silence.

A JOURNEY TO MOSSUL

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[This is the forty-third letter of Moltke's Letters from Turkey, and
is dated from Dshesireh on the Tigris, May 1, 1838.]

I told you in my last letter that we should be going on an expedition
against the Arabs. This did not materialize. Nevertheless, I had the
opportunity of making the acquaintance of a very interesting part of
the country. On April 15, von Muehlbach, I, and two fully armed _agas_
of the pasha, together with our servants and dragomans, embarked on a
vessel built in a style well known even in the times of Cyrus, a raft
supported by inflated sheep-skins. The Turks look upon hunting as a
sin, they despise venison and beef, but eat an enormous quantity of
sheep and goats. The skins of these animals are cut in front as little
as possible and removed from the carcass with great care. Then they
are sewed up and the extremities tied up. When the skin is inflated
(which is done quickly and without touching the skin to the mouth) it
is exceedingly buoyant and can hardly be made to sink. From forty to
sixty such bags are tied together in four or five rows under a light
framework of branches. There generally are eight skins in front and
eighteen in the back. The whole is covered with a litter of leaves
over which rugs and carpets are spread. Taking your seat on these you
glide downstream with utmost comfort. Because the current is swift,
oars are not needed for progress, but only for steering the raft,
keeping it in the middle of the course, and avoiding the dangerous
rapids. On account of these rapids we had to tie up every night
until the moon was up, but in spite of this we covered the distance,
which by land would have taken us eighty-eight hours, in three and
one-half days. The river, therefore, must flow with an average
velocity of almost four miles per hour. In places it is much swifter,
and in others decidedly slower.

The Tigris leaves the mountains near Argana-Maaden, and flows past the
walls of Diarbekir, where it is apt to cause slight inundations in
summer time. It then receives the Battman river flowing in a southerly
direction from the high Karsann-Mountains and carrying more water into
the Tigris than this river contained before. Immediately after the
union of these two rivers the Tigris enters another mountainous
territory formed of sandstone. The gentle curves of the broad and
shallow river are transformed into the