the lack of fresh water; and, topping everything else, there was the climate! An efficient naval base could never be maintained by any northern nation in this Gehenna. At length we reached Kishm Island, and, with it, the end of the survey came in sight. Kishm occupies 8 strong strategic position, exactly facing the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf. It is a mountainous island, sixty miles in length, separated from the Persian coast by a long narrow channel, named "Clarence Strait" (after good King William IV.) There are three towns on it-Kishm, on the eastern extreme, which gives the island its name; Laft, on the northern side; and Basidu, on the western end. It was to the latter spot that we directed our weary steps; and, on our arrival, had the satisfaction of seeing the Union flag run up on the flagstaff of the village-for Basidu is British! It has been so since 1809, after what cannot have been ether than a hot engagement. Laft was "reduced" at the same time, but it was left at that; while Basidu became the sanatorium of the Gulf for our ships' companies, and there was also maintained there a garrison of Indian troops. The hospital and barracks, long disused, are ruins; and there is now only a small village of ninety men, who, with an old Arab, our faithful Agent, represent the colony, and are established on an area, scarcely as much as one mile square, of bare and brown, but British soil. When Kemp visited the Agent he heard from him that, not long before, the Russian Consul for the Gulf had arrived in his small sailing dhow, on a tour of the coast. On his arrival there was immediately hoisted on the flagstaff the Union flag of Britain. The Consul, a little man but a fierce, landed; and pointing to the flag, shook his fist at it, oursed it, and demanded to know why it had been hoisted, and for how many years it had been flying there. The Agent, himself an old man with a grey beard, replied that it had been flying ever since he could remember anything, but that there was a still older inhabitant who might know more. On being sent for, this ancient replied in like manner, that he could not remember any condition of affairs in Basidu other than the British supremacy and flag. The little visitor, it appears, then danced with rage (it was in January, and the temperature permitted, without great discomfort, this exhibition of the Russian ballet), and he called both of the old Arabs "liars." "Very well, then," says our Agent with high composure, "if you know better than we do, why do you ask us?" And with this firm reply a grave international crisis olosed. The Consul went back to his boat, simmering but thoughtful, and resumed his inspection of the coast. Having thus "made our number" at Basidu, we left, and first steamed along the south side of Kishm Island, visiting, as we did so, the small outlying islet of Henjam at its south-eastern end. Then, after passing the crumbling ruins of the old Portuguese fort at Kishm town, on the east of the island, we rounded into Clarence Strait and anchored off Laft. In 1622 we sent five ships-or the Honourable East India Company sent them-to assist the Persian forces in besieging the Portuguese at Kishm. The Persians, it seems, wanted their island back, and we wanted the Portuguese trade. Hence the alliance. Both of us got what we wanted, though in doing so we suffered an unexpected loss. William Baffin, the famous Elizabethan Arctic navigator of Baffin's Bay, was killed at the beginning of the siege of Kishm by a shot from the Portuguese castle. He certainly went in for extremes of olimate during his wanderings, and would have been better advised to have stuck to the icefields and the snow! Laft, the delightful seaside resort off which we now found ourselves, is a harbour completely enclosed, easily accessible, fairly deep for anchorage, strategically well-positioned, and defensible without diffieulty - yet, with all these virtues, it is, like Naaman the Syrian, "a leper." Not only is the fresh-water supply of the most exiguous character, but the position has the reputation a true one, for we tested it-of being the hottest place in the whole Persian Gulf, and that is to say, in the whole world. Not a breath of outside air, not even the Shamál, gets into it. We sat and dripped helplessly all day, completing a vicious circulation of moisture by pouring down inside us bottle after bottle of partly-cooled aerated waters, which panting Goanese stewards made haste to supply. One could do nothing else but drink, and without liquid one would have become as a desiccated fruit, dried-up, mummified. I have thus consumed, in a single day at Laft, as many as twelve large bottles of the most uninspiring "pop"; and this was well below the average official thirstiness of the Sphinx. When night-time came I reposed on a grass-mat laid on my chart-table on deck, olad in the absolute minimum of clothing-in bathing-drawers, to be exact for pyjamas about one were as abhorrent as a mattress beneath, while the temperature slowly rose, after nine o'clock, until it was well up in the hundreds by 2 A.M. The heat then steadied, and between 3 and 4 A.M. there was a blessed, blessed time when it really fell a few degrees. Then came untortured rest. But with the first crack of dawn, buzzing flies attended the death-bed of sleep, and galvanised their limp victim into sufficient activity to arise, don such raiment as might satisfy the conventions, and start off in a boat, armed with sextant and theodolite, for surveying work "in the field." The temperature then might be as low as 97°; but by 8 A.M. it would be well up in the hundreds once more, and, in order to avoid a heat-stroke, it was necessary to return on board the ship, to the shelter of treble awnings. Nothing could be done outside that proteotion until about six o'clock in the evening, when an hour might be snatched before darkness closed the scene. Laft could not therefore be considered as a possibility for a "naval base," in spite of its other decided advantages. It was late in June when we steamed back through Clarence Strait, and anohered at its eastern entrance off the town of Bandar Abbás, which stands on the mainland here, and is faced by that famous island, Hormuz. Basra at the head of the Gulf, and Hormuz at its mouth, are names to take you back, as on a Magio Carpet, accompanied by Sindbad the Sailor, to a sandal-scented and romantic past. Until the seventeenth eentury Hormuz was the Mart of the East, where all the riches of India met in exohange with the pearls of Bahrein, with the attars, the pungent gums, and spicery of Araby the Blest; with dyed garments from Basra, with silks and carved work, damascened weapons, and delicate filigree of silver and gold from Baghdad the Fortunate. Ichabod! The glory has departed, indeed! Not a vestige now remains of it all, save dry ruins, houses crumbled so small that the few poor fishermen who still oling to the place cannot utilise them as dwellings, but make for themselves rude wigwams of date-palm leaves. On a low point above the village is the battered but still threatening remnant of a fort built by Albuquerque, when, in September 1507, the Portuguese seized the place and its riches, and reduced its inhabitants to subjection, with no oircumstance omitted of audacity and oruelty. There the Portuguese remained, in complete lordship, until 1622, when, after a siege of three months, Hormuz fell, with Kishm, before John Company's ships, aided by a Persian force. Beside the ruined fort there are many ancient tanks, now empty and dry, out into the rooky heart of the island. In the days of its splendid youth, water for these reservoirs was brought off in skins by boat from the river Minab, ten miles away. There is no other moisture obtainable, save for a saline trickle from the hills after rain. The general appearance of the little island is very remarkable. It oonsists of a rounded lump of hills, with three or four central conical peaks, seven hundred feet high. The lower parts, all completely barren, are striped, and patohed, and barred with geological "dazzle - painting" in ochre and red, brown, purple, and buff, while the surmounting oones, in streng contrast, are pure white. The whole effect is that of some monstrous pudding, standing on the blueand-white plate of the sea, over whose apex has been poured (in pre-war days!) a large jug of thick cream. A telegram was waiting us at Bandar Abbás, which ordered us to Maskat, to await the next mail steamer, which was bringing written orders for further survey work required, before I four sides of a central courtshould leave for England. yard. You come into it We sailed at once, rounding through an archway at the Cape Masandam, the Arabian back, and find a broad flight gate post of the Gulf, where of stairs on the right hand, it is only twenty-five miles leading to the cool verandah across to the Persian shore. and living-rooms on the first The extremity of the point is floor, which thus are well a tattered peninsula of hills raised above the heat of the whose heart is penetrated by ground, and look widely forth deep volcanic fiords, the whole on the harbour. Mrs Resident being joined by a narrow neck was a lady whose kindness of to the mainland to the south- heart extended itself far past ward. On its barren slopes the plane of humanity, and there olings a settlement, said reached down, even, to our to be formed of the last distant and nasty little relremnants of the aboriginal atives, the Apes. She kept, inhabitants of Arabia, children in the courtyard of the Resiof Shem, undiluted by the denoy, a collection of the more restless Bedouin blood of Ish- highly-coloured of these creamael, the race now dominating tures. No Thames barge, the remainder of that highly brilliant in red, blue, and undesirable land. yellow, can display more startlingly effective bows, or a more originally conceived stern decoration than could these Simian guardians of the stairs; and no bargee ever had such a command of the language of exeoration as they. They gnashed their teeth, yearningly, at the unfortunate visitor; they leapt and danced at the full extent of their straining waist-chains, clucking and gibbering at him, or hideously shrieking battle, murder, and sudden death; they seized the hand-railmercifully a stout one, and they could only just reach itand shook it in impotent fury. In brief, they put the wind up you. By closely hugging the wall on the starboard hand, and not hauling to the wind again, until well past these dangers, it was, however, just possible to circumnavigate them; and the delightful wel It was refreshingly cool at Maskat, outside the Gulf limits, for the Monsoon had "broken." The gracious moisture and coolness which the Monsoon brings across the sea to India does not actually reach these deserts; but it affects the whole Indian ocean generally, so that every coastline bathed by its waters rejoices therein. The five days that followed at Maskat, while we waited for the mail, were pleasant enough. There was a good deal of back surveywork to be plotted and reports to be written, and the busy days on board the ship were usually ended by cheerful sundownings at the Residency, with tennis and tea. The Resideney was a house, however, to be approached with some circumspection, in spite of the hospitality of its inhabitants. It is built around the come that greeted the visitor to carry the tea things up that on the top landing made quite atrocious precipice. In my well worth the Passage Peril- cowardly and sympathising ous below. One day there was heart I could not blame him. to be a pionio, which (it was Not so Mrs Resident. With so arranged) was to take place high originality of method, on the top of the steep rocky and entire knowledge of crags that rose immediately human-and especially of behind the Residency, to a Arab-nature, she summoned height of about three hundred to the verandah her whole feet. There was no path, it household, there seemed to was real mountaineering, and be about twenty of them. involved stepping upwards, Selim was then ceremoniously nearly perpendicularly, from conducted to the largest and one dangerous and precarious grandest chair, while the refoothold to the next. It was mainder of the "boys" were supposed to be eooler up there directed to pass before him, than on the shady verandah, there enthroned, and to salaam, and in any case it was a deep and lowly, proffering rechange. Such pionies had spectful salutations to one who often taken place before, and had grown so great as even to special wooden trays, upon equal the Mem Sahib in the which to carry up the tea giving of orders-the very things, formed part of the Mem herself, upon whom the Residential equipment. No eyes of all, hitherto, had diminution was permitted in waited! It was great fun; the glory of the repast. and no strike was ever more effectively or good-humouredly broken. By the time the fourth reverential mooker had passed, Selim had had enough of it. He leapt from the chair, seized his tray of silver, and presently, with several others, his chamois - assistants, was sealing the difficult peaks, where presently we followed them, deeply impressed. It was set forth on the topmost orag as exquisitely as on the verandah; the silver, the linen, the delicate china-all had to be carried up by the "houseboys." No difference whatever was allowed, and they must have been jugglers of no mean attainments to have scaled these precipices, as they constantly did, carrying the heavy trays, without either smashing or spilling anything. When we, from the Sphinx, arrived that afternoon and had successfully evaded the raging monkeys, we were in time to witness an impressive seene and to learn a lesson in household management. It appeared that Selim, head house-boy, had struck! He had refused point-blank again The mail steamer came at last, and the orders she brought were for us to visit, and report on, Chahbar, a good-sized bay, 150 miles away on the Makran coast, opposite Maskatwhether Persian or Beluchi, it would be difficult to say. It was of strategic importance, and that was enough for us. We sailed immediately for that delectable spot, and spent |