Their country must have presented at the beginning very much the same aspect of disorder and neglect which it offers to modern eyes.  It was a flat interminable moorland stretching away to the horizon, there to begin again seemingly more limitless than ever, with, no rise or fall in the ground to break the dull monotony; clumps of palm trees and slender mimosas, intersected by lines of water gleaming in the distance, then long patches of wormwood and mallow, endless vistas of burnt-up plain, more palms and more mimosas, make up the picture of the land, whose uniform soil consists of rich, stiff, heavy clay, split up by the heat of the sun into a network of deep narrow fissures, from which the shrubs and wild herbs shoot forth each year in spring-time.  By an almost imperceptible slope it falls gently away from north to south towards the Persian Gulf, from east to west towards the Arabian plateau.  The Euphrates flows through it with unstable and changing course, between shifting banks which it shapes and re-shapes from season to season.

[Illustration:  025.jpg GIGANTIC CHALDAEAN REEDS]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief of the
     palace of Nimrud.

The slightest impulse of its current encroaches on them, breaks through them, and makes openings for streamlets, the majority of which are clogged up and obliterated by the washing away of their margins, almost as rapidly as they are formed.  Others grow wider and longer, and, sending out branches, are transformed into permanent canals or regular rivers, navigable at certain seasons.  They meet on the left bank detached offshoots of the Tigris, and after wandering capriciously in the space between the two rivers, at last rejoin their parent stream:  such are the Shatt-el-Hai and the Shatt-en-Nil.  The overflowing waters on the right bank, owing to the fall of the land, run towards the low limestone hills which shut in the basin of the Euphrates in the direction of the desert; they are arrested at the foot of these hills, and are diverted on to the low-lying ground, where they lose themselves in the morasses, or hollow out a series of lakes along its borders, the largest of which, Bahr-i-Nedjif, is shut in on three sides by steep cliffs, and rises or falls periodically with the floods.  A broad canal, which takes its origin in the direction of Hit at the beginning of the alluvial plain, bears with it the overflow, and, skirting the lowest terraces of the Arabian chain, runs almost parallel to the Euphrates.  In proportion as the canal proceeds southward the ground sinks still lower, and becomes saturated with the overflowing waters, until, the banks gradually disappearing, the whole neighbourhood is converted into a morass.  The Euphrates and its branches do not at all times succeed in reaching the sea:  they are lost for the most part in vast lagoons to which the tide comes up, and in its ebb bears their waters away with it.  Reeds grow there luxuriantly in enormous beds, and reach sometimes a height of from thirteen to sixteen feet; banks of black and putrid mud emerge amidst the green growth, and give off deadly emanations.  Winter is scarcely felt here:  snow is unknown, hoar-frost is rarely seen, but sometimes in the morning a thin film of ice covers the marshes, to disappear under the first rays of the sun.*