Part 6 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: A bit of Old Baghdad.]

The journey from Basra to Baghdad takes nearly a week in a ”fast”

steamer. It can be done, however, express, by taking the train from Basra to Amara, leaving Basra about five in the evening and arriving at Amara in the morning. Then the journey is continued by boat to Kut, and thence from Kut in the evening by train, arriving in Baghdad in the early morning--the whole distance within two days. The railway does not run the whole way. The journey from Amara to Kut sounds a mere link across the river, as the full name of Kut is Kut-el-Amara, and most people naturally suppose Amara is part of Kut. This is another Amara, however. The Amara from which we embark for Kut, a day's journey in a fast boat, is a large camp, and quite a town for Mesopotamia, captured from the Turks, early in the war, by sheer bluff. The Turkish commandant surrendered to a naval launch under the impression that about half the sea-power of the British Empire lay in the offing. As a matter of fact no other help of any kind arrived until the next day, and all the surrendered forces were kept on good behaviour by a Lieutenant and a marine--I think with one revolver between them.

Kut looks quite an imposing place from across the river. The sketch at the top of this article shows it when the water of the Tigris was particularly high. It is drawn from the site of the famous liquorice factory, which is now represented by a few mud heaps and one rusted piece of machinery. The long arcade with brick pillars runs along the margin of the river, suggestive of some ancient Babylonian city from this distance, and is but a sorry enough place in reality.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MOONLIGHT FANTASY: KUT FROM THE RUINS OF THE LICQUORICE FACTORY]

Very little of the Baghdad as we know it to-day is old. By tradition it was founded in 762 A.D., and became the renowned capital of the Arab empire. It is said that the city grew till it covered some 25 square miles, reaching its high-water mark of splendour and magnificence under the Sultan Haroun-al-Raschid. The fame of its schools and learning was world-wide, and Baghdad became to the East what Rome became in the West.

For some five centuries this pre-eminence continued, until the Turkish nomadic tribes from Central Asia came on to the stage. They conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria.

The Turks extended their conquests to Egypt, and Baghdad, now on the decline, kept her head above water for another century. But Chingiz Khan, the Mongol, appeared on the scene, and his son and successor, Ogotay, overran the Caucasus, Hungary, and Poland. Baghdad was sacked by Hulagu in 1258, and the irrigation works of Mesopotamia were destroyed.

In spite of her decline and fall Baghdad is still a holy place to all faithful Mohammedans. It is the Mecca of the s.h.i.+ah Mussulmans. Kerbela and Nejef are the great places of burial for the faithful, and among the common sights of the plains of Mesopotamia are endless caravans of corpses from the Persian hills or from the distant north.

The British occupation of Baghdad has been responsible for one broad street through the city, possible for ordinary traffic, but most of the bazaars are long covered-in ways, arched like cloisters and very picturesque at night. There are some wonderful blues on domes and minarets, but it is not until you see the golden towers of Khadamain that you get any glimpse of the splendour of the golden prime of good Haroun-al-Raschid. Khadamain is a great place of pilgrimage, and so zealously guarded is the place that it is said no Christian would ever be allowed to come out of the great mosque alive. A golden chain hangs across the entrance. This can be seen in frontispiece sketch of this book. All good Mussulmans kiss this chain as they enter the sacred precincts.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

VIII

PARADISE LOST

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Blossoms and fruit at once of golden hue Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed.” --_Paradise Lost, IV_.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 b.u.mpy plain in places.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAWN AT AMARA]

Now that the British are in occupation of the land instead of the Turk, the natural a.s.sumption 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.