Of its former magnificence and splendour nothing remained in Baghdad. … The immense heat impressed its sign on every appearance and made all movement sluggish. The people walked slowly through the streets. They seemed to be of heavy blood, without gaiety and without grace. Their faces looked somber and unfriendly from under black-and-white headcloths …
...
But a great strength was apparent in these men; the strength of hatred – hatred of the foreign power that denied them their freedom. The people of Baghdad had always been obsessed by longing for freedom as by a demon. Perhaps it was this demon which so somberly overshadowed their faces. Perhaps these faces wore quite a different look when they met with their own kin in the narrow side lanes and walled courtyards of the town. For, if you looked more closely at them, they were not entirely without charm. They would occasionally laugh as other Arabs did. They would sometimes, like other Arabs, trail the trains of their cloaks with aristocratic nonchalance in the dust behind them, as if they were walking over the tessellated floors of marble palaces. They let their women stroll over the streets in colourful brocade wraps: precious, veiled women in black-and-red, blue-silver and Bordeaux-red – groups of brocaded figures gliding slowly by on noiseless feet … [ellipsis in original]
...
A few weeks after my arrival in Baghdad, as I was strolling through the Great Bazaar, a shout reverberated from one of the dusky, barrel-roofed passageways. From around a corner a man raced by; then another, and a third; and the people in the bazaar started to run as if gripped by a terror of which they, but not I, knew the reason. … From far away, somewhere deep in the bazaar, came the muffled roar of many voices. Again something whizzed and whined, and this time there was no possibility of mistaking it: it was a bullet … [ellipsis in original] In the distance a faint, rattling sound, as if somebody were scattering dry peas over a hard floor. It slowly approached and grew in volume, that regular, repeated rattling: and then I recognized it: machine guns … [ellipsis in original]
...
Once again, as so many times before, Baghdad had risen in revolt. On the preceding day, the twenty-ninth of May, 1924, the Iraqi parliament had ratified, much against the popular will, a Treaty of Friendship with Great Britain; and now a nation in despair was trying to defend itself against the friendship of a great European power … [ellipsis in original]