a flat interminable moorland stretching away to the horizon, there to
begin again seemingly more limitless than ever, with, no rise or fall in
the ground to break the dull monotony; clumps of palm trees and slender
mimosas, intersected by lines of water gleaming in the distance, then
long patches of wormwood and mallow, endless vistas of burnt-up plain,
more palms and more mimosas, make up the picture of the land, whose
uniform soil consists of rich, stiff, heavy clay, split up by the heat
of the sun into a network of deep narrow fissures, from which the
shrubs and wild herbs shoot forth each year in spring-time. By an almost
imperceptible slope it falls gently away from north to south towards
the Persian Gulf, from east to west towards the Arabian plateau. The
Euphrates flows through it with unstable and changing course, between
shifting banks which it shapes and re-shapes from season to season.

[Illustration: 025.jpg GIGANTIC CHALDÆAN REEDS]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief of the
palace of Nimrûd.

The slightest impulse of its current encroaches on them, breaks through
them, and makes openings for streamlets, the majority of which are
clogged up and obliterated by the washing away of their margins, almost
as rapidly as they are formed. Others grow wider and longer, and,
sending out branches, are transformed into permanent canals or regular
rivers, navigable at certain seasons. They meet on the left bank
detached offshoots of the Tigris, and after wandering capriciously in
the space between the two rivers, at last rejoin their parent stream:
such are the Shatt-el-Haî and the Shatt-en-Nil. The overflowing waters
on the right bank, owing to the fall of the land, run towards the
low limestone hills which shut in the basin of the Euphrates in the