Ojtob er ii, 191 7 
LAND dc WATER 
might not make it anew the home of the civihzation of which 
it was the cradle. Then, six or seven j'ears ago, a man came 
along with not only a well-maintained thesis to prove thati the 
desert was the original site of the Garden of Eden, but with 
a fully formulated plan to make a new garden of it, a garden 
more extensive and more fruitful than that of the Nile. It is 
impossible to speak of the future of Mesopotamia without 
bringing in Sir William Willcocks and the Nile. 
Two Most Fainous Valleys 
It is a remarkable fact that what are undoubtedlv the world's 
twomo.st ancient and opulent seats of empire, the vailevof the 
Nile and the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates, should both have 
iltimately become for the most part twoof the most sterile of the 
world's deserts. But more remarkable still is it that when, 
after the lapse of a score or more of centuries, the destined hour 
of their rehabilitation came round, the master transformer of 
2ach who in time will restore both valleys to a fruitfulness 
undreamed of by Rameses or Nebuchadnezzar, should be one 
and the same man. and he not a king nor an emperor, but a 
quiet unassuming Engli>hman, with the practical brain of an 
engineer and the imaginative soul of a dreamer. It is as a 
dreamer— a constructive dreamer— in fact, that I like ibest 
to think of Sir William Willcocks. On the memorable occasion 
on which I first turned the pages of his " Garden of. Eden " 
reclamation report, there was nought that I envied Keats 
his pioneering jaunt which provoked his rhapsody on " First 
Looking into Chapman's Homer." 
It was an evening of May, iQij.in the Bagdad Club Library 
that I picked up a volume of the " Thou^^and and One Nights " 
and sought a reclining chair under a punkah. I had intended 
whiling away the hot e\ening by following the inimitable 
Haroun.al Raschid through the highways and byways of the 
ancient city of the Kalyphs, but I chanced to start turning the 
leaves of the green-bound engineering report which I found on 
the arm of my chair, and instead of trailing at the skirts of the 
good Haroun. I found the car of mv fancv hitched to th<: 
Pegasus of Sir William Willcocks and" whirled of^' across the 
ages to the days of the Garden of Eden, swung back in a 
sweeping circle through the Deluge, the rise and fall of Chaldea, 
Babylon, Assyria and Hitt, on down to the present and 
Ixyond to that future when the transmuting touch of water 
was to restore all that was worth restoring of the glories that 
liad gone before. It was with Willcocks, the dreamer, that 
1 rode that night. . 
Twenty-four hours later, with a clear-eyed sun-tanned 
Scotchman, I stood at the awninged window of a drafting room 
looking down into a quarter mile wide hole where a couple of 
thou.sand Arab labourers and a confused mixture of pumps, 
cngmes, dredges, cement-mixers and steam-shovels were doing 
the prelimmary work of the foundation of the great Hindia 
Barrage, the completion of which, a year or more later, raised 
the waters of the Euphrates and " turned it back into its 
old channel by the walls of Babylon. Opened between us. 
and supplemented by a portfolio of maps, lav a green-bound 
report similar to the one I had found in Bagdad the night 
Ix-fore, and my companion turned often and read from it as 
he pomted and explained. But alwavs it was columns of 
figures— estimates of flow and fall andsiltage content -that 
he quoted : these magic pages glowing with fascinating inter- 
weavmgs of fact and fancies regarding Eden and the Deluge 
and Belshazzar and Sardanapalus were unturned. It was 
Willcocks, the engineer, not the dreamer, whom we followed 
that afternoon ; the engineer transforming into realities the 
•visionings of the dreamer. 
It is a significant commentary on the confidence with which 
Turkey still regarded England up to ioir-12 that, in spite of 
the fact that German intrigue was at its height in all parts 
of the Ottoman Empire at this time, the Government should 
not only have turned to a British engineer to draw up its plans 
for the greatest reclamation project ever planned, but should 
also have awarded all of the first construction contracts— 
involving the expenditure of many millions of pounds— to a 
British firm. That this was done in the face of strong en- 
deavours on the part of the Germans (who were already at 
work on the Bagdad railway) to secure at least the construc- 
tion contracts for themselves, indicates how small a British 
effort might have been successful in saving Turkey from her 
final entanglement with C.crmany. 
Perhaps no better idea can fee given of the incalculable 
promise of the future that awaits Mesopotamia if ever a 
stable government is established there than to outline briefly 
the salient features of the Willcocks project. Many of the 
names — such as Kut and Ctesiphon-nf subsidiarv' projects 
have since become bv'words. Indeed, General Maude's latest 
victory at Ramadie involved operations over the Habbania 
overflow area, the utilisation of which to take care of the surplus 
flood waters of tlie Euphrates formed really the initiatory 
project of them all. 
Tile great problem that confronted the first builders of ex- 
tensive irrigation works m Mesopotamia must have been that 
of disposing of the excess of water in flood time, and had not 
the solution been found at the outset it is certain that all 
their eft'ortsmust have come to nought in the end. The decline 
of the great Babylonian canals must have dated from the time 
when, either through neglect or through destruction bv 
enemies the flood protective systems became partially or.wholly 
inefi'ective. That the irrigation systems of the succeeding 
empires had but ephemeral existence was due to the fact that 
the complete restoration of the flood works was not made a 
condition precedent to irrigation. 
To Sir William Willcocks. with his life-long experience in 
curbing the eccentricities of the Nile, the imperative necessity 
for providing some sort of a flood escape for the surplus waters 
of both the Tigris and Euphrates must have been apparent 
at once, and his first attention, after being commissioned by 
the Turkish rro\-ernment to outline a plan for the reclamation of 
Mesopotamia, was directed to this end. Investigations were 
first made on the Euphrates, and, guided by a broad belt of 
shells in the desert to the north-west of Kerbela, a great de- 
pression having an area of _;oo square miles and a depth of 
fifty feet, capable of receiving a flow vastly in excess of any'- 
flood recorded in modern times, was discovered and surveyed. 
The lx;lt of shells and traces of old canals and diversion works 
pointed strongly to the fact that this depression was utilised 
by the ancients to the identical end it will serve when the 
Habbania Escape - which was under construction on the 
Euphrates at the outbreak of the war — is completed. This 
work will approximate in steel and concrete what the ancients 
built for the same jjurpose in sun-dried brick cemented to- 
gother with bitumen. When it is finished the way will be clear 
to take up systematically the canalization of the great area — 
the Hindia Barrage alone commands 1,360,000 acres — which 
can be irrigated from the waters of the Euphrates. 
Tigris Floods 
The handling of the flood waters of the Tigris which, 
although having slightly less average discharge than the 
Euphrates, swells to far above the maximum flow of the latter 
in spring time, is a mora difficult problem. There are two 
alternative solutions, one being to utilise as an escape an 
extensive salt sink to the south-east of Samara, in which the 
river Tarthar now discharges and terminates, and the other 
the simpler plan of abandoning the left bank of the river to 
the floods and creating a massive canal and dike along the right 
bank. The principal objection to the escape project was its 
estimated cost of £(),ooo,ooo, and Willcocks' recommendation 
was in favoiu' of the one involving the abandonment of the 
side of the river until such time as more money was available. 
It will be seen that the " cramping " efforts of Turkish finance 
were evident even in the tentative outline of this project. 
With the menace of the floods disposed of, the several 
projects for bringing the lower valley under canal were to be 
taken up as fast as the Turkish Government could provide 
the money. These projects, a score or more in number, if 
ever completed, will have brought water not only to all of 
the country irrigated b\' the Babylonians, but also to many 
hundreds of square miles that did not exist at the time of 
Nebuchadnezzar- and built out into what was then the Persian 
Gulf by the silt-laden rivers. 
A fairly extensive but relatively cheap piece of reclamation 
was projected at the great Ctesiphon loop of the Tigris, where 
Townshend administered so stinging a defeat to the Turks 
before falling back on Kut. Here a quarter of a mile \v-ide 
neck of land separates two points on the ri\er, which are thirty 
miles apart by its winding channel. A two or three-metre 
fall gives the opportunity to bring nearly all of the looped- 
in area— about 250,000 acres- — under canal. The consumma- 
tion of this project was expected ultimately to result in the 
destruction of the famous Ctesiphon ruin, the arch of which' 
is the largest ever constructed. 
The great Hindia Barrage was the first of the 'Willcocks 
projects to be undertaken, liecause ifr was possible to proceed 
with it regardless of the completion of the Habbania Escape 
which was to dispose of the flood waters of the Euphrates 
and upon which all the other projects had to wait. The dam 
at Hindia is designed to turn a large part of the flow of the 
Euphrates into its old Babylon channel, restoring to cultiva- 
tion hundreds of thousands of acres which had reverted to 
desert through the silting up of the ancient river bed. The 
Turks- in true Turkish fashion— had endeavoured to do the 
same thing twenty years previously by erecting a low weir 
across the river a "short distance below the site of the present 
barrage. This structure, which was built entirely of bricks 
quarried from the ruins of the Tower of Babel, the palace of 
Belshazzar. and other historic buildings of Babylon, did good 
service while it lasted, the water in the old channel being 
raised to a level which made it possible to bring a considerable 
