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.

[Illustration:  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 passages 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.”

[Illustration]

VI

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919

[Illustration:  GOUFAS ON THE TIGRIS]

[Illustration]

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 circumstantial 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.