438 
KIRKOOK, 
Mahomedan religious edifices, and other ruins, are in its neigh¬ 
bourhood ; indeed, the country is every where tracked with these 
melancholy footsteps of successive conquests, and successive 
devastations; arising, no doubt, from a custom prevalent in these 
countries from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to that of Nadir 
Shah, of removing a whole people from one city to another, at 
the will of any tyrant who acquired the power to execute his 
will; thus often turning the busy, prosperous district of to-day, 
into the silent, depopulated waste of to-morrow. Barbarous as 
Asiatic warfare has in general been, it was not always made a 
system of extirpation ; therefore, in this way of transplanting, 
we may account for most of the utterly deserted and ruinous 
towns and villages, whether ancient or modern, which in such 
dismal multitudes deform the kingdoms of the East. About a 
couple of miles from Tazik-koormati, we passed the extreme 
northern point of the second range of sulphurous hills we had 
seen the preceding day to our right. The Hamrean Hills were 
now only a faint, wavy grey line on the horizon, depressed or 
raised according to the delusive state of the atmosphere from the 
effects of the sun. The plain over which we marched was 
sometimes a dead level, at others undulating, and even hilly ; 
but wherever we met water, and the soil capable in the least, 
there we found cultivation. The produce was chiefly corn and 
millet. 
Our next halting-place was to be Kirkook; and for a great 
distance on the way we saw it standing before us, like a giant 
in the desert, the citadel, or rather upper town, surmounting 
its lofty insulated height. The scene was wild, and would have 
appeared totally waste, had not a few stunted trees scattered 
over the gardens in the suburbs of the city, in some degree 
