Sajûr valley, which we reached near Chat. We had left the carriage track and now followed the windings of the Sajûr by a path narrow at best and none the better for the recent rains. A man on a donkey jogged along behind us, and I caught fragments of his conversation with Ḥâjj ’Alî. He asked the meaning of the word ḥurrîyeh (liberty), a question to which he received no very definite answer. He did not press the point, but remarked that for his part he knew nothing of the new government, but this he knew, that no one in these villages had done military service (I suppose on account of the exemption that was extended to all who dwelt upon the Sultan’s domains) and no one was written down “ ‘and el ḥukûmeh” (on the official register). He prayed God that this fortunate estate might not suffer change. In three hours from Manbij we reached Osherîyeh, turned a bit of rising ground and came in sight of the Euphrates, flowing beneath white cliffs. If I had been instructed in the proper ceremonies I should have wished to offer up a sacrifice or raise a bethel stone, but failing these I paid the only tribute that can be accorded in an ungracious age and photographed it. Ḥâjj ’Alî drew bridle and watched the proceeding.

“I see it for the first time,” said I apologetically.

“Eh yes,” he replied, “this is our Euphrates,” and he turned an indulgent eye upon the rolling waters that are charged with the history of the ancient world.

The path dropped down into the valley and ran under cliffs which are honeycombed with chambered caves, made, or at least deepened, by the hand of man. The water was low at this season, and where we joined the river it was divided into two arms by a long island. Half-an-hour further down the arms met, and lower still another little island, which is covered after the snows begin to melt in the northern mountains, was set in the wide stream. Here was the ferry (Fig. 15). A company of bedraggled camels and camel-drivers waited on the sands while the cumbrous boats were dragged up from the point to which they had been washed by the current. The ferrymen had been weatherbound at Tell Aḥmar, and the caravans had spent a weary two days by the river’s edge. They had eaten misery, sighed the camel-drivers; wallah, no bread they had had, no fire and no tobacco; but with the patient deference of the East they stood aside when the first boat came lumbering up and observed that the Consul Effendi had best cross while the air was still. We drove our horses into the ferry boat, and by a most unnautical process, connected with long poles, our craft was run ashore upon the island, over which we ploughed our way and found a second boat ready to take us across the smaller channel. We landed in Mesopotamia at the village of Tell Aḥmar, which takes its name from the high mound, washed by Euphrates, under which it lies (Fig. 16). Jûsef spread out my lunch on the top of the tell, and we watched the caravan embark from the opposite bank and were well pleased to have accomplished the momentous passage in good order, with all our eagles pointing the right way.

I lingered on the mound, making acquaintance with a world which was new to me, but immeasurably old to fame. The beautiful empty desert stretched away east and north and south, bathed in the soft splendour of the February sun, long gentle slopes and low bare hills, and the noble curves of the Euphrates bordering the waste. Near the river and scattered over the first two or three miles of country to the east of it, there are a number of isolated mounds which represent the site of very ancient settlements.[24] Of these Tell Aḥmar is by far the most important. The ridge of silted earth which marks the line of the walls encloses three sides of a parallelogram, the river itself defending the fourth side. Strewn about the village are several stone slabs carved in relief with Hittite figures; outside one of the gates in the east wall are the broken remains of a Hittite stela, and before the second more southerly gate lie two roughly carved lions with inscriptions of Shalmaneser II.[25] By the time I had finished lunch Ḥâjj ’Alî had selected a villager to serve me as guide to the wonders of Tell Aḥmar, and we set off together to inspect the written stones. My new friend’s name was Ibrahîm. As we ran down to Shalmaneser’s lions he confided to me that for some reason, wholly concealed from him, wallah, he was not beloved of the Ḳâimmaḳâm of Bumbuj, and added that he proposed to place himself under my protection, please God.

“Please God,” said I, wondering to what misdeeds I might, in the name of my vassal, stand committed.

The fragments of the Hittite stela were half buried in the ground, and I sent Ibrahîm to the village, bidding him collect men with picks and spades to dig them out. The monument had been a four-sided block of stone with rounded corners, covered on three sides with an inscription and on the fourth with a king in low relief standing upon a bull (Fig. 18). When we had disengaged the bull from the earth the villagers fell to discussing what kind of animal it was, and Ibrahîm took upon himself to pronounce it a pig. But Ḥâjj ’Alî, who had been tempted forth from the tents to view the antîca, intervened decisively in the debate.

“In the ancient days,” said he, “they made pictures of men and maidens, lions, horses, bulls and dogs; but they never made pictures of pigs.”

This statement was received deferentially by all, and Ibrahîm, with the fervour of the newly convinced, hastened to corroborate it.

“No, wallah! They never made pictures of pigs.”

The whole village turned out to help in the work of making moulds of the inscriptions, those who were not actively employed with brush and paste and paper sitting round in an attentive circle. There is little doing at Tell Aḥmar, and even the moulding of a Hittite inscription, which is not to the European an occupation fraught with interest, affords a welcome diversion—to say nothing of the prospect of earning a piastre if you wait long enough. But on the third day, wind and rain called a halt, and guided by the sheikh of the neighbouring village of Ḳubbeh I explored the river-bank. Half-an-hour below Tell Aḥmar, among some insignificant ruins, we found a small Hittite inscription cut on a bit of basalt, and close to it a block of limestone carved with a much effaced relief. A few minutes further to the east a lion’s head roughly worked in basalt lay upon a mound. The head is carved in the round, but we dug into the mound and uncovered a large block on which the legs were represented in relief. We rode on to Ḳubbeh, where the inhabitants are Arabic-speaking Kurds, and found in the graveyard the fragment of a Latin inscription in well-cut letters—

We left the hamlet of Ja’deh a little to the right, and an hour further down passed the village of Mughârah, beyond which the eastern ridge of high ground draws in towards the river. In a small valley, just before we reached the slopes of the hill, I saw the remains of some construction that looked like a bridge built of finely squared stones, and on the further side a graveyard with a couple of broken stone sarcophagi in it. The sheikh said that after rain he had found glass and gold rings here. He insisted on my inspecting some caves by the water’s edge where he was positive we should find writing, and I went reluctantly, for a series of disillusions has ended in destroying the romantic interest that once hung about caves. These were no better than I had expected, and the writing was a cross incised over one of the entrances. The rain had stopped and we rode on to the big mound of Ḳara Kazâk (Kiepert calls it Kyrk Kazâk), at the foot of which there is a considerable area covered with cut and moulded stones, and massive door-jambs still standing upright with half their height buried in the earth. I should say that it was the site of a town of the Byzantine period. When we returned to

camp Ibrahîm brought me two fragments of a large earthenware jar decorated round the top with a double line raised and notched in the clay (Fig. 19). In the band between were set alternately a head in high relief and a semi-circle of the notched clay. The heads were finely worked, the eyes rather prominent and the cheeks round and full—a type which recalled that of the stone heads carved upon the walls of the Parthian palace at Hatra. Whether it were Parthian or not, the jar was certainly pre-Mohammadan.

The night closed in cloudless and frosty, and I resolved to risk the caprices of the river and ride up next morning to Carchemish, for it is impossible to lie within half-a-day’s journey of a great capital and yet make no effort to see it. Before dawn we sent a messenger up the river and charged him to bring us a boat to a point above the camp, that we might land on the west bank of the Euphrates above its junction with the Sajûr, a river which we were told was difficult to cross. In half-an-hour Fattûḥ and I reached Tell el ’Abr (the Mound of the Ford), where there is a small village, and on going down to the river found, to our surprise, that the boat was there before us—but not ready; that would have been too much to expect. I left Fattûḥ to bale out the water with which it was filled and went off to inspect Tell el Kumluk, a quarter of an hour away if you gallop. Here there was no village, but only a large graveyard with broken columns used as tombstones. By the time I returned to the river the boat had been made more or less seaworthy, but a sharp little wind had risen, the swift current of the Euphrates was ruffled, and the boatmen shook their heads and doubted whether they would dare to cross. We did not leave the decision to them, but hurried the horses into the leaking craft and pushed off. The stream swept us down and the wind held us close to the east bank, but with much labour and frequent invocation of God and the Prophet we sidled across and ran aground on the opposite shore. Our troubles were not yet over, for our landing-place turned out to be a big island, and there was still an arm of the river before us. The stream had risen during the rain of the previous day and was racing angrily through the second channel, but we plunged in and, with the water swirling round the shoulders of our horses, succeeded in making the passage. We shook ourselves dry and turned our faces to Carchemish. The road under the bluffs by the river-side was impassable, and we climbed up a gorge into the rocky country that lies along the top of the cliff. At one point we saw a mass of ruins, door-jambs and squared stones, which Kiepert—I know not on what ground—calls Kloster Ruine. In that bare land we met a cheerful old man driving a donkey and carrying a rifle. “Whither going in peace?” said he. “To Carchemish,” we answered (only we called it Jerâblus), and I fell to considering how often the same question had met with the same answer when the stony path was full of people from the Tell Aḥmar city going up and down to learn the news of the capital and bring back word of the movements of Assyrian armies and the market price of corn. Fattûḥ, elated by the conquest of the river, bubbled over with talk, simple tales of his beloved Aleppo, of the ways of its inhabitants great and small, and of his many journeys to Killîz and ’Ain Tâb, Urfah, Diyârbekr, and Baghdâd.

“Your Excellency knows that I was the first man to take a carriage to Baghdâd, for there was no road then, but afterwards they made it. And as for my carriage, Zekîyeh has lined it inside and filled it with cushions, so that the gentry may lie at ease while I drive them. And have I told you how I got Zekîyeh?”

“No,” said I mendaciously; I have travelled with Fattûḥ before, and have not been left unaware of the episodes that led to his betrothal, but reminiscences that take the listener into the heart of Eastern life bear repetition. The lady of Fattûḥ’s choice was fourteen when he first set eyes on her; he went straight to her father and made a bid for her hand, but the girl was very fair and the father asked a larger dowry than Fattûḥ could give. “Fortunately,” continued Fattûḥ ingenuously, “he had an illness of the eyes, and I said to him: ‘There is in Aleppo a doctor who loves me, and will cure you for my sake.’ But he answered: ‘God give you wisdom! none can cure me save only God.’ And I mounted him in my carriage, and drove him to that doctor, and look you, he healed him so that he saw like a youth. Then he said, ‘There is none like Fattûḥ, and I will give him my daughter even without a dowry.’ So I bought her clothes and a gold chain and all that she desired, for I said, ‘She shall have nought but what I give her.’ And since we married I have given her gold ornaments and dresses of silk, and when we return from this journey I will take her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And indeed she loves me mightily, and I her,” said Fattûḥ, bringing his idyll to a satisfactory conclusion. I have seen Zekîyeh in all the bravery of her silk gowns and gold ornaments, and I do not think she has ever had cause to regret the day when Fattûḥ mounted her father in his carriage.

We rode fast, and in a couple of hours came down to the Euphrates again, and so over the low ground for another hour till we reached a tell by the river with a village close to it. This village and tell, as well as the large mound half-an-hour away to the north-west, and the farm near it, are all called Jerâblus,[26] and probably local tradition is right in drawing no distinction between the widely separated mounds, the whole area between them having been, in all likelihood, occupied by the houses and gardens of the Hittite capital. Until you come to Babylon there is no site on the Euphrates so imposing as the northern mound of Carchemish (Fig. 17). It was the acropolis, the strongly fortified dwelling-place of king and god. At its north-eastern end it rises to a high ridge enclosed on two sides in a majestic sweep of the river. From the top of this ridge you may see the middle parts of the strategic line drawn by the Euphrates from Samosata to Thapsacus, strung with battlefields whereon the claims of Europe and Asia were fought out; while to the west stretch the rich plains that gave wealth to Carchemish, to Europus, and to Hierapolis. They are now coming back into cultivation as the merchants of Aleppo acquire and till them, or enter into an agricultural partnership with their Arab proprietors, and if the Baghdâd railway is brought this way, as was confidently expected, the returns from them will be doubled or trebled in value. The northern mound is covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards, and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field from the high ridge to a breach that indicates the place of a gate in the southern face of the enclosing wall. A couple of carved Hittite slabs, uncovered during Henderson’s excavations and left exposed at the mercy of the weather, bear witness to the antiquity of the site. It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound.

Fattûḥ had ordered the boatmen to pull or punt the boat over to the west bank during our absence; the river was rising and the arm that we had crossed with difficulty in the morning might have been impassable by nightfall. The boat was surrounded when we arrived by every one in the district who happened to have business on the opposite bank, and recognized in our passage an unusually favourable opportunity for getting over for nothing. As soon as we had embarked, some twenty persons and four donkeys hustled in after us and were like to swamp us, but Fattûḥ rose up in anger and ejected half of them, pitching the lean and slender Arab peasants over the gunwales and into the water at haphazard until we judged the boat to be sufficiently lightened. Those who were allowed to remain earned their passage, for when we presently ran aground on the head of the island—as it was obvious to the most inexperienced eye that we must—they leapt out and wading waist high in the stream, pushed us off. So we galloped home beside the swiftly-flowing river, aglint with the sunset, and found the camp fire lighted and the cooking pots a-simmer, and Tell Aḥmar settling down to its evening meal and to rest.

CHAPTER II

TELL AḤMAR TO BUSEIRAH

Feb. 21—March 7

Our way next morning took us past Ḳubbeh to Mughârah, which we reached in three hours. Here we left the river and climbing the low, rocky hill to the east, found ourselves in a stony and thinly populated country bounded by another ridge of eastern hill. After twenty-five minutes’ riding we saw the hamlet of Ḳayyik Debû about half-a-mile to the left of the track, and in another quarter of an hour we reached a few deserted houses. Four hours from Tell Aḥmar

we pitched camp on the further bank of a small stream near the village of Serrîn, for I wished to examine two towers which stand upon the crest of a high ridge about half-an-hour to the east. They are called by the Arabs the Windmills, but in reality they are tower tombs. The more northerly, which is the best preserved, is 4·20 m. square and two storeys high (Fig. 20). The walls of the lower storey rise in solid masonry to a height of about six metres and are crowned by a plain course of projecting stones, which serves as cornice (Fig. 21). On the east and west sides, just below the cornice, there is a pair of gargoyles, much weathered. They represent the head and fore-quarters of lions. A little below the pair of heads on the west side is a Syriac inscription, dated in the year 385 of the Seleucid era, i. e. A.D. 74, which states that the tomb was built by one Manu for himself and his sons.[27] The second storey is decorated with fluted engaged columns, four on either side, the outer pair forming the angles. The bases of these columns rest upon a course of masonry adorned with three fasciæ: it is to be noted that the mouldings are not carried straight through to the angles, but are returned one within the other like the mouldings of a door lintel. The Ionic capitals carry a plain Ionic entablature consisting of an architrave with fasciæ, which are here taken through to the corners, a narrow frieze and a cyma of considerable projection. Probably the whole was surmounted by a stone pyramid. There are two burial chambers, one in each storey. The lower chamber can be entered by a door in the east wall which was originally closed by a large block of stone. The entrance to the upper chamber, high up in the east wall between the columns, was closed in the same fashion, and the block of porphyry which sealed it is still intact.[28] Pognon, who has given the best description and illustrations of the monument, mentions five other examples of tower tombs crowned with pyramids, one of them being the southern tower at Serrîn. The well-known tower tombs of Palmyra and the Ḥaurân are not capped by a pyramid, nor is the face of their walls broken at any point by engaged columns. I believe the type illustrated at Serrîn to be compounded of the simple tower tomb and the canopy, or cyborium, tomb.[29] The cyborium tomb exists in an infinite number of variations in Syria, in the mountain district near Birejik (whence M. Cumont has supplied me with four examples, three of them as yet unpublished[30]), in Asia Minor and in the African Tripoli. Sometimes the columns stand free,[31] sometimes they are engaged in the walls,[32] sometimes they are represented only by engaged angle piers,[33] sometimes by free standing angle piers,[34] and occasionally column and pier have dropped away and the plain wall alone remains,[35] but the pyramidal roof is an almost constant feature, which, even in the simplest of these tombs, recalls the original canopy type. In the hill side near the tower I noticed several rock-cut mausoleums, now half-choked with stones and earth, and the hill was no doubt the necropolis of a town lying in the low ground that stretches down to the modern village by the stream.[36] The second tower, of which only the south wall remains, is situated on the southern end of the ridge, half-an-hour’s ride from the first (Fig. 22). It differs slightly in detail from the other. In the lower storey a shallow engaged pier stands at either angle, while in the upper storey, in place of the porphyry block, there is an arched niche between the two central engaged columns. The fasciæ returned at the corners reappear, but the columns are not fluted. The hill top commands a wide view over country which appears to be entirely desert. My guide, who was a Christian from Aleppo, an agent of the Liquorice Trust for the Serrîn district, said that there was no settled population to the east of us, and that the few Arab encampments which were visible upon the rolling steppe were those of the Benî Sa’îd, a subdivision of the Benî Faḥl. As we sat in the sunshine under the tower, Jirjî related tales of his neighbours, the Arab sheikhs, for whom he entertained, as the townsman will, feelings that ranged between contempt and fear—contempt for their choice of a black tent in the desert as a dwelling-place, and fear inspired by the authority which they wielded from that humble abode. But chiefly his simple soul was exercised by the swift downfall of Ibrahîm Pasha, who for so many years had been, as the fancy prompted him, the scourge or the mighty protector of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia, a man with whom the government had to make terms, while the great tribes stood in awe of him and the lesser tribes fled at the whisper of his name. Jirjî, like many another, refused to believe that he was dead, and entertained us with wild surmises as to the manner of his possible return from the unknown refuge where he lay in hiding. “God knows he was a brave man,” said he. “Oh lady, do you see Ḳal’at en Nejm yonder?” And he pointed west, where across the Euphrates the walls and bastions of the fortress crowned the precipitous bank. “There he forded, he and eight hundred men with him, when he hastened back from Damascus to his own country, hearing that the government was against him. They swam the river with their horses and rested that night at Serrîn. But the Pasha was grave and silent: God’s mercy upon him, for he befriended us Christians.” Ḥâjj ’Alî shook his head. “He wrecked the world,” said he. “Praise God he is dead.” Somewhere between the two opinions lies the truth. I suspect that though the way in which his overthrow was accomplished left much to be desired, the Millî Kurds, of whom he was the chief, had gained under his bold leadership a pre-eminence in lawlessness which no government was justified in countenancing. But since he is dead, peace to his memory, for he knew no fear.

We could not see the river from Serrîn, but next morning I rode down to it and looked across to the splendid walls of Ḳal’at en Nejm. The castle, seated upon a rocky spur, encloses the steep slopes with its masonry until it seems like a massive buttress of the hill, as ageless and no less imperishable than the rock itself. We turned away from this stern ghost of ancient wars and rode from the Euphrates up a bare valley wherein we came upon a great cave, inhabited by a few Arabs. It contained three large chambers,

the opening of which had been fenced in by the latest inhabitants with screens made of rushes. Upon one of the walls I found a curious inscription written in characters not unlike those seen by Sachau in a cave near Urfah[37] (Fig. 23). The Arab women with their children in their arms clamoured round me, and I distributed among them what small coins I had with me, without satisfying the claims of all. One scolding wench ran after us up the valley vociferating her demand that ten paras should be given to her swaddled babe. We had not ridden far before Jûsef’s horse slipped and fell upon a smooth stone, dismounting his rider, who was at no time too certain of his seat. “Allah!” ejaculated Ḥâjj ’Alî; “it was the woman’s curse that brought him down.” But the malediction had missed fire, or perhaps it was only ten paras’ worth of damnation, for Jûsef and his horse scrambled up together unhurt. At the head of the valley we came out on to a green sward. The rains on this side of the river had been scanty and the grass had scarcely begun to grow, but already there were a few encampments of the Faḥl in sheltered places which later in the season would be set thick with the black tents of the ’Anazeh, who do not come down to the river until the rain pools are exhausted in their winter quarters. The thin blue smoke of the morning camp fires rose out of the hollows and my heart rose with it, for here was the life of the desert, in open spaces under the open sky, and when once you have known it, the eternal savage in your breast rejoices at the return to it. As we rode near the tents a man galloped up to us and begged for a pinch of tobacco. He was clothed in a ragged cotton shirt and a yet more ragged woollen cloak, but Ḥâjj ’Alî looked after him as he turned away and observed, “His mare is worth £200.”

In three hours from Serrîn we caught up the baggage animals at the last village we were to see until we reached Raḳḳah. Mas’ûdîyeh is its name. On a mound close to the river Oppenheim found three mosaic pavements, parts of which are still visible, but the most beautiful of the three has been almost destroyed and nothing remains of it but a simple geometrical border of diagonal intersecting lines.[38] Beyond Mas’ûdîyeh we crossed a long belt of sand, lying in a bend of the river; we left a small mound (Tell el Banât) a mile to the east, climbed a ridge of bare hill and dropped down into a wide stretch of grass country, empty, peaceful and most beautiful. It was enclosed in a semicircle of hills that stood back from the river, and from out of the midst of it rose an isolated peak known to the Arabs as Ḳuleib. This land is the home of the Weldeh tribe, and not far from the Euphrates we found a group of their tents pitched between green slopes and the broad reaches of sand which give the spot its name, Rumeileh, the Little Sands. It was the encampment of Sheikh Ṣallâl, and no sooner had we arrived than the sheikh’s son, Muḥammad, came out to bid us welcome and invite us to his father’s tent. The two zaptiehs and I took our places round the hearth while Muḥammad roasted and pounded the coffee beans, telling us the while of the movements of the great tribes, where Ḥâkim Beg of the ’Anazeh was lying, and where Ibn Hudhdhâl of the Amarât, and similar matters of absorbing interest. Sheikh Ṣallâl was in reduced circumstances by reason of a recent difference of opinion with the government. His brother had been enlisted as a soldier and had subsequently deserted, whereupon the government had seized Ṣallâl’s flocks and clapped the sheikh into gaol, and finally he had sold “the best mare left to us, wallah!” for £T37 and with the money procured his own release.

“Eh billah!” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, shaking his head over the confused tale in which, as is usual in these episodes, the wrongdoing seemed to be shared impartially by all concerned. “Such is the government!”

“And now, oh lady,” pursued the sheikh, “we have neither camels nor sheep, for the government has eaten all.”

“How do you live?” said I, looking round the circle of dark, bearded faces by the camp fire.

“God knows!” sighed the sheikh, and turning to Ḥâjj ’Alî he asked him what was this new government of which he heard, and liberty, what was that?

“Liberty?” said Ḥâjj ’Alî, evading the question; “how should there be liberty in these lands? Look you, they talk of liberty, but there is no change in the world. In Aleppo many men are murdered every week, and who knows what they are doing, those envoys whom we sent to Constantinople?”

In spite of his misfortunes Sheikh Ṣallâl designed to entertain me at dinner and had set aside for that purpose an ancient goat. My attention was attracted to it by the sound of bleating in the women’s quarters and I was just in time to save its life, expending myself, however, in protestations of gratitude. Muḥammad ibn Ṣallâl took me round the encampment before the light failed and pointed out the foundations of a number of stone-built houses. Behind my tents the summits of some grassy mounds were ringed round with circles of great stones, of the origin of which he knew nothing. I counted five of them; in the largest lay foundations of small rectangular chambers.

As we walked back to the tents Muḥammad said reproachfully:

“Oh lady, you have not laughed once, not when I showed you the ruins, nor when I told you the name of the hills.”

I hastened to amend my ways, and thus encouraged he enumerated a string of ruined sites in the neighbourhood and accepted an invitation to serve us as guide next morning. He prepared himself for the journey by slipping on four cartridge belts, one over the other, although our whole road lay in the Weldeh country, and the worst enemy we encountered was a raging wind which sent the Euphrates sands whirling about us and obscured the landscape near the river. In about an hour we climbed up on to the higher ground of the grass plain at a point called Shems ed Dîn, where among a heap of cut stones I found fragments of an entablature carved with dentils and palmettes. Perhaps the ruins were the remains of a tower tomb. At Tell eẓ Ẓâher, an hour further south, we saw heaps of unsquared building-stones. Above this site stood Sheikh Sîn, a steep hill which we ascended, but found no trace of construction on it. I sent my zaptieh down to stop the baggage and bid Fattûḥ camp at the mound of Munbayah near the river, and with Muḥammad turned inland to a hill called by him Jernîyeh, some five miles to the east. Muḥammad rode across the downs at a hand gallop in the teeth of the wind, and I behind him, too much buffeted by the storm to call a halt. The immediate reason for our haste, as I presently discovered, was a couple of pedlars from whom he desired to buy soap, a commodity of which he stood in great need. The two men were Turks; they greeted me with effusion as a fellow alien in those wastes, and at parting pressed upon me a handful of raisins with their blessings. We galloped on faster than before and arrived breathless at Jernîyeh which lifts its solitary head a hundred feet or more above the surrounding plain. On the summit are three large mounds into which the Arabs had dug and uncovered fine cut stones; I conjecture that there may have been here watch towers or tower tombs belonging to the town of which the ruins lie below, to the south of the hill. These ruins comprise a large low mound ringed round with a wall and a ditch, and a considerable area covered with remains of buildings made of unsquared stones. Occasionally the plan of house or court was marked out upon the grass and Muḥammad showed me several deep cisterns—altogether a very remarkable ruin field though it is not named on Kiepert’s map. On our way back to the river we climbed Tell el Ga’rah and found the foundations of a fort on the top of it. Here we picked up a much-weathered Byzantine coin and a quantity of sherds of glazed Arab pottery, blue and green and purple. Munbayah, where my tents were pitched—the Arabic name means only an elevated spot—has been conjectured to be the Bersiba of Ptolemy’s catalogue of place names. It is an irregularly-shaped double enclosure, resting on one side on the river (Fig. 25). The line of the walls is marked by high grass mounds, but here and there a bit of massive polygonal masonry, large stones laid without mortar, crops out of the soil. The outer enclosing wall is not continued along the north side, but ends in a heap of earth and stones which looks like the ruins of a tower or bastion. To the south there is a clearly-marked gate in the outer wall, corresponding with a narrower opening in the inner line of fortification; another gate leads out to the north, and facing the river there are traces of a broad water gate, protected on either side by a wall that drops down the slope towards the stream (Fig. 26). Twenty minutes further down the bank lies another mound, Tell Sheikh Ḥassan. There are vestiges of construction by the water’s edge between the two mounds, and south of Tell Sheikh Ḥassan the ground is broken by a large stretch of ruin mounds, among which I saw a rude capital. In another half-hour down stream, at ’Anâb, there is again an enclosure of grassy heaps strewn with stones. For a distance of about three miles, therefore, the left bank of the river would seem to have been inhabited and guarded, though possibly at different dates. Jernîyeh and Munbayah are by far the most interesting sites which I saw on the little-known stretch of the river between Tell Aḥmar and Ḳal’at Ja’bar; it is useless to conjecture in what way, if at all, they were connected with each other, but in both places I should like to clear away the earth and see what lies beneath.

If it had been possible to cross the Euphrates I would have examined the high tell of Sheikh ’Arûd which had been all day the fixed point for my compass, but though there was a boat to be had, the intolerable wind continued till nightfall and made the passage impracticable. The mental exasperation produced by wind when you are living and

trying to work out of doors, passes belief. The blast seizes you by the hand as you would hold your compass steady, dances jigs with your camera and elopes with your measuring tape, and when after an exhausting struggle you return vanquished to your tent, it is only to find your books and papers buried in sand. Moreover, commissariat arrangements were complicated by the interruption of communications with the opposite side of the river. Fortunately I had foreseen that there would be little food for man or beast on the left bank, where no travellers pass, and contrary to my habits had laid in a provision of tinned meats, for which we had reason to be thankful. The baggage animals were lightly loaded and could carry four days’ corn besides their packs; when this ran short Fattûḥ went foraging in every Arab encampment, but occasionally the horses were without their full allowance, for at this time of the year the Arabs themselves are very scantily supplied. We soon learnt to place no reliance on assurances, however emphatic, that the next sheikh down the river would be well furnished, and as our road led us into regions that had suffered more and more severely from the lack of rain, we gave up all hope of ekeing out our corn with the grass which never grew that year. The corn, too, became dearer, until at Baghdâd it touched famine prices. On the upper parts of the river there is no fuel and we carried charcoal for cooking purposes; but when the tamarisk bushes began to appear, about a day’s march north of Raḳḳah, the muleteers boiled their big rice pot over a fire of sticks and the zaptiehs warmed their hands in the sharp chill of the early morning at the heap of embers that had been kept alive all night. The zaptiehs are supposed to feed themselves, but except on the rare occasions when we were on a high road, they shared the meals of my servants. I would find them sitting in the dark round the steaming dish served up by Ḥâjj ’Amr, and with them the Arab who had been our guide that day, or one who had dropped in towards supper time to give us information of the road, or any aged person considered by Fattûḥ to be worthy of our hospitality. We held many a frugal feast

under the stars where the waters of the Euphrates roll through the wild.

During the next day’s ride we followed the course of the river closely, save where the grassy edge of the desert was separated from the water by a tract of sand and stones covered in time of flood, and therefore devoid of all trace of settled habitation. The tents of the Weldeh were scattered along the banks and occasionally a small bit of ground had been scratched with the plough and sown with corn. At one point we saw the white canvas tent of a man from Aleppo who was engaged in negotiating an amicable partnership with the Weldeh sheikhs. The majestic presence of the river in the midst of uncultivated lands, which, with the help of its waters, would need so little labour to make them productive, takes a singular hold on the imagination. I do not believe that the east bank has always been so thinly peopled, and though the present condition may date from very early times, it is probable that there was once a continuous belt of villages by the stream, their sites being still marked by mounds. Half-an-hour from ’Anâb we passed Tell Jifneh, with remains of buildings about it; in another hour and a half there were ruins at Ḥallâweh, and forty minutes further we came to a big mound called Tell Murraibet. From this point the grass lands retreated from the Euphrates, leaving place for a wide stretch of sand and scrub opposite Old Meskeneh. Kiepert marks two towers on some high ground to the east, but they must have fallen into ruin since Chesney’s survey, for I could not see them. Six hours from Bersiba we reached in heavy rain the tents of Sheikh Mabrûk and pitched our camp by his, so that we might find shelter for our horses under his wide roof. We were about opposite Dibseh, which was perhaps the famous ford of Thapsacus. Mabrûk told me that in summer, when the water is low, camels can cross the river just above Dibseh; at Meskeneh a ferry boat is to be had, but at no other point until you come to Raḳḳah.

Next morning a young man from the sheikh’s tent, cousin to Mabrûk (all the unmarried youths of the sheikh’s family are lodged in his great house of hair) rode with us to Ḳal’at Ja’bar. He told me of a ruin called Mudawwarah (the Circle), an hour and a half away to the east: it may represent one of Kiepert’s towers, but according to Ibrahîm’s account nothing is now to be seen but a heap of stones. We rode out of the camp with a troop of women and children driving donkeys into the hills, where they collect brushwood.

“Last year,” said my companion, “they dared not stray from the tents, lest the horsemen of Ibrahîm Pasha should attack them and seize the donkeys. Wallah! the children could not drive out the goats to pasture, and every man sat with his loaded rifle across his knees and watched for the coming of raiders. For indeed he took all, oh lady; he robbed rich and poor; he held up caravans and killed the solitary traveller.”

“Eh wah!” said the zaptieh, “and the soldiers of the government he killed also. He was sultan in the waste.”

“But now that he is gone,” continued Ibrahîm, “we are at rest. And as soon as we heard of his death we blessed the government, and all the men of the Weldeh rode out and seized the flocks that he had captured from us, and more besides. And behold, there they pasture by the river.” And he pointed to some sheep grazing under the care of a couple of small boys.

“Then all the desert is safe now?” said I.

“Praise God!” he answered, “for the ’Anazeh are our friends. We have no foes but the Shammar, and their lands are far from us.”

Before we reached Ḳal’at Ja’bar we galloped up into the low hills to see a rock-cut tomb. Through a hole in the ground we let ourselves down into a chamber 5·10 m. × 7·00 m., with nine arcosolia set round it, each containing from four to six loculi (Fig. 27). On one of the long sides there was a small rectangular niche between the arcosolia. Ibrahîm called the place Maḥall es Ṣafṣâf and assured me that it was the only cavern known to him in these hills. From here he took me down to a mound named Tell el Afrai, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the river. On the landward side