. In the morning I
was roused and informed that six workmen had been secured. Twenty
minutes' walk brought us to the principal mound. Broken pottery and
fragments of brick, inscribed with cuneiform characters, were strewn on
all sides. With joy I found the fragment of a bas-relief. Convinced that
sculptured remains must still exist in some parts of the mound, I sought
for a place where excavations might be commenced with some prospects of
success. Awad led me to a piece of alabaster which appeared above the
soil. We could not remove it, and on digging downward it proved to be
the upper part of a large slab. I ordered the men to work around it, and
shortly we uncovered a second slab.

One after another, thirteen slabs came to light, the whole forming a
square, with a slab missing at one corner. We had found a chamber, and
the gap was at its entrance. I now dug down the face of one of the
stones, and a cuneiform inscription was soon exposed to view. Leaving
half the workmen to remove the rubbish from the chamber, I led the rest
to the south-west corner of the mound, where I had observed many
fragments of calcined alabaster.

A trench, opened in the side of the mound, brought me almost immediately
to a wall, bearing inscriptions in the same character. Next day, five
more workmen having joined, before evening the work of the first party
was completed, and I found myself in a room panelled with slabs about
eight feet high, and varying from six to four feet in breadth.

Some objects of ivory, on which were traces of gold leaf had been found
by Awad in the ruins, and these I told him to keep, much to his
surprise. But word had already been sent to the pasha of all details of
my doings. When I called on him he pretended at first to be ignorant of
the excavations, but presently, as if to convict me of prevarication in
my answers to his questions as to the amount of treasure discovered,
pulled out of his writing-tray a scrap of paper in which was an almost
invisible particle of gold leaf. This, he said, had been brought to him
by the commander of the irregular troops at Selamiyah, who had been
watching my proceedings.

I suggested that he should name an agent to be present as long as I
worked at Nimroud, to take charge of all the precious metals that might
be discovered. He promised to write on the subject to the chief of the
irregulars, but offered no objection to the continuation of my
researches. I returned to Nimroud on t