Baghdad May 3 Dearest Father. It's mail day again - the days melt like snow in the sun. But it's just as well for I've been realizing this evening that if I weren't so very busy I should be very lonely. The only person here whom I feel to be a real friend is Mr Bullard of the Revenue Office, but I see very little of anyone in particular because we are all so much run off our feet. Today I was in the Office from 8.30 to 8 and had really scarcely anything to show for it by reasons of the masses of odds and ends that take up all the time - countless visitors, each with their own little job to settle and a letter or a memorandum to write about each - written with considerable doubt as to whether the person to whom it's addressed will ever find time to deal with it! However I feel things do get done sometimes and one has to plaster over the omissions with soft words. I can't write any of the interesting and preoccupying things so you must put up with small change. I spent a couple of hours yesterday before breakfasting inspecting an exquisite 14th century mosque and a tomb of the same date and seeing what repairs were immediately essential. The two learned men who dwelt in the respective mosques were my enthusiastic guides. I took the Revenue Commissioner with me, Mr Garbett. We must have a trained architect out as soon as possible. Fortunately Mr Storrs from Cairo (Sec. to the High Commissioner) is on his way up on a short visit - and Lord how I'm looking forward to seeing him. He'll give me a hand over getting out the man I want and over several other things. Did I tell you of the little shaikh who came in from the other side of Euphrates to bring me a horse. I had camped with his father at Ukhaidir [Ukhaydir] in 1911, and as soon as he heard I was here he sent his son with a present. I didn't take the horse but I responded to the kind thought with various little gifts and indeed I was much touched and pleased. Then there rolled up old Mustafa Pasha from Khanaqin, with whom I had stayed in 1911. He came to see Sir Percy, but he turned up next day to call on me too and we spent a cordial half hour together. As for my new friends in Baghdad, I can scarcely keep count of them all, and many of them are very interesting people. I had a delightful conversation with a shaikh of the Bani Tamim who came in to pay his respects. I observed that the B. Tamim were a very old stock - oh yes, said he, he knew all about that. They came up from Arabia just after the Moham. conquest - he was quite right - and they had relatives still in Najd [(Nejd)]. There came up, said he, not long ago, a man from Najd, he was the B. Tamim and he was searching for his own clan, for like all the old tribes they are much split up. He sought among the B. Tamim of the Persian frontier, and among those in the Jabal Hamrin [Hamrin, Jabal] and on the Tigris, and at last he came to my friend near Baghdad. And he was the very man for whom he looked - he knew him by their common camel brand, OI behind the right ear. But, concluded the shaikh, he was very much surprised to find that we were Shi'ahs, for down in Najd they are all Sunnis. - Isn't that a pretty tale.
The Bp of Nagpur (your friend) has reappeared and wants me personally to conduct him to Babylon, which I'm well qualified to do, I may say! I hope the plan will materialize. I would like to go back there, though it will make my heart ache a little. They were all so kind to me, the German excavators, and no war can put an end to the affectionate esteem in which I hold Koldewey.

We have not got nearly enough clerks and typists, so that one never seems to roll the stone finally to the top of the hill - it rolls back for want of mechanical appliances. I suppose it will all straighten in time, meanwhile it's laborious. Thank Heaven my house is finished so that I don't have to begin the day by interviewing carpenters and brick layers - it was the last straw! Still on the whole, in spite of the rush and scramble, it's so deeply interesting that one doesn't bother about a straw more or less. Goodbye my dearest parents. I'm your very affectionate daughter Gertrude

Please will Mother have sent to me by post 6 pairs of thin white thread stockings and the same of brown - rather dark brown.