Going upstream the kellik keeps as close in shore as possible. Two men in the boat keep her from going aground, while a couple of others yoke themselves to a towline and move along the margin of the stream much like the canal bargees in Holland. But on the Tigris there is no well-defined towing path, and the course resolves itself into a kind of zigzag cross-country obstacle race, and the agility and dexterity with which these muscular native rivermen harnessed to the towline of a heavily laden raft will negotiate sunken ground, canal ditches, tumble-down village walls, and a few other natural hazards on a stretch of Tigris' river-bank, is extraordinary to behold. The life of a galley slave in Carthage must have been a soft snap indeed compared with that of the dark-skinned toilers who tug at an up-river kellik under the full force of a Mesopotamian sun. Bagdad as a city takes us back to the horizon rim of the world's history. There still clings to it an air of musty antiquity and prehistoric dirt which the efforts of its new masters, the British, with pick-and-shovel sanitary science, and other new-fangled inventions of Western civilization, have not entirely eradicated. The beardless invaders from over the seas have sought to scrape clean its ancient bones, to straighten out the kink in its narrow, tortuous, and evil-smelling streets, and to let the light of day and a little wholesome fresh air penetrate into the {53} gloom and dampness of its rabbit-warren of a bazaar. Staid, solemn-looking citizens, with the green turban of Mecca enveloping their venerable heads, whose ancestors probably drifted in here when overland travel was resumed after the Flood, have looked on in pious horror while festering slum areas have been laid low by British pickaxes. These Hadjis, fervent believers in tradition, and uncompromising opponents of innovation, have caressed their beards thoughtfully when confronted with the new order of things, and come to the philosophic conclusion that, as Kipling has it, "Allah created the English mad, the maddest of all mankind."