eated us well, and even sold me a Bible in Arabic and
Syrian (Chaldean).

In the northwesterly corner of the city the plateau falls off abruptly
toward the river. Here the water of the Tigris is raised by a
contrivance, which makes use of a high kind of derrick, leathern hose,
and a rope which is pulled by a horse. The long nozzle of the hose
empties into huge brick basins whence the water is distributed over
fields and gardens. But only the empty areas within the walls and the
fields adjacent to the city are cultivated. If only a fraction of all
the water rushing past Mossul could be used for irrigation purposes
this whole country would be one of the most fertile of the world. This
idea undoubtedly induced the people ages ago to build the powerful
stone dikes which hem in the course of the river a few hours above the
city. Surely, it would not be difficult to irrigate all the fields
from there, but the Arabs hovering about the city make the harvesting
of the crops too uncertain.

There is a bazaar especially for the Arabs immediately outside the
walls of Mossul, built there for the purpose of keeping these
suspicious characters from entering the city proper. Over the
confusion of many small mud-huts some slender palm trees rise to
majestic heights, the last ones of the desert. These palms are like
reeds grown to the proportions of trees. They are typical of the
south, and give confidence to the Arabs who seem to feel that they are
way up north and yet still in the land of the myrrh and the incense.
Here the children of the desert congregate and, pushing their
bamboo-spears into the sand--point down, squat on the ground to admire
the glory of a city--even though it be a city which affects the
European with the very opposite of glory, but which for hundreds of
miles has no equal.

Perhaps no people have preserved their character, customs, morals, and
speech as unchanged through centuries as the Arabs, and have done so
in spite of the most manifold changes in the world at large. They were
nomads, shepherds and hunters roving over little-known deserts, while
Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Persia, Rome and Byzantium rose and
fell. And then, inspired by one idea, these same nomads suddenly rose
in their turn and for a long time became the masters of the most
beautiful valley of the old world, and were the bearers of the then
civilization and science. One hundred years after the death of the
Prophet, his first followers, t