"You bet," I said fretfully, "he will have a five-course dinner to-night, on a table with clean plates and knives for each course, and probably a camp-chair to sit on."
"Yes," said X, "and a looking-glass hung on the wall of his tent, and hot water and a clean towel."
And that's what a man calls roughing it!
CHAPTER XIII
THE CREED OF THE KORAN
We left Jezireh early next morning. The scenery was now much tamer; the banks of the river were low; stretches of conglomerate and red rocks were interspersed with grassy slopes. The river was no longer disturbed by rocks and rapids, and our two kalekjis had been replaced by a bright-faced youth who was going to take us single-handed as far as Mosul.
"Am not I a good kalekji?" he kept on saying to us, "see how quick I make the raft go. When you get to Mosul you will remember what a good kalekji I was," and, standing up on the raft, grasping the two oars, he would throw himself right backwards, causing the raft to shoot on through the sluggish stream. Then when we had got into a faster bit of current he would lean on his oars and roll up a cigarette, talking all the time.
"The ladies like me, do they not? They see I am a good kalekji. They surely like me better than their other kalekjis?"
Six rafts laden with merchandise had followed us from Jezireh, and one with a hut similar to ours, and flying the Turkish crescent, was conveying a Turkish Yuzbashi with his harem to Mosul. The women were shut inside the hut the whole time, and occasionally, when the rafts drifted alongside, we caught glimpses of them peering shyly at us through the little glazed window. Did they envy us, sitting boldly outside, unveiled, open to the stares of all this crowd? Or, knowing no other lot, did they merely regard us with astonished curiosity, these so-called women from a strange land, who dressed like women but went about like men?