“Effendi, your terumbil is ready.” Thus did a young Arab inform me that the automobile which was to take us to Babylon was at the door of the Carmelite monastery.
Barely have a few words so thrilled me as did these then pronounced by the bronze-visaged son of the desert. They meant so much to me—far more than the simple words would seem to imply. They meant that we were at last near the final objective of our long and eventful journey; that, in a few hours, we should be contemplating the world-famed ruins of Babylon; that in, the short journey from the romantic capital of Harun-al-Rashid to the historic city of Nebuchadnezzar we should traverse a land which has long been celebrated in story and legend as the cradle of our race.
When we attempted to cross the swaying pontoon bridge which separates Bagdad proper from its old suburb on the right bank of the Tigris, we found our passage blocked for a while by the heterogeneous crowd of men and women and the long train of burdened donkeys and camels that were headed for the shops and the bazaars of the old capital of the Caliphs. But we welcomed this delay as it gave us an opportunity to study a scene which, during our wanderings along the river front of the city, had always possessed for us a special fascination.
Here were assembled the strange and varied craft for which the Tigris is so noted. Among them was the steam side-wheeler which brings freight and passengers from the port of Basra on the Shat-al-Arab. There were also tugs and barges and lighters of other varieties of modern craft familiar to people of the West. Scattered among these were numerous mahailas, those primitive and picturesque boats so much used by the Arabs in the navigable parts of the Tigris and Euphrates. With their pointed prows, high masts, and lateen sails, they are not unlike the dahabiyehs of the Nile or simplified forms of the fast-sailing felucca and xebec once so much used by the pirates of Barbary. Alongside of them were countless specimens of that long, canoe-shaped boat called by the Arabs the bellum—which in the narrow canals in and around Basra serves the same purpose as the gondola in Venice. The bellum, to judge from certain bas-reliefs found among the ruins of Nimroud, is but a slight modification of the type of boat which Sennacherib employed in his fleet during his celebrated campaign against the Elamits. But a far more singular craft than any of those mentioned is the kufa. Its frame is woven of willows or the split branches of the date palm and, like the Ark of Noah, is “pitched within and without with pitch” which is procured from the hot, bitumen springs of Hit, on the Euphrates. It is circular in form and looks like a large cauldron with its brim turned inwards. Their great number at Bagdad and the way which they are made to rotate among the other boats are always sure to attract attention. They are used as ferryboats in crossing the river and for carrying freight and passengers to and from the city and the adjoining country. Herodotus tells us that, after the city itself, these curious craft surprised him more than anything that he saw in Babylon. In form and size they are similar to the coracle in which St. Brendan is said to have made his famous voyage from Ireland to America, long centuries before Columbus “to Castile and Leon gave a New World.”
But few keleks are seen among the numberless boats that dot the Tigris at Bagdad. The reason is simple. As soon as they arrive from Mosul and Diarbeker their wooden frameworks are sold for fuel, for which they fetch a good price, while the deflated skins are returned to the places whence they came to be again used in the construction of other keleks.
Nowhere in the world can one see so great a variety of river crafts as at Bagdad, or styles of vessels which have remained unchanged for so many thousands of years. For here one finds everything from the raftlike slow-floating kelek to the swift, surface-skimming glisseur which, with a powerful engine, is capable of making a speed of more than forty miles an hour. The kelek and the kufa represent the high-water mark of the shipwright’s achievements two thousand years before our era, while the glisseur is but one of the many triumphs of the marine engineers of the twentieth century of the era in which we live. Forty centuries separate the two creations and yet they are both seen here side by side—one typifying the changeless East and the other the ever-progressive West.
After the congested traffic on the bridge had diminished sufficiently to allow us to pass, we took the stage road that leads to Hillah and Babylon. There was nothing to detain us in West Bagdad for of the old Round City of Mansur not a vestige is now visible. Many travelers make a detour to get a near view of the noted Kazimayn mosque but, as the fanatical Shiahs do not allow a Christian to enter this sacred shrine, I was satisfied with the view I had had of it through my field glass from the summit of the lofty old minaret of Souk-El-Ghazl.
Neither did we go to see that other lion on the western bank of the Tigris—the much lauded tomb of Zobeide, who occupies so conspicuous a place in Thousand and One Nights and in many Arabian chronicles. With the renowned Arabian queens Zenobia and the Queen of Sheba, Zobeide will always live in story and legend as one of the most prominent figures of the East. According to an Eastern tradition, she shares with the mythical Sultana Scheherazade the honor of having composed those fascinating tales known as “The Arabian Nights.” We did not visit the crumbling monument which is said to contain her tomb, for the simple reason that it has been proved beyond doubt that this was never the last resting place of Harun-al-Rashid’s favorite wife and was never considered to be so until nearly nine hundred years after her death.
A few short hours after leaving the city of the Caliphs we were in the heart of the broad alluvial plain of Babylonia. But there was little to attract our attention except the countless mounds that dotted the broad expanse of level land and covered all that remained of once flourishing towns and cities. With the exception of a few palms here and there along some old irrigating canal this extensive region was almost as treeless as the desert sections of northern Mesopotamia. Outside of an occasional reed hut or black tent—the humble homes of Bedouin Arabs—we saw but few human habitations in a land that during thousands of years was as thickly populated and as carefully cultivated as Holland or the valley of the Rhine.
Once we met a small caravan of pilgrims coming from far-distant Mecca and Medina. Although travel worn by their long journey through the burning sands of Arabia they seemed, nevertheless, to be a very joyous company. They were happy in the thought of having complied with the precept of the Koran which requires that every one of the Faithful shall, if at all possible, make a pilgrimage, at least once in his lifetime, to the venerated shrines which enclose the Kaaba and the tomb of the Prophet. Even