IRRIGATION. 17 



silted up, the river ate away the feeder canal at the site of the regulator whose ruins 

 to-day are in the bed of the river, and again ate away the main Nahrawan itself 



between the seventieth and eightieth kilometers. The ruin was complete. Feeble 

 hands did what they could to repair the disaster. The Beldai dam across the Dyala 

 was strengthened and the head of the Nahrawan Canal was removed to its one hun- 

 dred and fifty-second kilometer. The feeble supplies of the Dyala River could alone 

 be depended on, the Tigris gave no aid from its ample waters, and a once flourish- 

 ing and world-renowned region became a desert. The ruin on the wot bank was 

 equally great. The weirs which had held up the waters of the Tigris in order to 

 feed the canals were turned and the mighty canals dwindled away into the feeble 

 watercourses of to-day. Commander Felix Jones well observes: ''The summit of 

 Opis, as we gaze around, affords a picture of wreck that could scarcely be conceived 

 if it were not spread at the feet of the beholder. Close to us are the dismembered 

 walls of the great city, and many other mounds of adjacent edifices spread like islands 

 over the vast plain, which is as bare of vegetation as a snow tract and smooth and 

 glass-like as a calm sea. This appearance of the country denotes that some sudden 

 and overwhelming mass of water must have prostrated everything in its way. while 

 the Tigris, as it anciently flowed, is seen to have left its channel and to have taken 

 its present course through the most flourishing portion of the district, severing in its 

 mad career the neck of the great Nahrawan artery, and spreading devastation over 

 the whole district around. Towns, villages, and canals, men, animals, and cultiva- 

 tion must thus have been engulfed in a moment, but the immediate loss was doubtless 

 small compared with the misery and gloom that followed. The whole region for 

 a space of 4'cO kilometers, averaging about 30 kilometers in breadth, was dependent 

 on the conduit for water, and contained a population so dense, if we may judge 

 from the ruins and the great works traversing it in its whole extent, that no spot on 

 the globe perhaps could excel it.*' 



Of those who were spared to witness the sad effects of the disaster, thousands, 

 perhaps millions, had to fly to the banks of the Tigris for the immediate preservation 

 of life, as the region at once became a desert where before were animation and 

 prosperity. The ruin of the Nahrawan is indeed the great blow the country has 

 received. Its severity must have created universal stupor, and was doubtless fol- 

 lowed by pestilence and famine of unmitigated rigor, owing to the marshes which 

 accumulated annually in the absence of the dams on each spring rise of the river. 



It is interesting to read what the trained imagination of Mr. Will- 

 cocks foresees will be the result of the restoration of these ancient 

 irrigation works on the Tigris and his entirely preliminary estimate 

 of the expense necessary to restore them. An outlay on canals and 

 repairs of £8,000,000, he figures, will throw over a million and a 

 quarter acres under cultivation, raise the value of the land which is 

 now worthless to $150 per acre, and pay a profit in rentals of 25 per 

 cent per annum on the investment of $40,000,000. 



On page IT of the volume cited Mr. YVillcocks remarks: 



To enable a true estimate to be made of the exact nature of the works and their 

 cost, there lies much information to be collected by brigades of engineers working 

 under a capable chief— such information as only experts can gather through months 

 of patient observation and field work— exact gauge readings of the Tigris, Antheim, 

 and Dyala rivers; discharge diagrams; analyses of the waters of the rivers; field 

 maps of the soils; contoured maps of the country on which to lay down the align- 

 ments of the canals, and the dimensions of the cross-drainage works; soundings of 

 the rivers and borings of their beds; examination of the building materials available 

 9533— Xo. 54—03 2 



