mysterious. At night it appears as a vast plain gleaming with lights and studded with dark objects, half seen and suggesting primitive machinery of uncouth proportions. Huge lengths of pipes creep from the shadows on one hand into the far-off regions of blackness on the other.
Armed with an electric torch, which the Chief carried, and a large sketch-book which I regretted taking almost as soon as we started, we set out on our quest of Dantesque scenery. At first our road ran along the quays by the river side. A camouflaged Admiralty oiler was loading fuel oil by means of three pipes that looked like the tentacles of an octopus clutching on to the side of the ship. Near this quay was a gate, and we entered the wire fence that surrounds the works and the area of the tanks and struck out over a dark waste.
The novice who roams about this place in the dark spends a lot of time falling over pipes. They are stretching all over the place without any method that is apparent. The Chief showed up most of them with his torch, and so I fell about only just enough to get used to the feel of the ground as a preliminary to what was coming later. It had rained heavily two or three days before, consequently there were lake districts, slimy reaches of mixed oil and mud and dried, hard-looking islands that were in reality traps to the unwary. The top only was firm, and it had the playful property of sliding rapidly on the greasy substratum and thus sitting you down without warning when you thought you had reached dry land.
Had I known more about Abadan before I started I would have taken a course of lessons in tight-rope walking, for that seems to be a great asset in getting along. The Chief was quite a Blondin. He could walk or run any length of pipe and never swerve. Much practice had made him an adept. There were places where the only alternative to walking in mud and water was this balancing feat along the pipe lines.
When I had fallen several times and covered myself with a mixture that looked like grey condensed milk mixed with butter and felt like a poultice, I got my second wind. I was still recognizable as a human being. All fear of making myself in a worse mess had vanished, and thus, freed from nervousness, I began to get quite daring. The Chief saw in me the making of a first-class pipe walker, and prophesied that I should be able to attain the speed of three miles an hour. I still fell off, however, enough not to get a swelled head on the subject.
After what to me seemed miles, and which as a matter of fact must have been about five hundred yards, we emerged from the lake region and were able to find a track along the ground. It skirted a railway line and led toward some buildings and machinery. A dull glow began to illuminate the scene and show up our path.
A building loomed up against the sky. It was dimly lit by firelight and suggested to me a glimpse of the Tower of London with the corner turrets knocked off. In front of this were some vast boilers with uncouth chimneys stretching out of sight into the dark sky. The whole thing, weird and eerie, was reflected in pools of water, through which black figures toiled and splashed, pushing some loaded trollies. Then we came out into a lighted area at the foot of a mysterious-looking furnace tower, where strangely clad men, not unlike tattered and disreputable monks, were hauling at a great black object, some boiler or piece of machinery.
The workmen on closer view showed that they were dressed in sacking or some such rough material in a sort of tunic. They wore long curly hair and curious hats that looked like Assyrian helmets.
"What race are these men?" I asked the Chief.
"They are the Medes and Persians," he replied.
"And what is that tower?"
"Oh, that—," he paused for a few seconds, "that's Nebuchadnezzar's Fiery Furnace heated seven times hotter."
He was evidently determined to do me well from the point of view of local colour and picturesque Biblical association. I think, however, he missed a chance when later on we saw mysterious writing in Arabic characters upon the wall of an engine house. He should at least have read it out as mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
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.
II
THE VENICE OF THE EAST.
