it was stranded on the top of a mountain.  He came out of the ship with his wife, daughter, and pilot, built an altar, and sacrificed to the gods, after which he disappeared together with them.  When his companions came out to seek him they did not see him, but a voice from Heaven informed them that he had been translated among the gods to live for ever, as a reward for his piety and righteousness.  The voice went on to command the survivors to return to Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings, and make them known to men.  They obeyed, and, moreover, built many cities and restored Babylon.[3]

An eminent authority on the history of Mesopotamia told me that he considered the deluge to have been a purely local catastrophe in the flat land of Babylonia.  The Arabs use the same word alternately for mountain or desert.  If such a use has come down from long ago the extraordinary statements in Genesis vii. 20:  “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered,” may be easily reconciled.  It has always seemed to me that mountains which were covered by 24 feet of water must have looked very insignificant even in the flat land of Chaldea.  If, however, the word “desert” will serve equally well for the word “mountain” we have an account of a flood that could easily destroy the “world” of Mesopotamia.  The annual flood from which the nomadic inhabitants were used to escaping (as they do now by moving up to the higher ground) became a wide-spread inundation till the highest “desert” was covered and the population drowned.

The Biblical account of the Ark suggests to any dweller in Mesopotamia that it was a gigantic mahaila.  The pitching inside and out is still practised in putting together some of the Euphrates boats, and the method of making a goufa, covering it on both sides with bitumen, has a strong family likeness to the method of boat-building used in those primitive times.

The Jew, however, was always a typical landlubber, and one would expect a specification for the building of a ship would lack nautical details.  Not so, however, the Assyrian tablet relating to the Ark.  It was, we are told, a true ship.  It was decked in.  It was well caulked in all its seams.  It was handed over to a pilot.  It was navigated in proper style.  “I steered about the sea.  The corpses drifted about like logs.  I opened a port-hole....  I steered over countries which were now a terrible sea.”  The pilot made the land at Nizir and let her go aground.

Near Ezra’s Tomb on the Tigris I saw a boat very much like Noah’s ark of the toy shop, and made a scribbled sketch of it, which is reproduced on page 36.

[Illustration:  HIT, KNOWN TO THE ARABS AS “THE MOUTH OF HELL”]

Beside the fertile tract of country above Hit on the Euphrates—­a land which has been identified as the Sumerian Garden of Eden—­stretches a wild and desolate region, a place of bitumen and smoke of incrusted salt and sulphur, of rock and fiery heat—­known to the Arabs as the Mouth of Hell.  It guards the garden from approach by the nature of its inhospitable ground, and so I have called it, this burning wilderness, the Desert of the Flaming Sword, The town of Hit, evil smelling and grim, stands sentinel between the fertile river-bank and the ever-smoking plain.