Book: A Dweller in Mesopotamia

D >> Donald Maxwell >> A Dweller in Mesopotamia




From many delightful points of view the gleaming towers of this place,
seen through the palms and reflected in the flooded lagoons at the
margin of the river, do indeed give us something of the colour and
romance that we had expected to see and yet so rarely find in the
sun-baked lands of Mesopotamia.

[Illustration]




VIII

PARADISE LOST

[Illustration: "Blossoms and fruit at once of golden hue Appeared, with
gay enamelled colours mixed." --_Paradise Lost, IV_.]

[Illustration]




PARADISE LOST


The statement often made that Mesopotamia is a vast desert through which
run two great rivers, bare but for the palm trees on their banks and
flat as a pancake, is true as far as 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 me
that they had built up in their minds a wrong conception of the country
and a wrong idea of its character simply by letting their imagination
get to work on insufficient data.

To begin with, the word "desert" generally suggests sand. People who
have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara naturally picture a sandy waste
with its accompanying oases, palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is
a land of clay, of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames 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 _cafe au lait_. Even the
churned foam from a paddle wheel is _cafe au lait_ with what a
blue-jacket contemptuously referred to as "a little more of the _au
lait!_" At a distance it can be blue, gloriously blue, by reflection
from the sky, but it will not bear close examination.

The railway skirts the river here, running from Ezra Tomb to Amara
having started from Basra. Amara must not be confused with Kut-el-Amara.
The names are a source of great confusion to newcomers. 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 suggestion that I might have to wait some time for a steamer
to Kut. I thought Kut was on one side of the river and Amara on the
other. It is, however, a twenty-four hours' journey in a fast boat.

It is perfectly true that the country is "as flat as a pancake" in
original formation, but the traces of ancient irrigation systems, to say
nothing of buried cities--Babylon is quite mountainous for
Mesopotamia--make it a very bumpy plain in places.

[Illustration: DAWN AT AMARA]

Now that the British are in occupation of the land instead of the Turk,
the natural assumption of every patriotic Briton is that the desert will
immediately blossom as the rose 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 little
deeper than the generalizations popularly made about irrigation and its
revival in a land which was once, before all things, dependent for its
prosperity upon this science.

Of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the banks of the
Euphrates are the more wooded and picturesque and the Tigris is the
busier. The backwaters, creeks and side channels of both 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 borders. Centuries of neglect and the
blight of the unspeakable Turk have dealt hardly with this country. It
is indeed a Paradise Lost and it will be many a long day before it is
Paradise Regained.

A beginning, however, has been made. Our army of occupation includes
"irrigation officers," and gradually the work of watering the country is
extending. Hardly any tree but the palm is found, yet this is only for
want of planting. The soil is good, and with an abundance of water,
everything, from a field of corn to a forest, is possible.

I made some study of the irrigation work in progress, and picked up a
little rudimentary information concerning this problem of the watering
of the land, although I lay no claim to technical knowledge on the
subject. The chief difficulty does not seem to be that of making 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 will be
great. Mesopotamia is not a white man's country. India would appear to
be the direction in which to look for colonists, but it is an
unfortunate fact that the Arab does not like the Indian and the Indian
does not like the Arab. Sooner or later there would be trouble.

[Illustration: A BACKWATER IN EDEN]

In the creeks the water is much clearer than in the river, as it
deposits the silt when it flows more placidly than in the turmoil of the
main stream. Oranges, bananas, lemons, mulberries abound, and vines
trailing from palm to palm in some of the backwaters. In one narrow arm
near Basra, a sort of communication trench between two canals, I saw
orange bushes overhanging the water, and, growing with them, some plant
with great white 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 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 is to-day, and although we have no
records, it probably was in use for ages previously. Noah, possibly, had
one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa is made like a basket and then
coated with bitumen. This type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the
scenery of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially when filled with
watermelons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests Abraham
attempting the role of Sinbad the Sailor for "the pictures."

Of all the things I saw in my travels in Mesopotamia, I think a goufa
was about the most satisfactory. It is a delightful shape and a
fascinating 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 we are led to expect when we travel to the East. When
we first see a goufa we do not know quite what it is. It may be
something to do with magic.

Another curiosity of the Upper Tigris is the raft of light wood and
air-inflated skins which comes down from the north to Samara and
Baghdad. On this section of the river there are many shallows, sometimes
caused 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
being packed underneath with goat-skins inflated with air. Thus they
require only a very slight depth of water to float them, and they are
sufficiently tough to stand bumping and scraping over shoals and
shallows.

The men who manoeuvre these strange craft have some sort of tent or
shelter to protect them from the sun, and they row with huge paddles.
This rowing is sufficient to keep some sort of steering way on the raft,
enough to enable it to get from one bank of the river to the other as it
floats down.

Wood is scarce in the Baghdad region, and the material of these rafts is
sold together with the cargo on its arrival at its destination. The crew
proceed back by road to Diarbekr or some up-river town to bring down
another raft.

The glamour of the East is felt mostly in the West. In an atmosphere of
fog and wet streets, sun-baked plains with endless caravans and belts of
date-palms by Tigris' shore seem the most delightful of prospects.
Memory 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 Khadamain romance and mystery would seem to dwell in a
glimpse of Waterloo Bridge, with ghostly barges gliding silently by a
thousand lamps, or in the grey cliffs of houses that make looming vistas
down a London street.

[Illustration: "High, eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit Of vegetable
gold;"--_Paradise Lost, IV._]

Of all places in the world, Baghdad, the city of Haroun-al-Raschid, is
the one around which cling the romantic ideas of the enchanted East.
For this reason "Chu Chin Chow" 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 comparison.
"Like 'Chu Chin Chow'" or "quite the Oscar Asche touch" were expressions
frequently heard among our men who were describing something picturesque
they had seen.

Now I may as well confess before I go any further, that I have not seen
"Chu Chin Chow." I have never been able to get in. During the war, leave
in London was an opportunist 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 brought with it so many
disadvantages brought also many opportunities. Although I was unable to
get into His Majesty's Theatre, I succeeded in getting into Baghdad.

I found streets through which beggars and British officers, camels and
Ford cars jostled each other, often in vain attempts to get on. You can
imagine the 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, especially by moonlight, the quaint streets of old Baghdad do
give an element of mystery and adventure that the Arabian Nights and the
stage lead us to expect.

[Illustration: PUFFING BILLY ON THE TIGRIS]

I came upon a wonderful group of buildings by the banks of the Tigris.
It appears to have been a disused mosque. The minarets are shorn of
their tops, and look like huge candlesticks. A dark passage, vaulted
like the aisle of a cathedral, led down to covered bazaars.

Again, at Basra, the House of Sinbad in Ashar Creek has quite the effect
of a wonderfully staged production. The huge, high-prowed mahailas, the
crazy wooden galleries 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 twilight that it would be difficult to
beat for mystery and romance. A man in black with a fire of brushwood in
the bow of a mahaila added a touch of magic to the scene.

I don't know in the least what he was doing with this pillar of fire,
but it was extraordinarily effective, and it made you feel you were
getting your money's worth out of the show.

Or, again, for mystery and romance, here is another scene on the Tigris
between Amara and Kut.

The evening is still. No breeze stirs the sliding surface of the river.
On every side immeasurable plains stretch from horizon to horizon, "dim
tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom 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 Arabs' reed huts and a distant fire are the only signs that
the world is inhabited. A faint rhythmical beating is growing more
distinct, the herald of the slow progress of an up-coming steamer.

Before night is fallen she has passed--a strange object with high funnel
and clattering stern paddle, an apparition it would seem from our
Western world of a hundred years ago, moving slowly across the crowded
stage of modern war's necessities. I observed her number was S 31, but I
believe she is known by her intimate friends as "Puffing Billy."

[Illustration]




IX

THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD

[Illustration: THE WALLS OF HIT]

[Illustration]




THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD


Since I have returned to England I constantly run up against people who
ask me, sometimes jokingly and sometimes almost seriously, if I have
brought back any sketches of the Garden of Eden, and a conversation
invariably follows as to the authenticity or otherwise of the
traditional site. Is it true that Mesopotamia was the cradle of the
human race, and, if so, are the descriptions in the book of Genesis
concerning the world known to Adam and Noah, however figuratively they
may be taken, in keeping with the natural conditions of such a land?
However much Paradise may have been lost, can the traveller see in
Mesopotamia any signs of beauty and richness of verdure out of which the
artist and the poet could visualize a garden of the Lord?

The answer, as they say in Parliament, where no one could be expected to
give a downright and straightforward "yes" or "no," is in the
affirmative. The scenes of these early dramas are characteristically
Mesopotamian. The well-ordered garden "planted" with the tree of life
"in the midst," and a river to water it, the ark of Noah pitched "within
and without with pitch" as the ancient goufa is still pitched, the Tower
of Babel, built with brick instead of stone and with slime (_i.e._
bitumen) for mortar--all these things belong to the flat, sun-baked
lands of this alluvial plain. At Kurna, Arab tradition has placed Eve's
Tree. It is a sorry looking, scraggy thing. It does not seem good for
food, nor is it pleasant for the eyes and a tree to be desired. Another
traditional Garden of Eden is at Amara, and the Eden of the Sumerian
version of the story is thought by Sir William Willcocks to have been on
the Euphrates between Anah and Hit.

[Illustration: SUNSET ON THE TIGRIS]

The "planting" of the garden and certain details brought out in the
short description of its features suggest very strongly the things that
would occur to the mind of a writer living in an irrigated country.
Milton's gorgeous backgrounds are almost entirely northern. He has
striven to give it an eastern touch here and there, but such stage
management consists chiefly in bringing in a few palms from the
greenhouse. His description "of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
with thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild," and "of that steep savage
hill," are entirely northern in feeling. The same northern wildness
pervades the garden. Note the "flowers worthy of Paradise, which not
nice Art in beds and curious knots, but Nature boon poured forth profuse
on hill and dale and plain." In irrigation lands like Mesopotamia it is
the combination of great heat and abundant water that makes for
luxuriant growth. Milton conceives the most romantic and wild scenery on
hill and dale and savage defile, suddenly brought into order for the use
of man. The Bible story speaks only of features to be found in a land
like Babylonia. Sir William Willcocks thinks that the word translated
"mist" would probably be better rendered "inundation," and that the
writer is speaking of a country where inundation rather than rainfall
was the support of life to the vegetable world. Genesis ii. 5 and 6
would then read:

"For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there
was not a man to till the ground.

"But there went up an inundation from the earth, and watered the whole
face of the ground."

The description of the planting of the garden is very suggestive of a
tract of bare land to which irrigation has been brought. "And _out of
the ground_ made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to
the sight." The garden, too, is watered, not by rainfall, but by a river
which parts into different heads, as do the Tigris and Euphrates when
they spread out upon the flat alluvial land below Baghdad.

Compare the "scenery" in St. John's Revelation with that of the writer
of Genesis when the kings of the earth and the great men sought to hide
from the wrath of God. They "hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks
of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and
hide us."

Adam and Eve could hide themselves only "amongst the trees" of the
garden.

[Illustration: SHEIK SAAD AND THE PERSIAN MOUNTAINS]


The story of Noah and the flood has a very close parallel in a record of
Berosus, the Babylonian priest Xisuthros had a dream in which the deity
announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge
of water, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them
at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a ship, provide it with
ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his
dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind.
Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the flood began to abate, on
the third day after the rain had ceased to fall, he sent out some birds
to see whether they would find any land, but the birds, having found
neither food nor place to rest upon, returned to the ship. A few days
later Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but they again came
back to him, this time with muddy feet. On being sent out again a third
time they did not return at all. Xisuthros then knew that the land was
uncovered, made an opening in the roof of the ship, and saw that it was
stranded on the top of a mountain. He came out of the ship with his
wife, daughter, and pilot, built an altar, and sacrificed to the gods,
after which he disappeared together with them. When his companions came
out to seek him they did not see him, but a voice from Heaven informed
them that he had been translated among the gods to live for ever, as a
reward for his piety and righteousness. The voice went on to command the
survivors to return to Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings, and make
them known to men. They obeyed, and, moreover, built many cities and
restored Babylon.[3]

An eminent authority on the history of Mesopotamia told me that he
considered the deluge to have been a purely local catastrophe in the
flat land of Babylonia. The Arabs use the same word alternately for
mountain or desert. If such a use has come down from long ago the
extraordinary statements in Genesis vii. 20: "Fifteen cubits upward did
the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered," may be easily
reconciled. It has always seemed to me that mountains which were covered
by 24 feet of water must have looked very insignificant even in the flat
land of Chaldea. If, however, the word "desert" will serve equally well
for the word "mountain" we have an account of a flood that could easily
destroy the "world" of Mesopotamia. The annual flood from which the
nomadic inhabitants were used to escaping (as they do now by moving up
to the higher ground) became a wide-spread inundation till the highest
"desert" was covered and the population drowned.

The Biblical account of the Ark suggests to any dweller in Mesopotamia
that it was a gigantic mahaila. The pitching inside and out is still
practised in putting together some of the Euphrates boats, and the
method of making a goufa, covering it on both sides with bitumen, has a
strong family likeness to the method of boat-building used in those
primitive times.

The Jew, however, was always a typical landlubber, and one would expect
a specification for the building of a ship would lack nautical details.
Not so, however, the Assyrian tablet relating to the Ark. It was, we are
told, a true ship. It was decked in. It was well caulked in all its
seams. It was handed over to a pilot. It was navigated in proper style.
"I steered about the sea. The corpses drifted about like logs. I opened
a port-hole.... I steered over countries which were now a terrible sea."
The pilot made the land at Nizir and let her go aground.

Near Ezra's Tomb on the Tigris I saw a boat very much like Noah's ark of
the toy shop, and made a scribbled sketch of it, which is reproduced on
page 36.

[Illustration: HIT, KNOWN TO THE ARABS AS "THE MOUTH OF HELL"]

Beside the fertile tract of country above Hit on the Euphrates--a
land which has been identified as the Sumerian Garden of Eden--stretches
a wild and desolate region, a place of bitumen and smoke of incrusted
salt and sulphur, of rock and fiery heat--known to the Arabs as the
Mouth of Hell. It guards the garden from approach by the nature of its
inhospitable ground, and so I have called it, this burning wilderness,
the Desert of the Flaming Sword, The town of Hit, evil smelling and
grim, stands sentinel between the fertile river-bank and the
ever-smoking plain.

We reached this region in a car from Felujeh, travelling through
Dhibban, where we crossed the Euphrates by a bridge of boats and on to
Rhamadie. Thence the track is a rough one through desert country,
undulating in places and becoming rougher. Some ridges of barren hill
cut off the view from time to time as we approach Hit, and we surmount
one of these, obtaining a goodly prospect of the river, to plunge down
again into a wilderness glittering with crystals. At first sight we
might be entering the valley of diamonds of the Arabian Nights, but,
alas, a close inspection shows the glittering objects to be merely
pieces of rock, a sort of white marble. Then we come to mounds of
curious pale earth and ground yellow with sulphur, and then, far
descried beneath its black coils of smoke, the walls of Hit.

The car was boiling by this time, and owing to some breakage we had to
stop, as we drew close to the town. We left the driver, however, to
tinker about with the old Ford, and plunged into the wilds, Brown being
particularly anxious to see what all the smoke was about.

The sun heat was still intense, and it was difficult to tell the real
size of anything owing to the mirage. A sort of temple seemed to detach
itself from the ground, and it was apparently floating about in an
ever-changing lake. Little black men were stoking a furnace, and a river
of some black substance, well banked up with earth, was flowing at our
feet. I think I have seldom seen so weird a sight.

The ground is full of bitumen, and to make lime the Arabs stack up
alternate stones and blocks of bitumen, setting fire to the pile. The
effect of these kilns with their great columns of heavy, black smoke,
writhing and coiling up into the still sky, was indescribable.

The shadow of coming night crept across the desert, turning the gold and
purple of the ground to the colour of ashes. The high walls of the town
still caught the sunset and glowed dull red against the darkening sky. A
fringe of palms, beyond, showed where the river flowed, the river that
watered the garden where the land was green and good. But the grim
ramparts of Hit stretched like a line of fire between, forbidding and
impassable. Higher and higher the shadows climbed till the tall minaret
stood out alone, a sentinel and a flaming sword. A hundred sooty figures
toiled and grovelled in the ground.

In the sweat of their faces shall they eat bread.




X


THE KINGS OF THE EAST

[Illustration: Hit.]

[Illustration: SAMARA]




THE KINGS OF THE EAST


The future of Mesopotamia with its enormous productive potentialities is
a subject fraught with great interest to all those who have studied her
past. Will this country again become one of the granaries of the world,
and will it ever be, like Egypt, an important asset of our Empire? At
first, when the war had freed the country from the Turkish yoke, it was
assumed that it would rise into unheard-of prosperity under the fatherly
care of British protection. Schemes of irrigation, long planned and to
some small extent begun, even under the Turkish regime, were to re-stock
Eden and benefit the whole world. The Baghdad railway would bring the
wares of the East quickly to our doors, and it had even been
anticipated that Nineveh would become as much a resort for European
tourists as Rome.

All this, however, was foretold in the time when a new world was
expected as soon as hostilities ceased. Another tune has been called
now, and we find countless advocates of the policy to get out of
Mesopotamia altogether and let well alone. Capitalization, like charity,
we are told must begin at home, and thirty millions, estimated by the
Inspector of Irrigation in Egypt, as necessary to turn Mesopotamia into
a prosperous country with an annual revenue in fifty years time of ten
millions a year, should be used for house building in England and not
for empire building in Chaldea. On the other hand, wise men have told us
that the Mesopotamian oilfields near Mosul are to be of great
importance, like the Persian wells that have their pipe-line outfall at
Abadan, and that a firm and fatherly hand is necessary to keep the
country in a state of trade development. Should our sphere of influence
be withdrawn from Mesopotamia things will revert back to chaos. Already
trouble with the various tribes is brewing.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.