INLAND SAND PLAINS. 605 
are advancing to the north-west with a rapidity which seems 
fabulous when compared with the slow movement of the sand- 
hills of Gascony and the Low German coasts. Loftus, speak- 
ing of Niliyya, an old Arab town a few miles east of the ruins 
of Babylon, says that, “in 1848, the sand began to accumulate 
around it, and in six years, the desert, within a radius of six 
miles, was covered with little, undulating domes, while the ruins 
of the city were so buried that it is now impossible to trace 
their original form or extent.” * Loftus considers this sand- 
flood as the “ vanguard of those vast drifts which advancing from 
the south-east, threaten eventually to overwhelm Babylon and 
Baghdad.” 
An observation of Layard, cited by Loftus, appears to me 
to furnish a possible explanation of this irruption. He “ passed 
two or three places where the sand, issuing from the earth like 
water, is called ‘ Aioun-er-rummal, sand springs.” These 
“springs ” are very probably merely the drifting of sand from 
the ancient subsoil, where the protecting crust of aquatic de- 
posit and vegetable earth has been broken through, as in the 
case of the drift which arose from the upturning of an oak 
mentioned on a former page. When the valley of the Ku- 
phrates was regularly irrigated and cultivated, the underlying 
sands were bound by moisture, alluvial slime, and vegetation ; 
but now, that all improvement is neglected, and the surface, no 
longer watered, has become parched, powdery, and naked, a 
* Travels and Researches in Chaldea, chap. ix. 
Dwight mentions (Z’ravels, vol. iii., p. 101) an instance of great mischief 
from the depasturing of the beach grass which had been planted on a sand 
plain in Cape Cod: ‘‘ Here, about one thousand acres were entirely blown 
away to the depth, in many places, of ten feet. . . . Nota green thing was 
visible except the whortleberries, which tufted a few lonely hillocks rising to 
the height of the original surface and prevented by this defence from being 
blown away also. These, although they varied the prospect, added to the 
gloom by their strongly picturesque appearance, by marking exactly the origi- 
nal level of the plain, and by showing us in this manner the immensity of 
the mass which had been thus carried away by the wind. The beach grass 
had been planted here, and the ground had been formerly enclosed ; but the 
gates had been left open, and the cattle had destroyed this invaluable plant.” 
