of mankind, before they too passed into its clutches. All along the east side of the palace stretches the Via Sacra, contracting at one point only its splendid width that it may pass through the gate that stands midway between the house of Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the goddess Ishtar. The Ishtar gate—its name is attested by a cuneiform inscription—is the most magnificent fragment that remains of all Nebuchadnezzar’s constructions. Four or five times did he fill up the Via Sacra and raise its level, and each time he built up the brick towers of the double gateway to correspond. The various levels of the pavements can now be seen on the sides of the excavation trench, while the towers, completely disclosed, rear their unbroken height in stupendous masses of solid masonry. They are decorated on every side with alternate rows of bulls and dragons cast in relief on the brick; the noble strength of the bulls, stepping out firmly with arched neck, contrasts with the slender ferocious grace of the dragons, and the two companies form a bodyguard worthy of the gate of kings and of gods (Fig. 105 and Fig. 106). Along the walls of the Via Sacra marched a procession of lions, fragments of which have been found and pieced together. They, too, were in relief, but covered with a fine enamel in which the colours were laid side by side without the intermission of cloissons. This art of enamelling is lost, and no modern workman has been able to imitate the lion frieze.

On the east side of the gate stands the little temple of Ishtar, raised on a high platform and commanding the city below. The temple is built of sun-baked brick, probably in accordance with hieratic tradition, which held to the ancient building material used in an age when the architects were unacquainted with the finer and more durable burnt brick. Small courts with side chambers lead into an inner holy of holies, where in a niche stood the symbol or effigy of the goddess. Behind the sanctuary there is a narrow blind passage where the priests could lurk behind the cult image and confound the common folk with mysterious sounds and hidden voices. The Via Sacra pursues from the gate its stately way, skirting along the edge of an immense open court that lay between the palace and the temple of the god Marduk, the patron divinity of Babylon. The mound in which the temple lies has not as yet been completely excavated, but a pit sunk in its centre has laid bare the walls of the entrance court. It will be no easy matter to continue the work here. The mound was thickly inhabited during the Greek and Parthian periods, and its upper levels consist chiefly of refuse-heaps. When the workmen cut down through them to reach the temple gate, the stench of the old rubbish-heaps, combined with the stifling heat of the pit, was so intolerable that their labours had to be interrupted for several days until a breeze arose and made it possible to continue them.

The excavations are carried on all through the summer heats, but the director, Professor Koldewey, was at the time of my visit paying a penalty for his tireless energy. He had been ill for some months owing to his exertions during the previous summer, and to my permanent loss I was unable to see him. I retain notwithstanding the most delightful memory of the days at Babylon, of the peace and the dignified simplicity of life in the house by the river, of the little garden in the courtyard where Badrî Bey, the delegate from the Constantinople museum, coaxed his roses into flower and his radishes into red and succulent root; of long and pleasant conversations with Mr. Buddensieg and Mr. Wetzel, wherein they poured out for me their knowledge of the forgotten things of the past; of quiet hours with books which they brought for me out of their library—and books were a luxury from which I had been cut off since I left Aleppo. When I rode out of an afternoon one of the zaptiehs of Babylon was detailed to accompany me. He knew the ruin-field well, having been the fortunate occupier of a post at the Expeditionshaus for several years. I would find him waiting in the palm-grove where my horses were stabled, alert, respectful and less ragged than his brothers in arms whose pay does not come to them through the hands of European excavators. One day I asked him to take me to the Greek theatre, wondering a little whether he would understand the request.

“Effendim,” he said, “you mean the place of Alexander.”

The great name fell strangely among the palm-trees, and from out of the horde of ghosts that people Babylon strode the Conqueror at the end of his course. So we rode to the place of Alexander, the theatre near the city wall, ruined almost beyond recognition, but preserving in the popular nomenclature the memory of the most brilliant figure in the history of the world.

And once the clouds gathered as we were riding through the palm-groves by the river. “Praise God!” said the zaptieh, “maybe we shall have rain.” He shouted the good tidings to a peasant who drove the oxen of a water-wheel: “Oh brother, rain, please God!” But it was dust that was heralded by the darkness, and as we hastened to the great mound of Bâbil the wind bore down upon us and the parched earth rose and enveloped us. We left our horses standing with downcast heads under the lee of the mound and picked our way up the sides between the trial trenches of the excavators. In a few moments the dust-storm swept past, and we saw the wide expanse that was Babylon, embraced by gleaming reaches of river and the circuit of mound and ditch which marks the line of the city wall.

“Effendim,” said the zaptieh, “yonder is Birs Nimrûd,” and he pointed to the south-west, where, in the heart of the desert, rose the huge outline of a temple pyramid, a zigurrat. Legend has given it a notable place in the story of our first forefathers: it was believed to be no other than the impious tower that witnessed the confusion of speech.

I heard at Babylon some hint of the state of unrest, bordering on revolution, into which the province of ’Iraḳ had fallen. The German excavators had been sucked into the outer edges of the whirlpool. Their workpeople, drawn from different tribes (they had relinquished nomad life, but the tribal system still held good among them), had caught the infection of hatred and turned from the excavation pits to the settling of ancient scores—so effectually that many a score had been settled for ever, and the debtor came back to his place in the trench no more. Most of the survivors had been clapped into gaol by a justly incensed civil authority, and what with death and the serving out of sentences, Professor Koldewey and his colleagues had suffered from a scarcity of labour. This was nothing, as I was to learn at Baghdâd, to the confusion that reigned in other parts of ’Iraḳ, and it was fortunate that I had no intention of going south from Babylon; at that time it would have been impossible.

On the way to Baghdâd I was resolved to visit Ctesiphon, but we were obliged to follow, during the first day’s journey, the Baghdâd road, re-traversing for some hours the line of our march from Museiyib. Ever since we had left Kebeisah the temperature had been exceedingly high, and from Babylon to Baghdâd we travelled through a heat wave very unusual at the beginning of April. The early morning was cool and pleasant, but by about ten o’clock the scorching sun became almost unbearable, even for people so well inured to heat as my servants and I. As long as we were moving, it was tempered by the breath of our progress, but if we stood still it burnt through our clothes like a flame. There was not a leaf or any green thing upon the plain, and the only diversion in a monotonous ride was caused by a peasant who caught us up with lamentations and laid hold of my stirrup.

“Effendim!” he cried, “you have soldiers with you; bid them do justice on the man who stole my cow.”

“Where is the man?” said I in bewilderment.

“He is here,” he answered, weeping more loudly than before, “but a quarter of an hour back upon the road. An Arab he is; and while I was driving my cow to Museiyib, he came out of the waste and took her from me, threatening me with his rifle.”

“The effendi has nought to do with your cow,” said one of the zaptiehs impatiently—and indeed the sun withered us as we stood. “Go tell the Ḳâḍî at Museiyib.”

“How shall I get justice from the Ḳâḍî?” wailed the peasant. “I have no money.”

The rejoinder struck me as correct, and I sent one of the zaptiehs back with the lawful owner of the cow, telling him to catch the thief if he were still upon the road and I would give a reward. The zaptieh re-joined us while we were lunching at the khân of Ḥasua, but he had not seen the cow, nor yet the thief, and perhaps it was unreasonable to expect that the latter should keep to the high road with stolen goods trotting before him. The khân at Ḥasua is large and built on the Persian plan for Persian pilgrims. We ate our lunch in the shadow of its gateway, and when we came out the sun struck us in the face like a sword. There was nothing to be done but to try and forget it; I summoned Fattûḥ and drew him into conversation.

“Oh Fattûḥ,” said I, “is there any justice in the land of the Ottomans?”

“Effendim,” replied Fattûḥ cautiously, “there is justice and there is injustice, as in other lands. Have I not told you of Rejef Pasha and the thief who stole from me £T28?”

“No,” said I, settling myself expectantly in the saddle.

“It happened one year that I was in Baghdâd,” Fattûḥ began, “for your Excellency knows that I drive the gentry back and forth between Aleppo and Baghdâd in my carriage, and so it is that I am often in Baghdâd.”

“I know,” said I. “Once you sent me some blue and red belts embroidered with gold that you had bought in the bazaars.”

“It is true,” said Fattûḥ. “One I gave to Zekîyeh, and the others I sent by the post for you and for their Excellencies your sisters. Please God they rejoiced to have them?” he inquired anxiously.

“They rejoiced exceedingly,” I assured him for the fiftieth time; a present that has to be sent by the post is no small thing, and it would be matter for consternation if it did not please. “But what of Rejef Pasha?”

“Rejef Pasha was Mushîr of Baghdâd,” Fattûḥ picked up his tale. “And God knows he was a just man. Now I had sold my carriage to one who needed it and gave me £T28 for it, which was a good price, for it was old. And as I was walking in the bazaars a thief stole the money from me, and when I put my hand into my pocket, lo, it was empty.”

“Wah, wah!” commiserated the zaptieh.

“Eh yes,” said Fattûḥ. “Twenty-eight Ottoman pounds. Now I had heard men speak of Rejef Pasha that he was famed for justice, and I went to him where he sat in the serâyah and said: ‘Effendim, I am a man of Aleppo, a stranger in Baghdâd; and a thief has stolen from me £T28. And there are many here who can speak for me.’ Then Rejef Pasha sent into the bazaars and all the thieves he arrested.”

“Did he know them all?” I asked.

“Without doubt,” replied Fattûḥ. “He was Mushîr. And some he questioned and let them go, and others he caused to be beaten upon the soles of their feet with rods, and them too he released, until only three men remained, and then only one. And Rejef Pasha said: ‘This is the thief.’ Then they cast him upon the ground and beat him many times, and every time when they had beaten him till he could bear no more, he cried out: ‘Cease the beating, and I will give back the money.’ But when they ceased he said he had not so much as a mejîdeh. Then one of the soldiers caught him by the leg to throw him to the ground, and the man’s garment tore in his hand, and out of it fell £T26 and rolled upon the floor. But two pounds he had eaten,” explained Fattûḥ. “And Rejef Pasha cast him into prison. And when I was next in Baghdâd he was still in prison, and I visited him and lent him £T1, for he was very poor. And we ate together.”

“Did you see him again?” said I, deeply interested in this simple history.

“Eh, wallah!” replied Fattûḥ. “I met him in Deir, and there I feasted him in the bazaar. And now he lives in Deir, and I go to his house whenever I pass through the town, for we are like brothers. But he has not returned me the pound I lent him while he was in prison,” added Fattûḥ regretfully.

“Mâshallah!” said the zaptieh. “Rejef Pasha was a good man.”

“But I will tell you another tale of Rejef Pasha, better than the last,” pursued Fattûḥ, drawing, with the perfect art of the narrator, upon yet choicer stores of his memory—or was it of his imagination? “Effendim, I had a friend, and he hired from me one of my carriages that he might drive a certain daftardâr from Aleppo to Baghdâd. Now at Ramâdî the daftardâr spent two nights in the house of the son of his uncle, and when they reached Baghdâd the daftardâr searched in his box for the gold ornaments of his wife, and, look you, they were missing. And they cost £T60. Then the daftardâr said that the carriage driver had stolen them, and he caused him to be imprisoned for a period of three years. And soon after, I came to Baghdâd and inquired concerning my carriage; and a man in the bazaar told me that which had befallen, but I did not believe that my friend had stolen the gold ornaments of the daftardâr’s wife. And the man in the bazaar said: ‘You are his friend, and moreover you are a walad melîḥ, a good lad, and he has a wife and two little children in Aleppo. You will not let him starve in prison.’ And when I heard him call me a walad melîḥ and thought upon the children in Aleppo, I went away and sold my two carriages for £T60, and set my friend free. And then,” Fattûḥ continued his gratifying reminiscences, “I went to a scribe in the bazaar and gave him half a mejîdeh. And your Excellency knows that a scribe charges one piastre. And I said: ‘Take this half mejîdeh and write a letter to Rejef Pasha that shall be worthy to be sent to the Sultan and explain to him the whole matter.’ So the scribe wrote the letter, and I took it to the serâyah. Then Rejef Pasha called me before him, for he had not forgotten me, nor the £T28 that were stolen by the thief. And he said: ‘My son, do not fear. I will get back your money if I have to pay from the treasury of our Lord the Sultan.’ And he sent for the daftardâr and rebuked him for committing a man to prison without evidence, for he said that without doubt the gold ornaments had been stolen at Ramâdî. And the daftardâr paid me back £T60. Never was there a pasha like Rejef Pasha,” concluded Fattûḥ. “He feared none but God. God give him peace—he died a year ago.”

Late in the afternoon we came to Maḥmûdîyeh. The baggage got in half-an-hour afterwards, and found me established in the upper room of a khân which Jûsef had noted down as he passed through on his way to Kerbelâ as “the very place for our effendi.” The room was cooler than a tent, and to sit in the shade and drink tea seemed to me to be the consummation of earthly happiness. My lodging opened on to a flat roof on which I dined, and realized that the more intolerably blasting the day, the more perfect was the soft and delicate night. The khânjî, when he heard that we were bound for Ctesiphon, declared that the Tigris was in flood and the road under water. We stood aghast, seeing a second enemy flow into the field just as we had circumvented the first, but a Kurdish zaptieh (his name was ’Abdu’l Ḳâdir) stepped up with a smart salute and bade us take courage, for he would lead us to Ctesiphon. He was as good as his word; there was, in fact, no water on the road. We reached the mounds of Seleucia in three hours, and in another half-hour camped by the Tigris under the ruined wall of the Greek city. The Tigris, where we came to it, was a mighty stream and a well-conducted. It flowed solemnly between its low banks, which it did not attempt to overstep, in spite of the fact that the snows were beginning to melt in the Kurdish hills and the river was in flood. A belt of cultivation ran like a narrow green ribbon beside it, intersected by a network of irrigation canals which were fed by a regiment of jirds along the bank. The whole area of Seleucia was covered with corn, but half-a-mile inland the relentless desert resumed its rule, for the crops that had been sown beyond the irrigation streams, in expectation of the usual sprinkling of winter rain, had never sprouted. Out of the cornfields rose the mounds of Seleucia, the capital of the Seleucid empire, which for two hundred years after the death of Alexander embraced Mesopotamia, North Syria and a varying part of Asia Minor. Of all cities in Turkey, Seleucia is perhaps the one which would yield most to the spade of the excavator. The Greek civilization of the Diadochi has given up few of its secrets in any of the regions where the generals of Alexander cut their empires out of the fruits of his victories, but in Mesopotamia we are completely ignorant of what the Greek conquest may have meant in the history of architecture and the lesser arts. We know only that at the end of the period of Greek rule the arts emerged profoundly modified, and thus modified governed the late antique and the early Christian world.

I had no sooner appointed a camping-ground than I embarked on the broad waters of the Tigris in a basket. The craft that navigate that river are known in Arabic as guffahs, but I have applied to them the correct English word (Fig. 110). They are round with an incurving lip, like any other basket, made of plaited withes and pitched without and within to keep them water-tight. Their size and the pitch alone differentiate them from their fellows in the European market, and I readily admit that when first you are invited to cross a deep and rapid stream in a guffah you feel a shadow of reluctance. But for all their unpromising appearance they are stout and trustworthy vessels, and when you have crossed once, you and your zaptieh and your mares all in the same guffah, and accustomed yourself to its peculiar mode of progression, you come to feel a justifiable confidence in it. The guffah cannot make headway against stream; it must be pulled up the river to a distance considerably above the point you design to touch on the opposite bank—the two guffahjîs push off, the basket spins upon its axis, and so spinning advances, on the principle of the moon’s advance across space, or, for that matter, of the earth’s; the guffahjîs paddle with a genteel nonchalance, first on one side and then on the other, and at the end of all you reach your goal.

My goal was Ctesiphon (Fig. 107). The huge fragment of the palace, which is all that remains of the Sassanian capital, successor and heir to Seleucia, lies about half-a-mile from the river on the edge of a reed-grown marsh. No more of it is standing than the central vaulted hall (and here half the vault has fallen) and the east wall of one of the wings (Fig. 108). The second wing has disappeared, and nothing is left of the rooms on either side of the hall[88] (Fig. 109). Even in this condition Ctesiphon is the most remarkable of all known Sassanian buildings and one of the most imposing ruins in the world. The great curtain of wall, the face of the right wing, rises stark and gaunt out of the desert, bearing upon its surface a shallow decoration of niches and engaged columns which is the final word in the Asiatic treatment of wall spaces, the end of the long history of artistic endeavour which began with the Babylonians and was quickened into fresh vigour by the Greeks. Tradition has it that the whole wall was covered with precious metals. The gigantic vault, built over empty space without the use of centering beams, is one of the most stupendous creations of any age. It spans 25·80 metres: the barrel vaults of the basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum span 23·50 metres; the barrel vault that covered the aula of Domitian’s palace on the Palatine spanned 30·40 metres, but it has fallen. The Roman vaults were built over centering beams, not over space on the Mesopotamian system, and the latter, what with the appeal which it makes to the imagination and the high ovoid curve which it involves, gives a result incomparably more impressive. In this hall Chosroes held his court. It must have lain open to the rising sun, or perhaps the entrance was sheltered by a curtain which hung from the top of the vault down to the floor. The Arab historian, Ṭabarî, gives an account of a carpet seventy cubits long and sixty cubits broad which formed part of the booty when the Mohammadans sacked the city. It was woven into the likeness of a garden; the ground was worked in gold and the paths in silver; the meadows were of emeralds and the streams of pearls; the trees, flowers and fruits of diamonds and other precious stones. Such a texture as this may have been drawn aside to reveal the Great King seated in state in his hall of audience, with the light of a thousand lamps, suspended from the roof, catching his jewelled tiara, his sword and girdle, illuminating the hangings on the walls and the robes and trappings of the army of courtiers who stood round the throne.

The pages of the historian who relates the Mohammadan conquest of Ctesiphon ring still with the triumph of that victory. The Sassanian capital comprised both the old Greek

foundation on the west bank of the river and the later Persian town with its palaces on the east bank.[89] Sa’d ibn abi Waḳḳâṣ, the leader of the army of Islâm, had little to fear from the last of the Sassanian kings, Yazdegird, a boy of twenty-one, and having entered the western city (known to the Arabs as Bahurasîr) without striking a blow, he assembled his troops and, Ḳurân in hand, pointed to the fulfilment of prophecy: “Did ye not swear aforetime that ye would never pass away? Yet ye inhabited the dwellings of a people that had dealt unjustly by their own souls, and ye saw how we dealt with them. We made them a warning and an example to you.”[90] “And when the Moslems entered Bahurasîr, and that was in the middle of the night, the White Palace flashed upon them. Then said Ḍirâr ibn u’l Khaṭṭâb: ‘God is great! the White Palace of Chosroes! This is what God and his Prophet promised.’ ”[91]

But the fording of the Tigris was a serious matter, and some days passed before Sa’d announced to the army that he had resolved to make the venture. “And all of them cried: ‘God has resolved on the right path for us and for thee; act thou.’ And Sa’d urged the people to the ford and said: ‘Who will lead, and guard for us the head of the ford that the people may follow him?’ And ’Âṣim ibn ’Amr came forward and after him six hundred men. And he said: ‘Who will go with me and guard the head of the passage that the people may ford?’ And there came forward sixty. And when the Persians saw what they did, they plunged into the Tigris against them and swam their horses towards them. And ’Âṣim they met in the forefront, for he had neared the head of the ford. Then said ’Âṣim: ‘The spears! the spears! aim them at their eyes.’ And they joined in contest and the Moslems aimed at their eyes and they turned back towards the bank. And the Moslems urged on their horses against them and caught them on the bank and killed the greater part of them; and he who escaped, escaped one eyed. And their horses trembled under them until they broke from the ford. And when Sa’d saw ’Âṣim at the head of the ford he said: ‘Say: We call upon the Lord and in Him we put our trust and excellent is the Entrusted; there is no power nor strength but in God, the Exalted, the Almighty.’ And when Sa’d entered Madâin and saw it deserted, he came to the hall of Chosroes and began to read: ‘How many gardens and fountains have they left behind, cornfields and fair dwellings and delights which were theirs; thus we dispossessed them thereof and gave their possession for an inheritance unto another people.’ And he repeated the opening prayer and made eight prostrations. And he chose the hall for a mosque; and in it were effigies in plaster of men and horses and they heeded them not but left them as they were, though the Mohammadans do not so. And we entered Madâin and came to domed chambers filled with baskets; and we thought them to be food, and lo, they were overflowing with gold and silver. And they were divided among the people. And we found much camphor and thought it to be salt, and kneaded it into the bread, until we perceived the bitterness of it in the bread. And Zuhrah ibn u’l Ḥawîyeh went out with the vanguard and pursued the fugitives till he reached the bridge of Nahrwân; and the fugitives crowded upon it and a mule fell into the water, and they struggled round it greedily. And Zuhrah said: ‘Verily, I believe, billah, that the mule bears something precious.’ And that which it bore was the regalia of Chosroes, his robes and his strings of pearls, his girdle and his armour covered with jewels, in which he was wont to sit, vaingloriously attired.” ...

In the grey dawn I returned to Ctesiphon. The moon was setting in the west and as we floated down the river the sun rose out of the east and struck the ruined hall of the palace.

“Allah, Allah!” murmured ’Abdu’l Ḳâdir, moved to wonder as he watched the vast walls, in their unmatched desolation, take on the glory of another day.

We rode up to Baghdâd along the edge of the Tigris, and as we went, Fattûḥ, who thought little of ruins except as a divertisement for the gentry, dilated upon the splendours that we were to witness. Especially was he anxious that I should not fail to see the famous cannon which stands near the arsenal, chained to the ground lest it should fly away. “For,” said Fattûḥ, “the people of Baghdâd relate that in a certain year there was a great battle at a distance of many days’ journey. Now the soldiers of Baghdâd were giving way before the enemy when one looked up and saw the cannon flying through the air to their help. And without the aid of hands it fired at the army of the foe and drove them back. Then they brought the cannon back with them and chained it by the arsenal, for they prized it mightily. So I have heard in Baghdâd.”

“And what do you think of the story?” I asked.

“My lady,” said Fattûḥ with a fine show of contempt, “the people of Baghdâd are very ignorant. They will believe anything. But we in Aleppo would laugh if we were told that a cannon had flown through the air.”

Every few hundred yards we came upon the deep cutting of an irrigation canal and our road passed over it airily, borne on the most fragile of bridges. At first I could scarcely control my alarm as I saw rider and baggage animals suspended above the gulf, but the horses made light of it and no one can keep up a fear that is unshared by his comrades. We were fortunate in finding all the bridges intact, but our good luck deserted us in the middle of the day, and when we came to Garârah, where we hoped to cross the Tigris by a bridge of boats, we found that the bridge had been swept away and the keeper of the toll-house seemed surprised to learn that we had expected it to stand firm in time of flood. So we turned wearily round an immense bend of the Tigris and entered Baghdâd by the Ḥilleh road (Fig. 111). Here the pontoon bridge had been mercifully spared; it was crowded with folk, and as we pushed our way slowly across it I had time to offer up a short thanksgiving for the first stage of a journey successfully accomplished, new roads traversed, unvisited sites explored, another web of delightful experiences woven and laid by. At the end of the bridge we found ourselves in the bazaars and made our way to the British Residency. It is a pleasant thing to be English and to see the Sikh guard leap to the salute at the gateway of that palace by the Tigris which is our much-envied Consulate General. My thanksgiving must certainly have broken into a hymn of praise when I found that the hospitable Resident and his wife were expecting my arrival and had prepared for me a room almost as spacious as the hall of Chosroes.

At Baghdâd I learnt that the rumours of a revolt which had reached Babylon fell far short of the truth. Two of the Tigris tribes were up in arms and had effectually blocked all communication with Baṣrah and the Persian Gulf. They were holding up five steamers at Amârah, together with a couple of gunboats, which had been sent down to clear the channel, and over two thousand soldiers. Among the passengers was Sir William Willcocks, who was at that time engaged on the irrigation survey, and the disturbance had therefore become a matter of grave concern to the Resident and to all others who had the interests of Turkey at heart. During the few days which I spent in Baghdâd, I saw many people and heard much talk concerning the state of affairs that prevailed in the delta, and I came to the conclusion that the government were garnering the ripe fruit both of their inaction and of their action. On the one hand, the Arab tribes had been allowed to reach an alarming excess of insubordination. For three years the boats of the Turkish and of the Lynch Company had been exposed to perpetual danger of attack, and in 1908 one of the steamers of the Lynch

Company had been fired upon and several persons had been killed or wounded. Nevertheless no attempt has been made to bring the sheikhs to justice. In remoter districts, even where the land was under cultivation, the fiction of established government had been for all practical purposes abandoned. Where the tax-gatherers still ventured to put in an appearance they were bribed by the Arabs, and little money flowed through their hands into the imperial treasury, while not infrequently they did not dare to breathe the name of taxes. “The very shepherds are armed with rifles,” said one, “and if I were to ask them to pay the aghnâm, the sheep tax, they would raise their guns to their shoulders, saying: ‘Take the aghnâm.’ ” On the other hand, the authorities had sought to cover their weakness by setting one sheikh against another and thus fostering disorder. Individual officials had been guilty of methods of extortion almost unparalleled in the Ottoman empire, and a well-known sheikh had declared with some reason that to pay in the arrears which had been scored up against him would be little better than an act of madness, since the receipt given by one man would be pronounced invalid by the next and the whole sum would be demanded of him a second time. While I pondered over these tales, my interlocutor would generally add: “Wait till you see Môṣul. The vilayet of Môṣul is worse governed than the vilayet of Baghdâd.”

The one ray of hope for the future sprang from the labours of the irrigation survey whose leader was lying imprisoned in midstream at Amârah. “He who holds the irrigation canals, holds the country,” is a maxim which can be applied as well to Mesopotamia as it was to Egypt, and it was generally admitted that an irrigation system, justly administered, would be a better means of coercion than an army corps. The Arabs depend for their existence upon the river-side crops; the control of the water and the possibility of turning it off at any moment would prove an effective check on revolt. Moreover the man who has something to lose is never on the side of anarchy; prosperity is the best incentive to orderliness, and prosperity might in time be brought back to districts which had been for many ages the richest in the world. The native of ’Irâḳ, gazing upon the empty desert which now meets his eye, is accustomed to allude proudly to the days when “a cock could hop from house to house all the way from Baṣrah to Baghdâd,” and the saying illustrates the fundamental truth that the present poverty-stricken condition of the land is due not to the niggardliness of nature, but to the destructive folly of man. The forerunner of effective reform must always be honest administration, and how was that to be attained where corruption was as natural as the drawing in of the breath? Even to this, perhaps the most critical of all the questions that beset the new government, there seemed to me to exist the germs of an answer in the growth and free expression of popular opinion. In Baghdâd the public mind was on the alert and the public tongue was no longer to be silenced. One day when I went down into the bazaars I heard on every lip the rumour that a noted Arab from one of the rebellious tribes had arrived in the town, his hands filled with gold which he was prepared to transfer to those of a certain high military authority. The next day the tale was in the local papers, the official was mentioned by name, and if it were indeed true that the Arab had been sent on the mission with which he was credited, his distinguished patron would have found it hard to accept the money intended for him and impossible to carry out his part in the proposed bargain. But the press, though it was as yet inefficient enough, was the best asset of the new order. Not even the most optimistic could assert that constitutional government had taken deep root in Baghdâd. The local committee was a negligible quantity, and men of all creeds were persuaded that the revolution was still to come and that it would come with bloodshed. But it must be added that when the news of the counter-revolution in Constantinople reached Baghdâd, not a finger was lifted nor a voice heard to support anything that would approach to a return to the old régime, and the military authorities of Baghdâd were among those who telegraphed to the Committee with offers of assistance when the fate of the latter hung in the balance.

Here as elsewhere the chief bar to progress was the political fatalism of the people themselves. But amid the universal scepticism there was one section of the community which showed a desire to profit by the advantages which had been promised. The Jews form a very important part of the population, rich, intelligent, cultivated and active. One example of their attitude towards the new order will be enough to show their quality. It had been given out that all the subjects of the Sultan would ultimately be called upon to perform military service; the law (which has since been passed) had not yet assumed a definite shape and many were of the opinion that it would be found impossible to frame it. Not so the Jews of Baghdâd. As soon as the idea of universal service had been conceived, a hundred young men of the Jewish community applied for leave to enter the military school so that they might lose no time in qualifying to serve as officers. The permission was granted, and I trust that they may now be well on the road to promotion. The Christians showed no similar desire to take up the duties of the soldier. On the contrary, all those who were in arrears with the payment of their exemption money hastened to make good the sum due, that they might show that they had fulfilled their obligations under the old system and claim acquittal from those imposed by the new.

I heard these tales by snatches as I explored Baghdâd and tried to reconstitute the city which had been for five centuries the capital of the Abbâsid khalifs, a period during which it had witnessed a magnificence as profuse and destruction as reckless as any others on the pages of history. Of the original Mohammadan foundation, Manṣûr’s Round City, built in A.D. 762 on the right bank of the Tigris, no vestige remains.[92] The site of the great quarters which sprung up to north and south of the Round City are marked only by the tomb of Sheikh Ma’rûf and the celebrated Shi’ah sanctuary of Kâẓimein. The west bank is at present occupied by a small modern quarter, about and below the pontoon bridge which we crossed when we arrived. As early as Manṣûr’s time a palace had been built on the east side of the river and the eastern city gradually eclipsed the western in importance. But it did not occupy the site of modern Baghdâd; it lay to the north of the present town and the sole relic of it is the shrine of Abu Ḥanîfah in the village of Mu’aẓẓam, which is now situated some distance to the north of Baghdâd. Finally the existing town grew up round the palaces of the later khalifs, and its walls and gates are the same as those which were seen and described by Ibn Jubeir in the twelfth century. It no longer fills the circuit of those walls; between them and the modern houses there are large empty spaces which were once occupied by streets and gardens. I drove out one windy morning to the village of Mu’aẓẓam and gazed respectfully from a house-top at the tiled dome which covers the tomb of the Imâm Abu Ḥanîfah. He was the founder of the earliest of the four orthodox sects of the Sunnis and he aided Manṣûr in the building of Baghdâd. Even in Ibn Jubeir’s time the city had retreated from the shrine and he describes it as lying far outside the walls, as it does to-day. We then crossed the Tigris by an upper bridge of boats and visited the Kâẓimein. Here too a village has sprung up round the sanctuary which shelters the remains of the seventh and ninth Shî’ah Imâms.[93] The place is now purely a Shî’ah shrine, though its original sanctity was due to the fact that somewhere in this region stood the tomb of Ibn Ḥanbal, the founder of the last of the four orthodox Sunni sects. His tomb still existed when Ibn Baṭûṭaḥ visited Baghdâd in 1327, but it fell subsequently into ruin and has now disappeared. No infidel is permitted to enter a Shî’ah mosque, and it is well not to linger with too great a show of interest at the gates, so as to avoid the ignominy, which you are helpless to avert, of being hustled out of the way by a fanatical crowd. I went therefore to a neighbouring building, the tomb of Sir Iḳbâl ed Dauleh, brother to the king of Oudh, and begged the wakîl to allow me to look upon the Kâẓimein from his roof. The wakîl, the guardian of Sir Iḳbâl’s tomb, was a charming and cheerful mullah, dressed in long robes and a white turban. He turned a friendly eye upon me, partly out of the innate sociability of his character, and partly in view of the fact that I was a fellow subject of his departed master. Not only did he grant my request, but he presented me with a bunch of pomegranate flowers and entertained me with coffee and sherbet.

“Why,” said he, “do you travel so far?”

I replied that I had a great curiosity to see the world and all that lay therein.

“You are right,” he answered. “Man has but a short while to live, and to see everything is a natural desire. But few have time to accomplish it—what would you? we are but human.” And he drew his robe round him and sipped contentedly at the sherbet, repeating as he did so his elegy on the race: “Insân! we are human.”

With that he turned his attention to the things of this brief world and gave me his opinion of a high official of the empire. “He is mad,” he declared, “majnûn.”

“He is a man of books rather than of deeds,” said I, for I knew the official in question and held him in respect.

“That is what I call majnûn,” replied the mullah sharply.

When I had finished the sherbet I took my leave and went to the tomb of Sheikh Ma’rûf, who was a contemporary of Hârûn er Rashîd and by origin a Christian, but having professed Islâm he became noted as the ascetic of the age and the imâm of his time. He was one of the four saints who by their intercessions protected Baghdâd, however inadequately, from the approach of evil. The existing tomb, though it has frequently been repaired, probably covers the very site of the earliest shrine. It is surrounded by a large cemetery in which stands a building known as the tomb of the Sitt Zobeideh, the wife of Hârûn er Rashîd (Fig. 112). The attribution does not appear earlier than 1718 and is undoubtedly erroneous. The Princess Zobeideh was buried in the Kâẓimein, her tomb has long been destroyed and its exact site forgotten.[94] A very cursory inspection of the architecture is enough to prove that the building near the tomb of Ma’rûf cannot date from the ninth century.[95] It has been in great part reconstructed and contains nothing of architectural interest except the form of its cone-like roof, narrowing upwards by a series of superimposed alveolate niches or squinches (Fig. 113). I have never seen any roof of this kind which could be dated as early as the ninth century.

In the city on the east bank, the modern Baghdâd, by far the most interesting relic of the age of the khalifs is the line of the enclosing wall with its gates. The wall itself is largely destroyed, but its position is marked by a mound and a deep ditch; of the gates the two on the eastern side are the best preserved. One of these, the Bâb eṭ Ṭilism, is dated by a fine inscription of the Khalif Nâṣir in the year A.H. 618 (A.D. 1221) (Fig. 114). It is a splendid octagonal tower, but the door has been walled up ever since the Sultan Murâd IV, the Turkish conqueror of Baghdâd, rode through it in triumph in the year 1638. Round the top of this closed gateway runs a remarkable decoration consisting of a pair of dragons with the wreathed bodies of serpents (Fig. 115). They confront one another with open jaws above the summit of the pointed arch and between them sits cross-legged a small figure with a hand outstretched into each gaping mouth. The serpent motive is not unknown in the decoration of Islâm; it appears, as has been said, upon the gateway of the citadel of Aleppo, where the inscription in dated in the year 1209. I have seen it upon