it will prove a fruitful hunting-ground for archæologists. As far as I
could learn no serious excavating has hitherto been undertaken in the
vicinity.

The bazaars were well filled with goods of every sort. I picked up one or
two excellent rugs for very little, and a few odds and ends, dating from
Seleucid times, that had been unearthed by Arab laborers in their gardens
or brick-kilns. There were some truck-gardens in the outskirts, and we
traded fresh vegetables for some of our issue rations. There are few
greater luxuries when one has been living on canned foods for a long
time. I saw several ibex heads nailed up over the doors of houses. The
owners told me that they were to be found in the near-by mountains, but
were not plentiful. There is little large game left in Mesopotamia, and
that mainly in the mountains. I once saw a striped hyena. It is a
nocturnal animal, and they may be common, although I never came across but
the one, which I caught sight of slinking among the ruins of Istabulat,
south of Samarra, one evening when I was riding back to camp. Gazelle were
fairly numerous, and we occasionally shot one for venison. It was on the
plains between Kizil Robat and Kara Tepe that I saw the largest bands.
Judging from ancient bas-reliefs lions must at one time have been very
plentiful. In the forties of the last century Sir Henry Layard speaks of
coming across them frequently in the hill country; and later still, in the
early eighties, a fellow countryman, Mr. Fogg, in his _Land of the Arabian
Nights_, mentions that the English captain of a river steamer had recently
killed four lions, shooting from the deck of his boat. Rousseau speaks of
meeting, near Hit, a man who had been badly mauled by a lion, and was
going to town to have his wounds cared for. Leopards and bears are to be
met with in the higher mountain regions, and wild boars are common in many
districts. They inhabit the thickets along the river-banks, in country
that would permit of much sound sport in the shape of pig-sticking.