The pilot made the land at Nizir and let her go aground.

Near Ezra's Tomb on the Tigris I saw a boat very much like Noah's ark of
the toy shop, and made a scribbled sketch of it, which is reproduced on
page 36.

[Illustration: HIT, KNOWN TO THE ARABS AS "THE MOUTH OF HELL"]

Beside the fertile tract of country above Hit on the Euphrates--a
land which has been identified as the Sumerian Garden of Eden--stretches
a wild and desolate region, a place of bitumen and smoke of incrusted
salt and sulphur, of rock and fiery heat--known to the Arabs as the
Mouth of Hell. It guards the garden from approach by the nature of its
inhospitable ground, and so I have called it, this burning wilderness,
the Desert of the Flaming Sword, The town of Hit, evil smelling and
grim, stands sentinel between the fertile river-bank and the
ever-smoking plain.

We reached this region in a car from Felujeh, travelling through
Dhibban, where we crossed the Euphrates by a bridge of boats and on to
Rhamadie. Thence the track is a rough one through desert country,
undulating in places and becoming rougher. Some ridges of barren hill
cut off the view from time to time as we approach Hit, and we surmount
one of these, obtaining a goodly prospect of the river, to plunge down
again into a wilderness glittering with crystals. At first sight we
might be entering the valley of diamonds of the Arabian Nights, but,
alas, a close inspection shows the glittering objects to be merely
pieces of rock, a sort of white marble. Then we come to mounds of
curious pale earth and ground yellow with sulphur, and then, far
descried beneath its black coils of smoke, the walls of Hit.