MESOPOTAMIA—WILLCOCKS. 405 
the waters rising 16 feet, as in an ordinary inundation, they rose 15 
cubits, or 24 feet, and not only was the cultivated land under water, 
but the deserts themselves were submerged. To men living in the 
Kuphrates Valley and in the valley of the Nile, the word “ jebel ” 
does not represent a hill, but the desert. In the English translation 
the word “ mountain ” represents something those people never saw. 
In the Arabic translation it is properly called the “jebel.” <A rise 
of water of 15 cubits could put no hill, leave alone a mountain, under 
water. 
While traveling in Upper Egypt I have often been asked by the 
less-informed sheikhs whether England was irrigated by basins or 
by water courses. On my replying that England had no irrigation at 
all, the remark has invariably been, “Then, how do the people live 
in the ‘ jebel? ?”—pronounced “ gebel” in Egypt. As director-gen- 
eral of land-tax adjustment in Egypt 1 was once valuing the lands in 
a large basin, in the middle of which was a small desert mound some 
2 acres in extent and 4 feet high. On my suggesting that we might 
ignore so insignificant a patch of land, I was told that you could not 
tax the “gebel.” Mentioning these facts to Colonel Ramsay, the 
British resident at Baghdad, and to Mr. Van Ess, the Basra mission- 
ary, who were traveling with me, and just then on a steamer in the 
Nejef marshes, we agreed to test the matter on the Euphrates. Ap- 
proaching Shinafia we saw the low degraded desert on the horizon, 
and asked our boatmen what that was. They immediately replied, 
“the jebel.” It was no more lke a hill than Ludgate Hill is ike a 
mountain. 
Floating off in all probability from near Kerbela, where one of the 
shrines of the patriarch very properly stands to-day, and driven by 
the current and the wind, both steady from the north, the ark drifted 
southward and wandered long in Chaldean marshes. Finally it 
touched land, probably somewhere near Ur of the Chaldees, on the 
edge of the desert. I say Ur of the Chaldees, because it is here that 
we find Terah, the father of Abraham and the representative of the 
patriarch’s family. I think readers of the Bible will agree with 
me that the representatives of the patriarchal families were a sta- 
tionary kind of people in place and habits. It was the Cains and 
Tubaleains who moved about, undertaking new pursuits and making 
discoveries. The fact that Abraham, the friend of God, should have 
wished to move made him a marked man, and earned him his name 
of Hebrew. 
Ararat was the name of the desert mound where the ark rested; 
and when the families of the younger sons of the patriarch moved off 
and made new settlements, they gave the name of Ararat to the 
highest mountain they knew in honor of the spot, where the ark 
