H.M.S. MANTIS, ONE OF THE MONITORS ON THE TIGRIS.
Abadan is on an island and the pipe line crosses the water from the mainland. We could see it stretching away across the flat land into the darkness where the sky-line of the palm belt by the waterside was just visible. It is strange to reflect that all this scene of careless activity is dependent on those two pipes, each about 14 inches in diameter, connecting it with a point 150 miles away.
I came again in the morning to look at the works. They did not appear half so mysterious as when seen in the dark. The Tower of London had shrunk into quite a small buttressed building of brick and Nebuchadnezzar's Fiery Furnace dwindled considerably in size. The Medes and Persians, on the other hand, looked wilder and more "operatic" than at night. I think as a matter of fact they were Kurds.
It is a very simple style of get-up to imitate. For purposes of private theatricals I will tell you how to do it, in case you should find the stage direction, "Alarums and excursions. Enter the Medes and Persians."
Take a very tattered, colourless, and ill-fitting dressing gown, without a girdle and flopping about untidily. Wear long black curly hair to shoulder. Put plenty of grease on. Then knock handle off a round-bottomed saucepan, very sooty, and place on your head. Dirty your face and you might walk about Abadan without attracting notice.
I daresay if I knew something technical about the refining of oil I should not find these works so fascinating. There is always a glamour about a thing only half understood. Probably the retorts and boilers and all the apparatus here are of the very latest pattern, yet so strangely unlike modern machinery do they seem that I find myself wondering if I have gone back into some previous age and unearthed strange things of prehistoric antiquity. These solemn-looking turbaned Indians might be tending the first uncouth monsters of engineering—the antediluvians of machinery. These serried ranks of tall iron funnels, these rude furnaces fed by crawling snakes of piping, these roaring domes of fire might be crude steam engines evolved by Titans when the world was young.
