The Gates of Kut

ISBN: 9781330877364 出版年：2016 页码：345 Lindsay Russell Forgotten Books

Night, like a dark and bloated buzzard, was winging its way slowly and uneasily over Mesopotamia.In Kut-el-Amara, in that grim, tongue-shaped loop of the Tigris, the broken jumble of mud huts began to merge into strange, distorted shapes. The scraggy tamarinds and liquorice trees made a fretful murmuring. The stifled moans of the sick and the dying rose for a little space, faltered, and fell away again into silence.Thin, skeleton fingers plucked aimlessly at the sand, and voices murmured and muttered deliriously of the white cliffs of Dover, of England and home, of London - gay, laughing, lamp-jewelled London, dancing down the roads of the world.Towards the great marshes, stern and sinister in the growing darkness, isolated flares of light betokened the Turkish lines of investment and the redoubts of the enemy.North, south, east and west they were merging into a circle, slowly narrowing, ever creeping closer.