the Tower of Babel, but of some newfangled building raised by Nebuchadnezzar on its site.1 On historic ground he measured values largely by antiquity. We found the Germans already at Babylon. They had hardly begun to scratch. The double gate of Ishtar, with its brick reliefs of bulls and dragons, was then unrevealed. There was little to catch the eye of the uninitiated beyond the headless lion standing over its human victim. It is still there, but elevated sixty feet above the foundations by the delving all round. At Babylon I longed to be an Assyriologist, to decipher inscriptions, and to confound the higher criticism. I envied the excavator. I could understand how to the few who can read the records in cuneiform this dead land must be intensely living. Half the bricks we stumbled over were inscribed with the stamp of Nebuchadnezzar. The surface of the land is monotonous and uninspiring, but the archæologist finds his harvest underground. His companions are the Babylonians. He knows all about their social system, their large co-operative societies of women, the administration of temple endowments, the rites observed in the temple of the Sun God, the relations between the priests and the people. He could roll off the names of the most trustworthy mercantile houses in Babylon during the reign of Esarhaddon or Nebuchadnezzar. He can read the survey tables of Khammurabi; his inventories of cattle and sheep; lists of provisions for his workmen and slaves; the catalogue of the plants in his botanical gardens ; orders as to the preservation of fishing rights; the repair of canal banks; the transport of goddesses and their women attendants from Elam to Babylon; the movements of troops, such as the transfer of men from the garrison of the city to a ship lying at Ur. There is a letter from Khammurabi to Sin-idinnam, Governor of Larsa, ordering him to cut down a certain number of abba-trees for use by smelters of metal; only well-grown and vigorous trees are to be felled. A baker is to be restored by the King's command to his former position. An inquiry is to be made into a case of bribery; the bribe-money to be confiscated and sent to the King in Babylon. Witnesses are summoned to court, mortgage deeds inquired into, the repayment of a loan to a merchant is enforced with interest. The King looks closely into audit accounts and inventories. Thus the excavator resurrects the past. For him all these people live. They are in a way his creations. Their triumphs and reverses have more interest for him, as he pieces their story together, than 1 The Tower of the Seven Planets, built by Nebuchadnezzar II. (B. c. 604-568). the résumé of events in Reuter. There are gaps in the story he is anxious to fill, and his copy of The Weekly Times' is laid aside for news that touches him more nearly. At Nippur, perhaps, he has found a broken clay envelope with a missive beside it. It is an appeal from a general on the borders of Zagros or Elam, hard-pressed by the enemy. There is sedition in his camp; the tribes behind him are disaffected; he is shouting out for reinforce ments. Unless a river fleetHere the message ends. An unrelated bit of history. Were the troops dispatched in time? Was the province saved for the empire An eternity of digging and deciphering may not solve these doubts. Yet the safety of the general has become almost a personal affair. The archæologist grows to think of him as some Babylonian Gordon. Years afterwards, perhaps, in a different scene, at Borsippa or Lagash, in the Louvre or the British Museum, he may find the clue. The enemy has been trodden down; their gods are being carried to Babylon; the traitors are in chains. The excavator is glad that his Babylonian general has made good. The voice he has been listening for has come to him across forty centuries; he is probably the only soul, in the last twenty-nine centuries at least, who would have heard in it a human cry. I envied the excavator. He was not only a scholar but a discoverer. A detective on a grand scale. Sherlock Holmes would have been happy with these problems. I had the dilettante's immense respect for erudition. But I must confess that there were other influences contributory to my envy. The picture in my mind as we turned our backs on Babylon was not of a pale and cloistered student, but of a brown neck and hands and knees. I could dedicate myself to erudition in the open air, but not in cities. This excavator would be equally wise and ten times more free than the pedant who worked in a museum or library. Incidentally he would possess a horse and a gun. One-half of my mind was with Khammurabi and Sin-idinnam, but the pagan half was counting heads. Now if one could start again and be an Assyriolo I was thinking of the glorious sand-grouse shooting one would have on the Euphrates. When we returned to Baghdad I had not made up my mind what route I was going to take home. As usual, financial necessities decided the ques XI. tion. We had been travelling en prince; I had still some purchases to make in Baghdad, and I was dangerously near the end of my funds. The worst thing that could happen would be that I should have to cable home for money. That would be to admit defeat. Everything pointed to the caravan road to Damascus, which leaves the Euphrates at Deir-ez-Zor and passes through Tadmor, the ancient Palmyra. This is a journey of 600 miles, and one might have to wait a month for a caravan. It looked as if I would have to walk home from Beirut. But chance again was sympathetic. I came to hear of a more direct way to Damascus. It was possible to make the journey from Baghdad by the camel-post in ten days. The Turkish Government used to send a man across with the mail every week. No parcels or valuables were carried, and the Bedouin sheikhs received a consideration to let him pass, for the tribes on the Euphrates side, and again as one approaches Lebanon, are notoriously predatory. The subsidy only covered the postrider and his mail-bags; if one accompanied him it was at one's own risk. I made secret arrangements with this man, who engaged to take me with him and to provide a camel for ten Turkish pounds. Officially a traveller with the post was not even winked at, so I ceased to frequent the Residency and the Consulates during my last days in Baghdad. The post-rider travelled alone. There was no track, of course, and at night he guided himself by the stars. Between Hitt and Dumeir on the Syrian side there might, or there might not, be water; and if there was water it was easy to miss it. However, one carried one's own, and if one missed the wells, or they were dried up, the camel had to go thirsty. A special breed of dromedaries were trained for the post by the man who had the contract. After the journey they were given six days' rest. Splendid, tireless, ascetic beasts! Mine had only one drink in the seven days between Hitt and Dumeir, and all that time we were riding eighteen hours out of twentyfour, allowing only six hours for hurried meals and rest. My camel's abstinence was not the penalty of drought; for the first week in January, when we left Baghdad, succeeded the heaviest rainfall in the year. All the wells were full, but it was wise to avoid them. The dry season would have been safer for my journey. Where there is water there will be Bedouin-that is to say, cut-throats and thieves. I do not use the words in a disparaging sense, for the calling in the conditions of life in which the Bedouin finds himself is as honest as many of higher repute. Damascus is 360 miles from Hitt as the crow flies, and 473 miles from Baghdad; but we must have made some wild detours to avoid the Bedouin encampments by the waterholes. My enduring beast owed his one and only drink to a masterly piece of strategy on the part of Moussa, my old they took us for their own people. If we had passed in daylight half an hour earlier we must have been seen; half an hour later the flare of our I think Moussa ran the risk for the sake of the camels. Otherwise he would have given the Anazeh a wider berth. camel-man. We rode more be challenged, but no doubt than eighteen hours on the day we struck the well. Moussa ate his midday meal on the camel, and signalled to me to do the same, pointing menacingly to the horizon, which fire would have betrayed us. always seemed to be rimmed with moving unaccountable shapes, and drawing the edge of his palm slowly across his throat. He even said his prayers on his camel, and I knew that this was a bad sign. An hour before sunset we reached the pool, and watered our camels. This was the time that we generally halted and prepared our evening meal of rice and dates, which I always shared with him; but, famished and exhausted as we were, he insisted on pushing on. He pulled up an hour later under the brow of a hill, and hastily scrubbed up an armful of camel - thorn and lighted a fire. In half an hour it was dark, and we had finished our meal. Moussa carefully stamped out the embers, and we mounted again. I discovered then that Moussa had chosen the sandhill under which we had sheltered as a screen between us and the Bedouin. From the top of the rise we looked down on the camp-fires of a mighty host of the Anazeh, stretching a mile or more to the north and south of our course. We threaded that camp with the fires on either side of us, passing near enough to the tents of the Bedouin to hear their talk and laughter. I expected every moment to But we did not escape them. Twice or thrice on that journey the moving unaccountable shapes descended on us out of the mirage. They took my camel and some of my food and clothing, and gravely debated whether they should take my life. It was a long and rather a grim parley, and, though I knew no Arabic, I had no doubt as to the turn it was taking. Moussa told me in Damascus that the councillors were divided, and that I owed my life to him. This may or may not have been true in the literal sense of the word. The old man may have believed it, but I rather doubt it, though I certainly owed my camel to him, which the Bedouin restored; and on a desert journey one's camel or one's life may amount to the same thing. On the morning of the day when we reached Dumeir we entered the first pasturage of Syria. I was almost unconscious with cold and exhaustion, but again Moussa refused to halt for our morning meal. He pointed to the black tents of the Bedouin in a valley under the spurs of Anti-Leb anon, an immense distance off. But I was obstinate. A pantomime of gestures ensued on my attempts to make my camel kneel. Moussa was trying to explain that even if the Bedouin had observed us and were following, we could yet reach Dumeir before we were overtaken; whereas if we halted. But I had reached a point of indifference to the Bedouin and everything else beyond the crying needs of numbed and cramped joints and an empty inside. These refractory members were in a state of revolution. I might be robbed; I might even be knocked on the head, though I was always ingenuously sceptical on this point. In the meanwhile I was going to lie down for half an hour beside a crackling fire, and warm and fortify the inner and outer man. Old Moussa had to reconcile himself to my obstinacy in the matter, though not in the manner, of refreshment. After some gurgling remonstrances, not unlike the protests of his camel, he turned his beast's head towards the Bedouin's camp and beckoned me to follow him. Half an hour later we were the guests of the Anazeh. They entertained us hospitably. The sheikh was a conspicuous aristocrat. In the easy way he carried his authority he reminded me of the sheikh who rode up to us when we were captured and called off his canaille, who were rifling our camel-bags, as if they were a pack of hounds. He was a genial host, and gave us the best breakfast we had had since we left Baghdad. I could see that Moussa was amusing him with stories of my eccentricities. No doubts regarding my safety entered my head. All that I had heard about the sacrosanctity of the guest among the Bedouin was being put to the test. The laws of hospitality held good. There was the other side of the code, of course, according to which it is lawful to follow up the parting guest in the manner of the Pathan and to put a bullet through him when he is outside the perimeter of hospitable obligations. But I was confident that I was among people with whom this was 66 not done." I had very little knowledge of the world then ; but I still believe in those Bedouin, though my notions of comparative ethics are more elastic than they were. I should have liked to have heard Moussa's opinion on the point. He approached the Bedouin camp with incomplete confidence, and no doubt he had his reasons. My staunch old guide, to whom I owed my safe conduct in this journey across the desert, was murdered a few years afterwards by the Dulaim. I heard the story when I was at Hitt with the Euphrates column in 1918. Moussa was returning from Damascus with a contractor who had sold a large convoy of camels, and who was believed to be carry |