A Pilgrimage to Nejd Volume Ii Part 13

When I was in India last summer I made acquaintance with a great number of British officials, and I was at some pains to learn from them their views on this "alternative route." I will not say that their answers to my questions were invariably the same, but I think I am making no mistake in affirming, that the consensus of intelligent opinion among them is wholly adverse to the notion. "The Euphrates route," say they, "would be of exceedingly little use to us. The mails, to be sure, would go that way, and we should get our letters from England three or four days sooner; but, politically speaking, the mails are a matter of less consequence than they were. Nowadays all official work of real importance is transacted by telegraph, and when the mails come in afterwards, their interest has been forestalled. It would matter little at Simla or Calcutta whether they had taken three weeks or a fortnight on the road. Trade would certainly benefit somewhat in this way, but Government very little. As regards the sending of troops overland, there could be no question of it, as long as the Suez route was open; and if England cannot keep the Suez route open, she had better give up India at once. No Secretary at War would be so ill-advised as to send troops, with the risk of cholera and over-fatigue, by the land journey as long as they could be marched on board at Plymouth, and landed fresh at Bombay."

"Not even in case of a new mutiny?" I asked. "Not even in a mutiny.

People in England have no idea of the meaning of a thousand-mile railway journey in desert countries. For six months in the year no pa.s.sengers would go that way, except, maybe, an occasional officer on a three months' furlough. We should not take our wives and children there at any time. The extra trouble and expense have prevented most of us from making use of the Brindisi line, which really saves us a week and avoids the Bay of Biscay; so we certainly should not face the Persian Gulf for the sake of four days. The Persian Gulf is hotter than the Red Sea."

Lastly, as to the strategical importance of the Euphrates and Tigris districts to India, I found that these were considered, even by the extremest advocates of conquest, quite out of our line of march for many years to come. The veriest Russophobe could not be made to believe, that a modern army would attempt a march through any pa.s.ses in Asia Minor, or down any Euphrates valley, on India.

It may therefore be dismissed from our calculations that India stands in need of a railway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The political advantage, if advantage there be, would lie solely with Turkey, or with whatever power may eventually become master of Armenia and Kurdistan.

As a commercial speculation, the Euphrates railway scheme is, I believe, equally delusive. The additional cost and risk of transhipment would be an effectual bar to through traffic; while local traffic alone, would be insufficient to secure the financial success of the line. The Euphrates and Tigris valleys are often represented as rich agricultural districts, waiting only the hand of the immigrant to become again what they were in cla.s.sic and even mediaeval times. It is argued that if, in the twelfth century, the Euphrates valley boasted such towns as Rakka, Karkesia, and Balis, such towns may exist again, and that a railway carried by that route to Bagdad, would surely revive the ancient wealth of a naturally wealthy district. But such an argument speedily vanishes on an examination of the facts.

1st. The Euphrates and Tigris valleys neither are nor ever were rich agriculturally. As corn-growing districts they cannot compare with the hill country immediately north of them, with northern Syria, the Taurus, or Kurdistan. They lie out of the reach of the regular winter rains, which cling to the hills, and for this reason are almost entirely dependent on irrigation for their fertility. At best, the Euphrates and Tigris valleys, through which a railway would pa.s.s, are inconsiderable strips of good land, hemmed in closely by a barren desert, and incapable of lateral extension or development. They are isolated, and have long ceased to lie on the track of commerce. At the present day they contain no place of importance, with the exception of the pilgrim shrines of Kerbela and Meshhed Ali, and the decayed city of Bagdad, nor along the greater part of their extent, more than a few villages, depending for their subsistence on the date-palm. They are, moreover, subject to the caprices of their great unmanageable rivers, which at flood time wreck half the valleys. The Euphrates for 150 miles, pa.s.ses without alluvial belt of any kind, through a quite inhospitable desert, while lower down it loses itself in marshes at least as valueless. The Tigris, from Mosul to Bagdad, boasts but three inconsiderable villages, and from Bagdad to Bussorah, a poor half dozen. The Montefik country on the lower Euphrates, and the island enclosed within the Hindiyeh Ca.n.a.l, are the only important corn-growing districts now existing.

2nd. The great plain of Irak, the ancient Babylonia, is not only uncultivated now, but for the most part is uncultivable. A vast portion of it has been overflowed by the rivers, and converted into a swamp, while the rest is more absolutely barren than even the desert itself. It would seem that the water of the Tigris contains saltpetre in solution, and the plain below Bagdad, in the neighbourhood of the river, is in many places covered with a saltpetrous deposit, the result of over-irrigation in ancient days. The soil would seem to have been in some sort worked out. I believe, moreover, that from the denudation since ancient times of Armenia, from which the two rivers flow, their floods have become more sudden, and the water supply less calculable, and that the vast irrigation works from the Euphrates, which would be necessary before the fertility of Irak could be restored to what it then was, would still be liable to excessive flood and drought.

The ancient agricultural wealth of Babylonia was a purely artificial thing, depending upon a gigantic system of irrigation which has no parallel in anything now found in the world. When these vast works were begun is not known; but it must have been in an age of mankind when Asia was densely peopled and human labour cheap. Indeed, we may feel sure that only compulsory labour could have carried them out at all, for they would have ruined any treasury at any rate of wages. This can hardly be done again. There are no captive nations now to be impressed; no treasury capable of providing the funds. We see India, with its really great population, and its comparatively great wealth, sinking under the burden of irrigation works; and the miserable Arabs of Irak cannot be called on to square their shoulders and carry this far greater load.

With all our knowledge, too, of engineering, there would still be some risk of failure; for the Euphrates and the Tigris are not rivers to be trifled with, as Midhat Pasha found to his cost. I think it more than probable that in the day of Babylonian greatness, the flooding of both rivers was more regular and less subject to disasters of drought and excess than now. As I have said, the denudation of Armenia accounts, perhaps, for the destruction of Irak. In any case it is certain, that at the present moment the full energies of the existing population are required to preserve their footing, not to make new conquests on the river. Now, as I am writing, Lower Mesopotamia is expecting famine from the failure of the Tigris, for not an acre of wheat can be sown without its flooding. Last year all hands were at work damming out the Euphrates. These matters are worth considering.

3rd. In treating this question of Euphrates Valley communication, it seems to be forgotten that not only the circ.u.mstances of the Valley itself are changed, but those of all the world of Asia adjoining it.

To understand the present position of Mesopotamia and its adjacent lands, we must consider the history of their ruin. In the days of ancient Rome, not only the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, African as well as European, but also all Western Asia, were a densely peopled empire. Even the lands beyond Roman jurisdiction were full of great cities, from Armenia, through the central plateau of Asia, to the edge of China. Land was everywhere taken up and everywhere of value, while a great surplus population was constantly being pushed out into poorer and still poorer districts by the struggle of life, until hardly a habitable corner of the old world remained unoccupied.

It is not surprising, then, that, with such a necessity for elbow room, the Euphrates and Tigris Valleys were early seized upon, and that at a later date, even poorer regions of the desert were conquered from sterility, and forced into the work of producing food. As long as Babylonia, and the kingdoms which succeeded it, maintained their fertility, these valleys lay on the highway between them and Asia Minor.

Even so lately as the twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish Jew, found numerous large towns still flourishing in Upper Mesopotamia.

Palmyra, at that day, was still a commercial city, containing with other inhabitants a population of two thousand Jews. On the Upper Euphrates he mentions five towns, and on the Tigris two or three. It must not, however, for a moment be supposed that these cities owed their wealth in any but a very small measure to agriculture. Palmyra and El Haddr, the two most important, never could have had more than a few cultivated acres attached to them, while the towns on the rivers, though making full use of the alluvial valleys, were essentially commercial. The high road between Aleppo and Bagdad then pa.s.sed down the Euphrates as far as Kerkesia (Deyr?), whence striking across Mesopotamia to El Haddr, it joined the Tigris at Tekrit. Along this line cities were found at intervals, much as the posting-houses used to be found upon our own highways, and with the same reason for their existence. They gradually died, as these died, with the diversion of traffic from their route.

Palmyra and El Haddr, which (to continue the posting-house metaphor) had no paddocks attached to them, were the first to disappear; and then one by one the river towns, which for a time had still struggled on with the aid of their fields, died too. In the thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth centuries, the terrible scourges of Mongul and Ottoman conquests pa.s.sed over Asia, and swept the regions surrounding Mesopotamia clear of inhabitants. All Western Asia was at this time ruined; and the first result was the abandonment of outlying settlements, which only the stress of over-population elsewhere had ever brought into existence. The Tigris and Euphrates were gradually abandoned, and only the richest districts of Armenia, Kurdistan, and Syria retained. The Ottoman system of misgovernment has done the rest; and now at the present day there is no surplus population eastwards nearer than China, which could supply the deficiency. Until Persia and Armenia are fully occupied, it is idle to expect the comparatively waste lands of Mesopotamia and the river banks to invite immigration. Russia may some day a.s.similate Asia Minor, and Asia Minor may some day again become populous, but until that is done Mesopotamia must wait.

On the other hand, Europe is as little likely to send emigrants to the banks of the Euphrates. With such large tracts of good land on the southern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean and in Syria, unoccupied, there is nothing to tempt agriculturists to poorer lands so far away. Mesopotamia has hardly a climate suited to northern Europeans, while Italians and Maltese (the only southern nations with a surplus population) find openings nearer home. It is equally idle to talk of coolies from India, or coolies from China. These only emigrate, on the prospect of immediate high wages, to countries where labour commands its full price, and capital is there to employ it. As mere emigrants in search of land they will not come.

4th. Although South-western Persia, through which the last 400 miles of a railroad to Bushire might be made to pa.s.s, has not suffered from the same physical causes which have ruined Babylonia, its present condition as regards population, production, and existing wealth, are hardly less unfortunate. The government of Persia, which burlesques all that we most complain of in Turkey, has succeeded in reducing the production of a district, one of the wealthiest in natural advantages of all Asia, practically to nothing. With the single exception of a tract of cultivated land lying between Dizful and Shustar, and another between Dilam and Bushire, the railway would pa.s.s through a country at present uninhabited even by wandering tribes possessed of pastoral wealth. The policy of the Persian government in its dealings with Arabistan has been to depopulate, as the shortest and easiest mode of governing it, and the policy has been successful.

Still I consider, that a railway run along the edge of the Bactiari hills, would have a far better chance of attracting population towards it, than one in the Euphrates or Tigris valleys. The soil is naturally a very rich one, and the winter rainfall sufficient for agricultural purposes. Where-ever cultivation exists it is remunerative, and the soil has not been worked out, as is the case in the plains. The line would doubtless serve the better peopled districts of Shirazd and Luristan; and Bebaban, Shustar and Dizful, would become once more important _entrepots_ for the wealth of the interior. With the security a railway would give, immigrants might even gradually arrive, and it is conceivable that the district might in the course of years be reclaimed, for it is well worth reclaiming, but the prospect is a distant one.

On the whole I would suggest that all calculations as to traffic should be based strictly on existing circ.u.mstances. It may be, that the present population and production are sufficient for the support of a railway, (I myself considerably doubt it), but investors should trust to these only.

The future has only delusions in store for them. It is idle to quote the precedent of those American railways, carried through waste places, which have speedily attracted population, and through population, wealth. In Asia there is no surplus population anywhere to attract. Moreover there are existing circ.u.mstances of misgovernment, which no system of railways can cure, and till these are changed, it is idle to hope for other changes. Railways in Europe or in America, serve the interests of the people. In Turkey or in Persia they would serve the interests of their rulers only.

That readers may judge what the actual condition is, of the lands lying between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, I have put in tabular form the amount of cultivated and uncultivated land, of pasture and desert, afforded by the various lines of route which have been suggested for a railway. These are:

1.-_The Palmyra Route_, 555 miles.

Miles.

Tripoli to Homs, partial cultivation 70 Homs to Palmyra, a pastoral desert 120 Palmyra to Hitt, uninhabited desert 250 Hitt to Seglawieh, partial cultivation 65 Seglawieh to Bagdad, alluvial plain, uncultivated, for 50 the most part uninhabited Total under partial cultivation 135 ,, desert or pastoral 420 Total 555

This route has nothing to recommend it except its shortness. It would pa.s.s through but one considerable town, Homs; it would serve no important agricultural district, and could count upon no local traffic. The greater part of its course is without water, fuel, inhabitants, or possibility of development. It would require considerable cutting and bridging (for ravines), and would have little strategical value.

2.-_The Euphrates Valley Route_, 625 miles.

Miles.

Lattakia or Alexandretta to Aleppo, cultivation 100 Aleppo to Deyr, pastoral 210 Deyr to Abu Camal, pastoral, partly cultivated 70 Abu Camal to Hitt, desert, with palm oases 130 Hitt to Seglawieh, partial cultivation 65 Seglawieh to Bagdad, alluvial plain, uncultivated, and 50 mostly uninhabited Total cultivated and partly cultivated 235 ,, desert or pastoral 390 Total 625

This line pa.s.ses through one town of eighty thousand inhabitants, Aleppo, and two small towns, Deyr and Ana, besides a few villages. It could count on very little local traffic; Deyr might export a little corn, Ana a few dates. Except in the northern portion it is not a sheep district.

It has the advantages of water and fuel, but these would be to a certain extent neutralised if, as is probable, the line should have to pa.s.s along the desert above, instead of in the valley. In either case the construction would not be without expense, the river with its inundations causing constant obstruction below; while the desert above, is much broken with ravines. It could hardly pay the whole of its working expenses. Its princ.i.p.al advantage is, that in case of its being continued from Seglawieh to Bussorah, some miles would be saved, or a branch line might be made to Kerbela. The Euphrates line is strategically of advantage to Turkey, mainly as a check on the Bedouin tribes.

3.-_The Mesopotamian or Tigris Valley Route_, 700 miles.

Miles.

Alexandretta or Lattakia to Aleppo, cultivation 100 Aleppo to Orfa, cultivation 120 Orfa to Mosul, by Mardin, partial cultivation 250 Mosul to Bagdad by the right bank of the Tigris, pastoral 230 Total cultivated and partly cultivated 470 ,, pastoral 230 Total 700

This line has the advantage of pa.s.sing through no absolutely desert district. It would be well watered throughout, and in the Tigris Valley would have a supply of fuel. It would, as far as Mosul, serve four large towns with an aggregate population of two hundred thousand inhabitants, besides numerous villages, and a nearly continuous agricultural population. Its stations would serve as depots for the produce of Upper Syria, Armenia, and Kurdistan from the north, and of a fairly prosperous pastoral district from the south. Below Mosul, however, there would be but two small towns, Samara, and Tekrit, and hardly a village. The engineering difficulties of this route, in spite of several small rivers besides the Euphrates (which all three lines would have to cross), would probably be less than in the others. Upper Mesopotamia is a more even plain than the Syrian Desert, and southwards is but little intersected with ravines. This route is strategically of immense importance to Turkey, and is perhaps the best. I would, however, suggest, that commercially, a better line would be from Mosul by Kerkuk to Bagdad.

This would continue through cultivated lands, and is the route recommended by the very intelligent Polish engineer, who surveyed it some years ago.

Beyond Bagdad the routes to the Persian Gulf would be-

1. Bagdad to Queyt by right bank of Euphrates, serving Kerbela, Meshhed Ali, and the district of Suk-esh-Shiokh (460 miles) or to Bussorah (400 miles).

This could be continued from Seglawieh, thereby saving fifty miles. It would serve two fairly flourishing agricultural districts, and should pa.s.s along the edge of the desert where the ground is nearly level.

Queyt is a good port as to anchorage, but has no commercial importance.

Bussorah is a river port much circ.u.mscribed by marshes.

2. Bagdad to Mohamra by the left bank of the Tigris (320 miles).

This would be a difficult line to make, on account of the marshes, and would pa.s.s through a nearly uninhabited country. It has no advantage but its shortness.

3. Bagdad to Bushire, along the edge of the Hamrin Hills to Dizful, then by Shustar, Ram Hormuz, and Dilam (570 miles).

This line would be an expensive one, on account of the six large rivers it would have to cross, but it presents no other engineering difficulties. It should keep close under the Hamrin Hills to avoid marshy ground near the river. It is uninhabited as far as Dizful, though the soil is good and well watered. Dizful and Shustar are important commercial towns, being the princ.i.p.al markets of South Western Persia; the district between them is well cultivated. Beyond Shustar to Dilam there is but one inhabited place, Ram Hormuz (or Ramuz). There are a few villages along the sh.o.r.e of the Persian Gulf to Bushire, but very little cultivation. This route might be shortened by taking a direct line from Ali Ghurbi on the Tigris to Dilam, but it would then pa.s.s wholly through uninhabited country, swampy in places. On the whole I prefer the Dizful-Shustar route, as having better commercial prospects. These towns would supply no little traffic. Bushire is an important place, and would make the best terminus for a railway on the Gulf. I cannot, however, recommend any of these lines south of Bagdad as commercially promising for a railway.

W. S. B.

[Picture: Rock inscriptions and drawings in Jebel Shammar]

FOOTNOTES.

{7} Abbas Pasha's Seglawieh is reported to have had two foals while in Egypt; one of them died, and the other was given to the late King of Italy, and left descendants, now in the possession of the present king.

{34} We measured one, a pollard, thirty-six feet round the trunk at five feet from the ground.

{41} Ra.s.sam, who has been digging at Babylon, informs me that these inscriptions are in the ancient Phnician character. It would seem that the Phnicians, who were a nation of shopkeepers, were in the habit of sending out commercial travellers with samples of goods all over Asia; and wherever they stopped on the road, if there was a convenient bit of soft rock, they scratched their names on it, and drew pictures of animals. The explanation may be the true one, but how does it come that these tradesmen should choose purely desert subjects for their artistic efforts-camels, ostriches, ibexes, and hors.e.m.e.n with lances. I should have fancied rather that these were the work of Arabs, or of whoever represented the Arabs, in days gone by, anyhow of people living in the country. But I am no archaeologist.

{50} It was to Taybetism that Abdallah ibn Saoud fled ten years ago when he was driven by his brother out of Aared, and from it that he sent that treacherous message to Midhat Pasha at Bagdad which brought the Turks into Hasa and broke up the Wahhabi Empire.

{57} Red is said to be the female and green the male, but some say all are green at first and become red afterwards.

{59} Compare Mr. Palgrave's account.

{63} Compare Fatalla's account of the war between the Mesenneh and the Dafir near Tudmor at the beginning of the present century.

{65} Belkis is the name usually given by tradition to the Queen of Sheba.

{67} I have since been told by dentists that the fact of a third set of teeth being cut in old age is not unknown to science.