Western Bagdad, on the right bank of the Tigris, always recognizing and rendering a somewhat sullen obedience to the sway of the Turkish Sultan, is separated from Eastern Bagdad by much more than the deep waters of the river. Its inhabitants for the most part are Mohammedans of the Shi'ite sect, as opposed to the orthodox or Sunni creed of the Turks. The Shias may be described as Islamic dissenters, and their cult is the state religion of Persia. Ethnologically and politically they are closer akin to Iran than to Turkey, and their eyes are more frequently turned to Teheran than to Istambul. In Western Bagdad they have their own mosques, their own bazaars, and their own shrines, and lead lives more or less isolated from their Asiatic brethren on the opposite side of the river. During a visit to the famous Shi'ite mosque and shrine at Kazemain, a suburb of the Western City, I found that the people, while outwardly friendly and polite, were much more fanatical than the average Sunni Mussulman, and were inclined to resent any attempt on the part of a Giaour like myself to see the interior of their mosques and shrines. I had for companions General Byron and Lieutenant Akhbar, the latter a professing Shi'ite. We crossed by the new pontoon swing bridge which now connects the {56} two shores, superseding the old bridge of boats of Turkish days. The houses are huddled together, and are squat and meanly built, with the low encircling walls and roofed parapets of sun-dried mud so common to Persian villages. The streets are barely wide enough for two pedestrians to pass abreast, and are full of holes or covered with garbage. As for the inhabitants, they were miserably clad, and the few women whom we chanced to encounter in our path hastily stepped aside and, turning from us, made a furtive effort to veil themselves by covering the upper part of their faces with a dirty piece of rag produced from the voluminous folds of a sleeve-pocket. We did not tarry here very long. Quitting this waterside hamlet we drove three miles to Kazemain itself, passing en route the terminus of the Bagdad-Anatolian Railway, that great link of steel in the chain of German world-expansion the completion of which, under the existing concession, would have been commercially and economically fatal to us in Western Asia.