Now that the British are in occupation of the land instead of the Turk, the natural assumption 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.

[Illustration:  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 canals, 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