"Mashallah," said the kalekjis.
"It is a pudding," said X, "a real pudding."
We all gazed at it for several moments in ecstatic excitement. I handed X a spoon and we each took a mouthful; then we looked at one another.
"It is a pudding," said X again.
It almost seemed as if she were trying to persuade herself of the fact against the dictates of reason. When we had finished, the men shared our spoons in turn; each one cautiously raised a spoonful and smelt it, then they swallowed it, very much as one remembers swallowing jam in the nursery when one knew there was a powder inside.
"Ehe" (Good), they said very deliberately, nodding their heads, and then, as they handed the spoon to their neighbour, "Inghiliz" they added. One felt that the first word was Turkish politeness; the second was a veiled warning to their brethren.
But on the whole it seemed a success; we had a sense of repletion; how often had we not swallowed bowls of rice and been only conscious of a great internal void.
The men carried our rugs outside and we stretched ourselves lazily out on the open end of the raft. I began to reflect upon Time and Destiny. No shadow of a cloud appeared to disturb the horizon, no obstruction in the river affected our steady onward course down the slow, wide stream; we took the current where it served, and so were not delayed in the shallows where the waters dallied about the banks; they in due course would arrive at their destination and pour themselves, unquestioning and unquestioned, into the oblivious sea. But what would Time, that unremitting, relentless current, do with us? Was it going to hurl us too into oblivion? Whatever it had to give was ours, and yet, because we could not stop it, we were not master of it. We could moor to the shore and let the river go on without us; the current did not wait for us, but we could pick it up again when we were ready for it and go on without loss; but in the current of Time, when we stay on one side and let the moments go past us, we have lost for ever what those moments had to give, and our arrival at our destination has not been delayed; it is so much the nearer.
"X," I said, "where do you think we are floating to?"
"Baghdad," said X.