on the bouquets of broad leaves with their
centre of yellow dates; upon the cereals and other useful and ornamental
plants growing under their gentle shade, and forming a carpet for the rich
and sumptuous vegetation above. Around the villages perched upon their
mounds the orchards spread far and wide, carrying the scent of their orange
trees into the surrounding country, and presenting, with their masses of
sombre foliage studded with golden fruit, a picture of which the eye could
never grow weary.

No long series of military disasters was required to destroy all this
charm; fifty years, or, at most, a century, of bad administration was
enough.[24] Set a score of Turkish pachas to work, one after the other, men
such as those whom contemporary travellers have encountered at Mossoul and
Bagdad; with the help of their underlings they will soon have done more
harm than the marches and conflicts of armies. There is no force more
surely and completely destructive than a government which is at once idle,
ignorant, and corrupt.

With the exception of the narrow districts around a few towns and villages,
where small groups of population have retained something of their former
energy and diligence, Mesopotamia is now, during the greater part of the
year, given over to sterility and desolation. As it is almost entirely
covered with a deep layer of vegetable earth, the spring clothes even its
most abandoned solitudes with a luxuriant growth of herbs and flowers.
Horses and cattle sink to their bellies in the perfumed leafage,[25] but
after the month of May the herbage withers and becomes discoloured; the
dried stems split and crack under foot, and all verdure disappears except
from the river-banks and marshes. Upon these wave the feathery fronds of
the tamarisk, and in the stagnant or slowly moving water which fills all
the depressions of the soil, aquatic plants, water-lilies, rushes, papyrus,
and gigantic reeds spring up in dense masses, and make the low-lying
country look like a vast prairie, whose native freshness even the sun at
its zenith has no power to destroy. Everywhere else nature is as dreary in
its monotony as the vast sandy deserts which border the country on the
west. In one place the yellow soil is covered with a dried, almost
calcined, stubble; in another, with a grey dust which rises in clouds
before the slightest breeze; in the neighbourhood of the ancient townships
it has received a reddish hue from the quantity