352 
RUINS OF BABYLON. 
lie thick beneath, not only along the brink of the stream, but as 
far as the eye could discern under the water there they were 
also. The point a is by much the most elevated of the 
whole embankment, rising about 60 feet perpendicular from the 
level of the water ; but the continual friction of the stream, has 
so acted on the steep at its base, as to give it the appearance of 
a regular flight of steps : this effect having been produced by 
the slime-cement of the courses of brick immediately against the 
river, being gradually washed away, when the ranges it had sup¬ 
ported slid into the stream. I have marked in my sketch, traces 
of this river-bulwark, from the neighbourhood of the Nil canal, 
all along the eastern bank of the Euphrates to the point a; and 
thence following the bending sweep of the stream southward for 
nearly three quarters of a mile, at that extremity we come upon 
a projecting piece of flat marshy ground, forming an angle, 
in depth from the base to the vertex 220 yards, (b), 
evidently once the channel of the river, though now perfectly 
abandoned of its stream ; for besides the nature of the ground, 
we find another proof in the bounding line, past which the 
Euphrates flowed of old, being still marked by a continuation of 
the same river-embankment we had traced from its northern 
point. It stretches across the angle, in an expanse, north 
and south, of 1,300 yards from one edge of the river to the 
other. The first 600 yards of this one ecolossal boundary are 
now fallen into a low and abrupt slope, in consequence of being 
the common pass, over which the plundered materials dug from 
the vast ruin at its back have been dragged during these last 
2000 years, to be embarked on the river for farther transportation. 
The ruin I mean, is that of the Kasr, (or palace itself,) the west¬ 
ern face of which extends the whole length of these 600 yards 
of reduced embankment; and the line of embankment continuing 
