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This army moved along down the eastern bank of the Tigris, the scouts pressing forward as far as possible in every direction in front of the main army, in order to get intelligence of the foe. It is in this way that two great armies feel after each other, as it were, like insects creeping over the ground, exploring the way before them with their antennæ.
The night was not so bad save for mosquitoes, and after a sousing of river water, drawn forward of the mule barge, and a cup of tea at dawn, we felt cheerful. We started at four-thirty and passed Kurna. Kurna is the Garden of Eden. It lies at the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris, and is a small hamlet of white houses.
"Then," said he, "in the evening, you must be at the mosque built by the caliph's lady on the bank of the Tigris, and wait there till somebody comes to conduct you." To this I agreed; and after passing the day in great impatience, went in the evening to the prayer that is said an hour and a half after sun-set in the mosque, and remained there after all the people had departed.
The legend, after enumerating the great names of Rameses II., goes on to state that the king was in the "country of the two rivers," by which we are to understand some portion of Mesopotamia, the rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates, and that the local chiefs were bringing to him tribute consisting of gold, lapis-lazuli, turquoise, and logs of wood from the Land of the God.
That evening, as I was putting a few things into a small valise which I had bought, as our trunks were lost on the "Tigris," I had very little trouble in packing up, I said to Rectus that by the time he started off he could lay in a new stock of clothes.
Indeed they are no less proud of the sheep and cattle on their thousand hills than were the patriarchs who anciently pitched their tents between the Tigris and the Euphrates, or in the pleasant valleys of the land of promise.
The different explanations adopted maybe grouped into two main attempts: to find the place among the group of rivers that surrounds Mount Ararat in Northern Armenia, vis., in the extreme upper course of the Euphrates near its two sources; to find the place below the present junction of the Euphrates and the Tigris, along some part of the united course, which is now more than two hundred miles long, and is called "Shatt-el-'Aráb."
LOFTUS, in the Journal of the Geographical Society, vol. xxvi. p. 142; Ib., Sir HENRY RAWLINSON, vol. xxvii. p. 186. MASPERO, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient, p. 137. Nature in the Basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. The inundation of the Nile gives renewed life every year to those plains of Egypt which it has slowly formed, and so it is with the Tigris and Euphrates.
The logic was sound enough for those who had the means to enforce it; and in spite of the torrid heat, the river route and our gun-boats enabled us to master Nasiriyeh on 25 July. Early in August began the advance up the Tigris from Amara to Kut, whither the Turks had retired. They had been well taught by their German instructors, and their position astride the river was well entrenched.
Of the provinces already mentioned beyond the Tigris, the four first had been dismembered by the Parthians from the crown of Armenia; and when the Romans acquired the possession of them, they stipulated, at the expense of the usurpers, an ample compensation, which invested their ally with the extensive and fertile country of Atropatene.
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