KINGDOMS OF THE PAST. 



The vastness of it lills you with awe, the silence 

 and absence of life weigh heavily upon you, the 

 hovering vulture and the staring white skeleton of 

 pony or camel speak only of death. Everything is 

 so real and so stern, you feel that to smile or to 

 laugh would be impossible in these surroundings ; the 

 inexorable reality of life and death is on all sides 

 forced upon you. These are the lands where you 



" Fold your tents like the Arabs, 

 And as silently steal away." 



But even the desert has an end, and haltingly at 

 first and then with more confidence signs of humanity 

 reappear. The waters of a great river roll placidly 

 by, the most priceless blessing in a thirsty and dry 

 land. The bleak steppe-land is behind, and before 

 you rise the remnants of mighty nations. The glory 

 and magnificence, it is true, are of the past ; the 

 present is squalid in comparison with what was. 

 But the mounds beneath which lie buried all that 

 remains of a remote antiquity stand imperishable wit- 

 nesses of the splendour of a bygone age. Two thou- 

 sand five hundred years ago Nineveh, the gorgeous 

 capital of the Assyrian empire, fell never to rise 

 again ; but the vast mass of debris which is to be 

 seen on the left bank of the Tigris to-day is an 

 object far more imposing than the collection of high- 

 walled houses and narrow tortuous alleys, which make 

 Mossul on the right bank a city of the unregenerate 

 East. To the south the ruins of ancient Babylon tell 

 of an age so remote as to bewilder the brain as it 

 tries to gaze down the dim vistas of time at the 

 achievements of a highly civilised race six thousand 

 years ago, or peers uncertainly into that earlier period 

 which hovers darkly through a legendary haze, when 



