A Dweller in Mesopotamia Part 4

As a matter of fact, Brown "let himself go" with historical speculations and discovered not only that this was the Tower of Babel, but that it was the site of Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace, with evident signs, from a fragment of calcined brick, which he bore away in triumph, that it had been heated seven times hotter on some occasion.

We climbed about the ruin, unearthed several coins, which seemed quite plentiful in one place where the rain had washed down the side of a small mound, and found obvious signs of some great conflagration. Brown says that, as no one has got any better explanation of this fire than he has, he will stick to his furnace theory.

The native driver turned up all right with the car and took us back to Hillah. From there we crossed the river by the bridge of boats and at a distance of about five miles came upon the scene of the great excavations, which, although the city is said to have extended over an area of some 200 square miles, is generally known as the site of Babylon. It was in 1899, that the German archaeologist, Dr. Koldeway, began excavations on a large scale and with systematic care.

Although Babylon was a site occupied by some city in prehistoric times, as stone and flint implements denote, the earliest _houses_ of which there are any traces belong to about 2000 B.C. It was Nebuchadnezzar, however (605--562 B.C.), who rebuilt the city and made it very splendid, and it is to this period of his reign that the greater part of the ruins of the great city belong. The mound Babil is thought to be the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II. An inscription reads: "On the brick wall towards the north my heart inspired me to build a palace for the protecting of Babylon. I built there a palace, like the palace of Babylon, of brick and bitumen."

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELLAMS UNDER SAIL]

The princ.i.p.al excavations are in the Kasr, at one time a vast block of buildings where are still the traces of a great and broad street used as a processional road to the temple of E-Sagila, which lies to the south about 700 yards away. Some of the stones of this road are in their original places, and there are pieces of brick pavement, each bearing cuneiform characters. If you take up a brick and look at it casually, you might think that it had "Jones & Co." or the "Sittingbourne Brick Co." stamped upon it and it does not look at all old. It is rather startling to be told that the letters read:--

"I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon; I paved the Babel Way with blocks of _shadu_ stone for the procession of the great lord Marduk. O Marduk, Lord, grant long life."

These mounds of the Kasr have suffered by successive generations of brick getters. Half Hillah is said to be built out of bricks from the ruins of Babylon, and bricks are still taken for any building operations that occur within easy access of these well-nigh inexhaustible supplies.

In one place, the Temple of Nin-Makh, the Great Mistress, there are to be found an immense number of little clay images, thought to be votive offerings made by women to the great Mother G.o.ddess.

In the Mound of Amram, according to Major R. Campbell Thompson, are traces of the E-Temenanki referred to in Murray's handbook as not yet identified. [My Murray's handbook is 15 years old.] He writes, in a most useful little book published in Baghdad, 1918, "History and Antiquities of Mesopotamia":--"A hundred yards north of the north slope of Amram is the ancient _zigurrat_ or temple-tower of the famous E-Temenanki: 'the foundation stone of Heaven and Earth' (the Tower of Babylon). The enclosing wall forms almost a square, and part has been excavated, but all the buildings have suffered from brick-robbers. The remains of the actual Tower are towards the south-west corner.

"Many ancient restorations were carried out here. Professor Koldeway found inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Sardanapalus and thereafter inscriptions of Babylonian Kings. Herodotus calls the group of buildings 'the brazen-doored sanctuary of Zeus Below,' and he describes the zigurrat as a temple-tower in eight stages. The cuneiform records of Nabopola.s.sar relate how the G.o.d Marduk commanded him 'to lay the foundation of the Tower of Babylon ... firm on the bosom of the underworld while its top should stretch heavenwards.'"

The first impression of the Kasr is that of a sh.e.l.led town or mined flour mill, where nothing remains but the lower walls of buildings. From a painter's point of view, the scene of this great city, about which he has pictured so much, is somewhat disappointing. There is such an absence of anything suggestive of palaces and streets. Frankly, the ruins of the cement works at Frindsbury are, pictorially, far more suggestive. I have always said that the hanging gardens of Borstal knocked spots off the hanging gardens of Babylon, and now I know it. So much for a first impression.

After awhile, however, wandering amongst these hummocks and pits, with here and there a suggestion of a gateway or pavement, the glamour of it all begins to return.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BABYLON THE GREAT IS FALLEN, IS FALLEN]

It is not to the eye that the appeal of poetry is made, but to the imagination.

There is a figure of a stone lion trampling on a man, but this was unearthed and set up by a French engineer, and is not explanatory of any scheme of sculptural work. It is merely a monument. There is also a brick pillar, the bricks being uncommonly like London stock bricks, which might be part of a fallen chimney in a ruined factory. These are the only architectural signs at first visible.

On descending to the pa.s.sages and ways made by the base walls of buildings, lions and monsters moulded in the brickwork appear, but they are only to be seen at close quarters, and in one part of this vast wilderness of brick, and do not affect in any way the general character of the place--a place of loneliness and of utter desolation. The whole area is like a small range of hills, down the slopes of which are steep descents to clefts sometimes filled with reeds and rushes and stagnant pools of water. The site of the world-renowned hanging gardens is now marked by a series of nondescript lumps. The great temple of Marduk is a dusty heap of brick rubbish, and the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar appears as a mean slag heap looking down upon a land desolate and empty.

This is Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees.

"It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

"But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there and satyrs shall dance there.

"And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

VI

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOUFAS ON THE TIGRIS]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919

Somewhere in Mesopotamia, in the desert country that lies between the Euphrates at Felujeh and the Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of a walled-in group of buildings known as Khan Nuqtah, in the month of February of this year, and on a singularly miserable and rainy afternoon, there might have been seen a dark object moving very slowly across the uninteresting field of vision. At a distance it would not have been very easy to make out the nature of the thing, and a newcomer to the scene, with no local knowledge of circ.u.mstantial evidence to guide him, would have hesitated between a buffalo or a hippopotamus and finally given a vote in favour of it being some slime-crawling saurian that we come across in pictures of antediluvian natural history.

A closer view, however, would have made clear to him that it was no animal, but some species of tank, coated and covered with mud, accompanied by three similarly encased attendants, probably human beings, staggering and skidding about in its immediate vicinity. From time to time, one of these three would mount on the head or fore-part of this object, with the effect of causing it to slide and plunge forward for a few yards to stick again and again, snorting and panting and unable apparently to make any further progress.

A detective, equipped with a certain amount of motor knowledge, might have been able to discern that the mud-encrusted monster was a Ford car.

A tailor, whose technical training would help him to penetrate the disguise of thick slime, might have been able to recognize by the cut of their clothes that the first of the three figures was an R.A.F. driver and the other two were naval officers. As a matter of fact one of these forlorn representatives of our boasted sea-power was Brown, and the other one, although I think he would have hesitated to swear to his ident.i.ty at the time, was the unfortunate writer of these chronicles.

There was no doubt about it; we were done.

"At the present rate of progress we shall reach Baghdad in about ten days," said the driver, "and it's getting worse."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET IN KHADAMAIN]

A few more hours' rain and no power on earth would move the car an inch.

We knew from experience that nothing could be done for four or five days, so we faced the situation philosophically, shouldered a bag each and staggered in the sliding mud in the direction of the Khan. We started off with no illusions as to our fate if we encountered rain, and were therefore quite prepared for this. There was nothing for it but to camp out somehow until the sun had been given a chance. The fact that we had been able to reach this point with the Khan and railway close at hand was a piece of luck for which we were thankful.

Brown was by far the best exponent of this art of walking in mud while carrying weight. The driver was quite good at it, having had considerable practice on similar occasions. I was uncompromisingly bad.

I sat down three or four times to the driver's once. Brown did not sit down at all, but he did some amazing movements in skidding, reminding one in a somewhat vague way of the tramp cyclist of the music-hall stage.

I have often thought since these days of mud in Mesopotamia that a vast fortune might be made by some one who could find a commercial use for a substance, as slippery as oil, as indelible in staining properties as walnut juice, and as adhesive as fish glue. Large quant.i.ties of Mesopotamian mud could be shipped to London and made up into tubes. Then all that would be necessary would be three distinctive labels. One could describe it as a wonderful lubricant and cheap subst.i.tute for machine oil. Another could proclaim to the world a new washable distemper. A third could laud it as a marvellous paste or cement that would adhere to anything whatsoever.

"There is one comfort," Brown gasped in an interval between two very energetic spells of sliding, "if we can't move the Ford, n.o.body else can!"

In the circ.u.mstances of the moment I cannot say that I felt much "comfort" in contemplating the car's condition. In fact I didn't care in the least whether I saw the thing again or not. All I cared about was reaching the Khan and putting down my bag. We found tracks where some scrubby plants were growing, where the surface was pa.s.sable, but as we neared the entrance to the Khan, where carts and hors.e.m.e.n had made a veritable quagmire, we stuck, all three, without apparently any prospect of getting on at all unless we abandoned our baggage. However, some Arabs came to our a.s.sistance and relieved us of our burdens, so that we gained our objective.

Beginning our toilet by sc.r.a.ping each other down with a ruler, so that we could see which was which, we soon evolved into something like our normal selves. We had a few clothes to change into, but neither Brown nor I had a complete set of everything. The result was that Brown looked like a naval officer that had taken up cement making and I appeared to be a cement worker, finished off, as the eye followed me downwards, with very smart trousers and regulation naval boots.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOONLIGHT, BAGHDAD]

The Khan was a poor enough shelter as far as accommodation went, but we managed to make up a good fire and get tolerably dry. Some tea, made by the ever resourceful driver, raised our spirits considerably, and we talked over plans for the immediate future. Enquiries revealed the fact that we were in great luck about trains, which appeared at intervals of several days, as one was due in a few hours that would reach Baghdad the same night. The driver had found others held up with their cars, so we left him to stand by till better weather made movement possible and decided to put in a few days at Baghdad instead of waiting here.

At about 7 o'clock, a train of miscellaneous construction steamed in from the direction of Dhibban, bound for Baghdad. This bit of line runs from Baghdad to the Euphrates and is important because it links up the two great waterways and is always available when motor transport is impossible on account of the state of the roads.

We clambered into a covered van, specially reserved--a sort of Mesopotamian Pullman car. It contained a great litter of odd baggage and two Hindu officers who were very luxuriously fitted up with beds and a table. Divesting ourselves of our wet trench-coats, for it was still raining, we made some sort of a seat of our bags and were tolerably comfortable. Brown, who, now that he was dry and warm and well fed, was in the highest spirits, prophesied that our arrival in the enchanted city of the Arabian Nights was well timed, for it was Friday night, when all the mosques would be lighted up.

"A million tapers flaring bright From twisted silvers look'd to shame The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream'd Upon the mooned domes aloof In inmost Bagdat, till there seem'd Hundreds of crescents on the roof Of night new-risen."[2]

So sang Brown, with a map spread out, proving to me that we must alight at Baghdad South to get the best effect as we gazed entranced at the night glory of Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold and walked on to find romance and mystery by many a shadow-chequer'd lawn.

"So much better," he argued, "to approach it gradually like this instead of arriving in a matter-of-fact way by train." It was still raining hard, and I had grave doubts about the splendour we were enjoying so much in antic.i.p.ation, but I did not throw all cold water on his scheme, especially as much of it was planned for my benefit. Art would be the richer, although we, its humble devotees, might be the wetter.