A Dweller in Mesopotamia / Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden

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s it goes. It is possible, however, to picture a land entirely different from Mesopotamia and still stick to this description. I have met countless men out there who have told m

es and Medway saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every direction-this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the riverside country between Basra and Amara. No blue, limpid waters by Baghdad's shrines of fretted gold, but pea-soup or café au

wcomers. When I was told that the railway did not go any further than Amara, I lightheartedly pictured myself making my way across the river in a goufa or bellam and scorned the suggestio

ion, but the traces of ancient irrigation systems, to say nothing of buried cities

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and the waste places become inhabited. But the difficulties, which are many-finance being, perhaps, the least of them-arise on all sides, when a study of the subject goes a li

th are exceedingly beautiful, and here one can get a glimpse of the fertility that must have belonged to Mesopotamia when it was a network of streams and when the forests abounded within its bor

k of watering the country is extending. Hardly any tree but the palm is found, yet this is only for want of plant

the desert blossom as the rose, but that of causing the waste places to be inhabited. What the Babylonians with slave labour could do, modern machinery and science can quite easily achieve; but the difficulty of finding sufficient people to live in this resuscitated Eden w

WATER

bells. I have sketched the effect on page 98, and incidentally show a bellam in which an old Arab is pushing his way through the overhanging shrubs. On page page 105 is a goufa, a type of round wicker boat in vogue two thousand six hundred years ago and still in use. Talk about standardization: here is a craft standardized before the days of Sennacherib! Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum show this boat in use exactly as it i

g colour-a sort of milky blue-grey-somewhere between the colour of an elephant and an old lead vase. It satisfies that craving for mystery which

sed by traces of old rubble weirs. Consequently any kind of craft which drew more than a few inches would be always in trouble. These rafts, made of light saplings lashed together, are rendered buoyant by bein

e sun, and they row with huge paddles. This rowing is sufficient to keep some sort of steering way

d together with the cargo on its arrival at its destination. The crew procee

and imagination, those two artists of never-failing skill, leave out of the picture all dust and squalor-and insects! Yet to those who are sojourning by the Waters of Babylon or resting in sight of the golden towers of

t, blooming a

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will probably be still running in ten years' time. It is a play which has become almost a symbol of Eastern romance. In Mesopotamia I observed that it was a standard of c

ortunist affair, with no notice in advance to allow for advance booking, and so I never succeeded in my quest of the glamour of the East-on the stage. But war, which

he state of things on a busy morning. By day there is so much more rubbish and dirt to take the romance away from the picturesque, but at night, especia

ILLY ON T

been a disused mosque. The minarets are shorn of their tops, and look like huge candlest

eries skirting the river, the quaint, squat minaret appearing over the flat roofs, and the dim light of lamps reflected in the still water made a picture at twili

of fire, but it was extraordinarily effective, and it made

nce, here is another scene on t

of leaden-coloured even," save where the misty blue ridge of the Persian mountains links heaven to earth, gleaming with a ghostly chain of snow beneath a rose-flushed sky. A few marsh Ara

it would seem from our Western world of a hundred years ago, moving slowly across the crowded stage of modern war's