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The spacious times were past, when loads of pink granite, honey-coloured sandstone, fragrant woods, and spices from the Land of Punt, went floating down the stream! There were tombs as well as temples which we might have seen, savage gorges and mild green hills. There was the great grim fort of Kasr Ibrim; and at last there was Abu Simbel.
The one identification which may be made upon certain and indeed indisputable evidence is that of the Kasr mound with the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar. The tradition which has attached the name of Kasr or "Palace" to this heap is confirmed by inscriptions upon slabs found on the spot, wherein Nebuchadnezzar declares the building to be his "Grand Palace."
In any case, when we went to look for the suspicious craft seen near Kasr Ibrim, she was not among the two or three small private dahabeahs of artists and others, moored within a mile of the Great Temple.
It is quite otherwise with the two other ruins in the same neighbourhood, called respectively Kasr and Birs-Nimroud. Their bricks are held together by an excellent mortar of lime, and cannot be separated without breaking. Elsewhere, at Mugheir for instance, the mortar is composed of lime and ashes.
These mounds of the Kasr have suffered by successive generations of brick getters. Half Hillah is said to be built out of bricks from the ruins of Babylon, and bricks are still taken for any building operations that occur within easy access of these well-nigh inexhaustible supplies.
Near its north end, ten or eleven miles north of Borsippa, round Babil and Kasr, is a larger wilderness of ruin, three miles long and nearly as broad in extreme dimensions; here town-walls and palaces of Babylonian kings and temples of Babylonian gods and streets and dwelling-houses of ordinary men have been detected and in part uncovered.
Perhaps nobody but a green-turbaned Hadji could so speedily have screwed information out of secretive Arabs, paid to be silent. And he had to fit deductions into spaces of the puzzle left empty by fibs and glib self-excusings. What he did learn was this: a dragoman had come, in a small boat, from a steam dahabeah to the Enchantress Isis while we were away at Kasr Ibrim.
The only other ancient work of any importance of which some remains are still to be traced is a brick embankment on the left bank of the stream between the Kasr and the Babil mounds, extending for a distance of a thousand yards in a line which has a slight curve and a general direction of S.S.W. The bricks of this embankment are of a bright red color, and of great hardness.
The palace was called in the inscriptions the "great house," as the temple was "God's house," though in later times it was also named "the abode of royalty," "the dwelling-place of kings," while the great palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, the ruins of which are marked by the Kasr mound, was called "the wonder of the earth."
Their debris may be confused with those of the Kasr mound, on which one writer places them. Or they may have stood between the Kasr and Amran ruins, where are now some mounds of no great height. Or, possibly, their true site is in the modern El Homeira, the remarkable red mound which lies east of the Kasr at the distance of about 800 yards, and attains an elevation of sixty-five feet.
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