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Since these prosperous days the sea has receded about 150 miles, and left Ur a nondescript heap to be disputed over by professors. At length, when we had said good-bye to the Shushan and taken to a motor-boat, we arrived at Hillah, bent on finding the house of the irrigation officer. We landed on the wrong side of the river and rashly let the boat go back.
In Chaldæa the crude walls of the houses and towers were cuirassed with those excellent burnt bricks which the inhabitants of Bagdad and Hillah carry off to this day for use in their modern habitations. The crude bricks used behind this protecting epidermis have not lost their individuality, as at Nineveh they seem to have been used only after complete dessication.
In this case he pictured us approaching Hillah and looking down upon miles and miles of fruitful gardens intersected with little waterways a sort of landscape-garden Venice. This view could only be obtained from a high cliff, and as there was no cliff in lower Mesopotamia, except in Brown's imagination, it was natural that he would be disappointed.
"Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils." The irrigation officers at Hillah were ideal hosts, not only from the commonly accepted standpoint, but from that of an artist. They let me roam about and sketch what I wanted, not what they wanted.
It goes the long journey from Busrah to Bagdad over five hundred miles or even to Hillah and the other towns on the Euphrates river. This kind of boat has a cabin in the bow and can carry a large cargo of wheat or wool. It sails by all the interesting country which was once the home of Abraham and is still called Mesopotamia. The largest boats used by the Arabs are called dhows or buggalows.
The nearest considerable town is Dîwânîyah, on the left bank of the Hillah branch of the Euphrates, twenty miles to the south-west; but some four miles to the south of the ruins is the village of Sûq el-'Afej, on the eastern edge of the 'Afej marshes, which begin to the south of Nippur and stretch away westward.
Practical difficulties still existed, inasmuch as we were for a long time unable to explain to the native driver that he was to meet us at Birs Nimrûd, and feared, if we were not very explicit, he would return to Hillah and we might never be heard of again. Brown's pantomimic attempts at direction were obscure even to me, and I am sure the driver thought he had gone out of his mind.
Every day when at Hillah I used to see this work going on as it had gone on for centuries, Babylon thus slowly disappearing without an effort being made to ascertain the dimensions and buildings of the city, or to recover what remains of its monuments.
Had we been ambassadors on a diplomatic visit to Hillah, we could not have been more hospitably entertained or given greater facilities for getting about in a most fascinating region of the world for any one who felt the glamour of history in this once highly civilized country.
"BIRS NIMRÛD, about 2½ hours from Hillah, is a vast ruin crowned apparently by the ruins of a tower rising to a height of 153½ ft. above the plain, and having a circumference of rather more than 2000 feet. The Birs, which was situated within the city of Borsippa, has been wrongly identified with the Tower of Babel.
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