having started from Basra. Amara must not be confused with Kut-el-Amara.
The names are a source of great confusion to newcomers. When I was told
that the railway did not go any further than Amara, I lightheartedly
pictured myself making my way across the river in a goufa or bellam and
scorned the suggestion that I might have to wait some time for a steamer
to Kut. I thought Kut was on one side of the river and Amara on the
other. It is, however, a twenty-four hours' journey in a fast boat.

It is perfectly true that the country is "as flat as a pancake" in
original formation, but the traces of ancient irrigation systems, to say
nothing of buried cities--Babylon is quite mountainous for
Mesopotamia--make it a very bumpy plain in places.

[Illustration: DAWN AT AMARA]

Now that the British are in occupation of the land instead of the Turk,
the natural assumption of every patriotic Briton is that the desert will
immediately blossom as the rose and the waste places become inhabited.
But the difficulties, which are many--finance being, perhaps, the least
of them--arise on all sides, when a study of the subject goes a little
deeper than the generalizations popularly made about irrigation and its
revival in a land which was once, before all things, dependent for its
prosperity upon this science.

Of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the banks of the
Euphrates are the more wooded and picturesque and the Tigris is the
busier. The backwaters, creeks and side channels of both are exceedingly
beautiful, and here one can get a glimpse of the fertility that must
have belonged to Mesopotamia when it was a network of streams and when
the forests abounded within its borders. Centuries of neglect and the