. The cheerful Thomas Atkins promptly christened the kufa "Noah's Dinghy," and lost no time in getting afloat therein. Some of the Australians at Hinaida Camp organized a kufa regatta, the course being across river and back, a distance of about two miles. A waterproof sheet was attached as a sail {51} by one enterprising Anzac, but even that did not help to accelerate very appreciably the snail-like progress of his aquatic tub. Local tradition avers that Sinbad the Sailor came spinning down from Bagdad to Basra in a kufa, when he signed on at the Gulf port for his first ocean voyage. Who knows? Kufas are depicted on some of the old Assyrian monuments. A close relative surely to the Kufa is the Kellik or Mussik raft of the upper Tigris. Constructed of a square framework of wood buoyed by inflated goat-skins, it is widely utilized as a cargo carrier on these inland waterways. Piled high with hay and a miscellaneous collection of live-stock, it will waddle off down river with a crew of three or four, and half a dozen or so passengers. Sometimes the cargo shifts, or the goat-skin bladders become deflated, and the kellik, down by the nose or stern, grows more unwieldy than ever. A little mishap of this kind never bothers the crew. They steer for some convenient point on the river-bank where the water is shallow, unhitch the defective skins, and inflate them afresh with the unaided power of their own lungs. The cargo righted, and the trim of their cumbersome raft restored, they will push off into midstream and continue their venturesome journey, logging a steady two knots. But on an upstream trip it is another story. Then the laden or empty kellik has to be towed, and hard work it is to make headway when the river is in {52} flood and racing down to meet its brother, the Euphrates, on their joint way to the Gulf.