A Dweller in Mesopotamia | Page 9

and Euphrates. Not only has the Marsh Arab evolved a style of dwelling that can be built in a night, but he can boast of a device still more alluring in its naivity and utility--the Portable Village!
[Illustration: A MARSH ARAB REED VILLAGE]
I once made a sketch of a Marsh Arabs' village at evening (reproduced facing p. 34), and on returning thither on the following morning to verify certain details, I found it had gone! I succeeded in tracking it down again by the afternoon, about ten miles from its former situation, and found the mayor (or whatever the Marsh-Mesopotamian equivalent may be) inspecting the finishing touches being made to the borough. Of course it is frightfully muddling, all this moving about of villages, to the stranger who is not keeping a sharp look-out and marking well such impromptu geographical activity.
Along the shores of the rivers of Mesopotamia and in the innumerable lagoons and backwaters that abound can be found large areas of tall reeds, ranging from quite slight rushes to canes twenty feet high. It is with such material the Marsh Arab builds. The long rods he bends into arches like croquet hoops. On this skeleton, not unlike the ribs of a boat turned upside down, he stretches large mats woven out of rushes. At the ends he builds up a straight wall of reed straw bound up in flat sheaves. An opening is left for an entrance, a mat, sometimes of coloured material, doing duty for a door.
So much for the principal and removable part of the village. However, the town planner will add to this by improvising mud enclosures for animals, and an occasional wall and "tower." The mud is mixed with cut grass and reeds, quickly drying into a hard substance, and sufficiently permanent for anything that such a temporary village requires.
In the bright sunlight of the Mesopotamian plains, and probably also on account of their prominence at a distance over the flat land, some of these mud buildings look quite imposing. I remember once approaching a city with ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the most decrepit kind.
Great changes have been made in the rule of the waterways of Mesopotamia. Sinbad the Sailor has given place to Sinbad the Soldier, the Inland Water Transport.
We have learnt, as we were advised to do in regard to the things of Mesopotamia, to think amphibiously.
[Illustration: Noah's Ark, 1919.]

IV
THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST
[Illustration: Upward bound on the Tigris.]
[Illustration]

THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST
The story of Mesopotamia is a story of irrigation. "It is not improbable," writes Sir William Willcocks, the great irrigationist, "that the wisdom of ancient Chaldea had its foundations in the necessity of a deep mastery of hydraulics and meteorology, to enable the ancient settlers to turn what was partially a desert and partially a swamp into fields of world-famed fertility." The civilizations of Babylon and Assyria owed their very life to the science of watering the land, and even in the later times of Haroun Alraschid their great systems had been well maintained. It is said of Maim?n, the son and successor of this monarch, that he exclaimed, as he saw Egypt spread out before him, "Cursed be Pharaoh who said in his pride, 'Am I not Pharaoh, King of Egypt?' If he had seen Chaldea he would have said it with humility."
Allowing for a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration, the exclamation at least shows at what a high degree of excellence the irrigation system of Mesopotamia was maintained in the 10th century A.D. Yet Mesopotamia is to-day a desert except for the regions in the immediate vicinity of the rivers. You can go westwards from Baghdad to the Euphrates, and every mile or so you will have to cross earthworks, not unlike irregular railway embankments, showing a vast system of irrigation channels both great and small. But there is not a drop of water near and not a tree and no sign of any life. How came the change and how can such a network of channels have ceased to work entirely?
The reason is to be found in some past neglect of the ancient dams that kept the water on a high level, so that it could flow by means of artificial canals at a greater height (and consequently at a slower rate) than the rivers themselves. The Tigris and Euphrates are rivers fed by the melting snow in the mountains of Armenia. The hotter the season and the more necessary a plentiful supply of water, the greater is the amount brought down. The rivers, however, when they reach the flat alluvial plain between the region round about Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, when left to themselves are always bringing down a deposit