72 THE LANDS OF THE TIGRIS. 



hoar ruins of the past I fall an easy victim to the spell 

 of antiquity. For we have a strange reverence for all 

 that is old. As I finger some tablet or cylinder of 

 clay scored with the curious dashes of the cuneiform 

 alphabet telling a tale of the past, and realise that 

 I am handlinof the actual handiwork of some monarch 

 who reigned five thousand years ago, which has lain 

 silent in the earth while nations have come and gone, 

 to hand his fame through the ages to a wondering 

 posterity, I am conscious of an extreme fascination. 

 And now as I wandered among the mounds of Nineveh 

 and Babylon, and trod in the courts of Esarhaddon 

 and Nebuchadnezzar, I dreamed dreams of the glory of 

 their day, reconstructed the palaces and temples of 

 their monarchs and their gods, and pictured dimly to 

 myself " how the world looked when it was fresh and 

 young, and the great deluge still had left it green." 

 And when I returned to earth again and gazed on the 

 great piles of debris where stood great cities, the 

 pathos of decay swept over me, and I bowed before 

 the inexorable power of the destroyer Time. For here, 

 as elsewhere. Time sadly overcometh all things, and 

 amid such surroundings the poetic lines of Sir Thomas 

 Brown held a stran^-e charm for me : — 



Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant and 

 sitteth on a sphinx and looketh into Memphis and old Thebes, 

 while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid 

 gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and 

 turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh, beneath her 

 cloud. The traveller as he paceth through those deserts asketh 

 of her who builded them ? And she mumbleth something, but 

 what it is he heareth not. 



But to leave generalities and descend to particulars, 

 the great mounds of Koyunjik and Nebi Yunus, which 

 rise within the colossal earthern ramparts that mark 



