Mesopotamian summer weeks in the future—the upland valleys of the Jebel Hamrin still bloom like a garden, their fragrance riding down the wind even past Deli Abbas far out on the desert, already parched and burning under the ardent sun.
The country was such as would have delighted the eye of the scenic painter: the long, serrated ridges of crumbling sandstone, the broad swales, the grass- and flower-grown valleys between the bold, upstanding cliffs, and an occasional flaring patch of scarlet poppies giving a touch of color to their towering drabness.
At their right, its spidery legs asprawl on the rock, the steel ferrules firmly wedged in a natural fissure, and two holes drilled for them, the tripod of a signaler's glass was standing, the telescope pointed through the break in the escarpment four miles away, where the Mosul road debouched from the hills, meandered across the desert to Deli Abbas; and, crossing the Khalis, straggled on through Baqubah to Baghdad, sixty miles away.
The smallest of the three had the air of one intently watching, his hands clasped about his bare knees, the iron heelplates of his heavy ammunition boots braced in a jagged crack of the rock. The other seated figure, his face shaded by the peak of his topee, was setting down, letter
