A Dweller in Mesopotamia Part 6

[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 Shiah 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.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ca.n.a.ls, 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! a.s.syrian 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 b.u.mping and sc.r.a.ping 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' sh.o.r.e 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sage, 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 l.u.s.trous 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.