14 PERSIAN GULF DATES. 



around the Persian Gulf all degrees of saltiness. The writer was 

 unable to obtain good samples of the soil from all of the noted date 

 regions about the gulf but examined a sufficient number to satisfy him- 

 self of its variability. In Bassorah there is an adobe soil, resembling 

 the silt of the Nile Valley, so sticky that it has only to be dried in the 

 sun to make the best of adobe bricks. This pure adobe is not con- 

 sidered as suitable a soil as that which has a slight admixture of sand 

 in it to make it lighter. Though undoubtedly a tine soil, this alluvium 

 can not be compared with the rich river bottoms of the Missouri, 

 Kansas, and Mississippi, and is able to produce no such crops of maize 

 or wheat. The soil of Bagdad resembles that of Bassorah closely, 

 being made up of the same alluvial deposits from the Tigris River. 

 Not a stone the size of a man's fist can be found by searching for hours 

 across the plains about Bagdad, and the broken antique pottery, tiles, 

 and bricks attest the character of the fine-grained soil of which these 

 millions of acres are composed. It is the very soil of which Babylon 

 was built, and which when baked has so well preserved for later 

 generations the cuneiform language of the Babylonians. 



IRRIGATION OF THE PLANTATIONS. 



Nowhere in the world does such an ideal water supply exist for the 

 irrigation of date plantations as at Bassorah. A broad, muddy river, 

 flowing at a rate varying from OA mile to 6 miles an hour between 

 banks which are so low that the Arabs sit upon them and wash their 

 hands in the stream (PI. IV, fig. 3), supplies an almost unlimited 

 quantity of water. With each high tide the waters of the river are 

 backed up for about TO miles and rise on an average at Bassorah 6 feet 

 above their former level, filling on both banks the hundreds of irrigat- 

 ing canals which run in eveiw direction for many miles through the 

 date forests. The height of the river at Bassorah changes little, sum- 

 mer or winter, though its level at Bagdad, 535 miles away, falls 

 materially during the dry summer months. A strong southerly wind, 

 if blowing up river for some time, will, together with the rising tide 

 on the bar, raise the level of the water a foot or more over its natural 

 high tidal mark. 



Occasional large canals extend for more than 2? miles into the desert 

 at right angles to the river and give off numerous side canals. These 

 mains are navigable by large steam launches and form the avenues by 

 which dates are transported to the steamers that lie in the river during 

 the shipping season. These large canals, planted for their whole 

 length with palms, are in fact like rivers through a great forest of 

 dates. The land is so level that apparently no engineering difficulty 

 lies in the way of an immense extension of this canal system so as to 

 take in thousands of square miles of this rich alluvial desert which 

 stretches away to the horizon from the comparatively narrow strip of 



