THE EUPHRATES. 
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Bagdad, where, on breaking down the dyke which confines its 
waters within their proper channel, they flow the country, and 
extend nearly to the banks of the Tigris with a depth sufficient 
to render them navigable for rafts and flat-bottomed boats. At 
the moment I am now writing, (May 24, 1812,) rafts laden with 
lime, are brought on this inundation almost every day from 
Felugiah, to within a few j'ards of the northern gate of Bagdad, 
called that of the Imaun Moussa.” 
Felugia lies in a direct line across from Bagdad. The classic 
field of Cunaxa is in its neighbourhood. Indeed, both shores of 
the great river from thence to Kufa, and still farther beyond 
southward and westward, had been objects with me to explore, 
till the kiahya laid his interdict on their possibility; and in truth 
his conduct with regard to the heads of the Arab hives, had 
aroused every swarm in revenge ; and to move any where but in 
the beaten track, I found would indeed be a quixotic enterprise. 
Mesched Ali had been one of my points, not in honour of its 
saint, but to inspect some remains of sculpture, probably very 
ancient, which I had read of in the narrative of Abdoul Kerim’s 
Journey from Delhi to Mecca. The writer was an officer in Nadir 
Shah’s army, and he gives some very interesting notes on the 
mosque or mesched of Ali, which he had visited in his way to 
the shrine of the Prophet. He mentions, that the natives of the 
place have a tradition, that the building now converted into the 
mosque of the beatified caliph, was so old as to have been founded 
by Noah. But the writer remarks, for his part he thinks it bears 
every appearance of having been only a temple of the ancient 
unbelievers; and that good Mussulmen had covered its vestiges 
of idolatry with a thick coat of mortar all along its western wall. 
Accidents, in the course of time, had broken away some of this 
