ere are a few showers at the
changes of the season, and, in winter, a few days of heavy rain. During the
summer, for long months together, the sky remains inexorably blue while the
temperature is hot and parching. In winter, clouds are almost as rare; but
winds often play violently over the great tracts of unbroken country. When
these blow from the south they soon lose their warmth and humidity at the
contact of a soil which, but a short while ago, was at the bottom of the
sea, and is, therefore, in many places still strongly impregnated with salt
which acts as a refrigerant.[19] Again, when the north wind comes down from
the snowy summits of Armenia or Kurdistan, it is already cold enough, so
that, during the months of December and January, it often happens that the
mercury falls below freezing point, even in Babylonia. At daybreak the
waters of the marshes are sometimes covered with a thin layer of ice, and
the wind increases the effect of the low temperature. Loftus tells us that
he has seen the Arabs of his escort fall benumbed from their saddles in the
early morning.[20]

It is, then, upon the streams, and upon them alone, that the soil has to
depend for its fertility; all those lands to which they never reach are
doomed to barrenness and death. It is fortunate for the prosperity of the
country through which they flow, that the Tigris and Euphrates swell and
rise annually from their beds, not indeed like the Nile, almost on a stated
day, but ever in the same season, about the commencement of spring. Without
these periodical floods many parts of the plain of Mesopotamia would be
beyond the reach of irrigation, but their regular occurrence allows water
to be stored in sufficient quantities for use during the months of drought.
To obtain the full advantage of this precious capital, the inhabitants
must, however, take more care and expend more labour than is necessary in
Egypt. The rise of the Euphrates and of the Tigris is neither so slow nor
so regular as that of the Nile. The waters do not spread so gently over the
soil, neither do they stay upon it so long;[21] since they have been
abandoned to themselves as they are at present, a great part of them are
lost, and, far from rendering a service to agriculture, they turn vast
regions into dangerous hot-beds of infection.

It was to the west of the double basin that the untoward effects of the
territorial conformation were chiefly felt. The valley of the Euphrates is
n