Nomad's Land by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Author:Mary Roberts Rinehart [Roberts Rinehart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4623-6
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-09-11T00:47:00+00:00

CHAPTER VI

LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON we reached Bagdad. We had crossed the Euphrates on its pontoon bridge, had Arab tea and broiled meat cakes cooked on a charcoal grill in the open street of Felluja, at the end of the bridge, and at last the golden domes and minarets of the Mosque at Kadhimain came into view.

Bagdad!

Apparently millions of palm trees; a road congested with traffic of all sorts; a bridge toll-keeper at a table beside the road, the toll paid in Indian money, for we were in the land of the rupee now; then the pontoon bridge itself, and under it the Tigris—that was our first view of Bagdad.

We drove down the main street, which British imagination running riot has named New Street, turned into a dirty court-yard, stiffly got out of the Panhard, left our luggage for the customs officers, and started for our hotel.

I wanted a hot tub bath; in fact, during the entire time I was in Bagdad I wanted a hot tub bath. For I never got it.

In the early days of the British occupancy the Bagdadi who owns Maude’s Hotel had, in a burst of enthusiasm, put in two bathrooms. But he is an Oriental, and so the only bursts which have lasted are the bursts in his pipes. On the one occasion when I made a really determined effort to brave the flooded floor, the dirt and the odors of a bathroom opening off the court-yard, I walked in on a British officer in puris naturalibus, and was compelled to retreat hastily.

Maude’s Hotel! I think about it sometimes, its untidy dining room, with sparrows stealing the food from the tables and the crumbs from under one’s very feet; with the dishes being washed on the floor of the court-yard in filthy greasy water; with the refuse, when the British Sanitary officer’s back is turned, thrown out to decay on the river bank under our windows; with its hard cotton pillows, which were not pillows in our sense of the word at all, but head-rests of some sort of lumpy felt; and its menu, before me as I write, of greasy “soup, mixed grilled, onion and boiled potatoes, Irish stew and vermicelli pudding.”

Heat, smells, flies and mosquitoes came indiscriminately through our open windows. An untidy servant waited on us during the day and at night, poor wretch, lay down on the bare boards outside our door to sleep. Two high flights of outside wooden stairs led from the court-yard to our bedroom, and to reach them from the street we traversed another court-yard, went down steep stone steps past the bar, up more and steeper steps into the rear court, and then began to climb again.

And the room, when we reached it, was certainly not worth the effort.

If, as some British writer has recently said, agriculture and tourists are the only reliable futures of Mesopotamia, somebody should take mine host of Maude’s Hotel out and drown him in the Tigris.

But British writers are mostly very pessimistic about Bagdad, and indeed about all of Mesopotamia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.