PARADISE LOST


The statement often made that Mesopotamia is a vast desert through which
run two great rivers, bare but for the palm trees on their banks and
flat as a pancake, is true as far as it goes. It is possible, however,
to picture a land entirely different from Mesopotamia and still stick to
this description. I have met countless men out there who have told me
that they had built up in their minds a wrong conception of the country
and a wrong idea of its character simply by letting their imagination
get to work on insufficient data.

To begin with, the word "desert" generally suggests sand. People who
have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara naturally picture a sandy waste
with its accompanying oases, palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is
a land of clay, of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames and Medway
saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every
direction--this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the riverside
country between Basra and Amara. No blue, limpid waters by Baghdad's
shrines of fretted gold, but pea-soup or _café au lait_. Even the
churned foam from a paddle wheel is _café au lait_ with what a
blue-jacket contemptuously referred to as "a little more of the _au
lait!_" At a distance it can be blue, gloriously blue, by reflection
from the sky, but it will not bear close examination.

The railway skirts the river here, running from Ezra Tomb to Amara