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These are Nazibina, which is the modern Nisibin, the Nisibis of the Greeks; Amidi, which is Amida or Diarbekr; Haran, which retains its name unchanged; Sirki, which is the Greek Circesium, now Kerkesiyeh; Anat, now Anah, on an island in the Euphrates; and Sidikan, now Arban, on the Lower Khabour.
Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard baton. In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before them.
The other spur is thrown out near the western extremity, and runs towards the north-west, parallel to the course of the upper Khabour, which rises from its flank at Ras-el-Ain. The name of Abd-el-aziz is applied to this spur, as well as to the continuation of the Sinjar between Arban and Halebi.
Layard have been received in London, to the 10th of April, dated from Arban, on the River Khabour. The last account from this quarter mentioned his purpose of penetrating into the desert, which he has explored for three weeks, meeting with numerous traces of ancient population, though not so many antiquities as he expected.
Arban was at one time on a level with the highest point of Mont Blanc, the top of which, standing out well above the clouds, resembled "an immense block of crystal sparkling with a thousand fires."
They have been found in the greatest plenty at Arban on the lower Khabour, the ancient Sidikan or Shadikanni, which lies nearly at the extreme west of the Assyrian territory; but many specimens have likewise been obtained from Nineveh and other of the central Assyrian cities.
Bavian, Khorsabad, Shereef-Khan, Neb-bi-Yunus, Koyunjik, and Nimrud, which have furnished by far the most valuable and interesting of the Assyrian monuments, all lie east of the Tigris; while on the west two places only have yielded relics worthy to be compared with these, Arban and Kileh-Sherghat.
The former of these two routes is marked as a line of traffic by the foreign objects discovered in such abundance at Arban, by the name Tiphsach, which means "passage," and by the admitted object of Solomon in building Tadmor.
According to some, the Sinjar here terminates; but perhaps it is best to regard it as rising again in the Abd-el-aziz hills, which, intervening between the Khabour and the Euphrates, run in the same south-west direction from Arban to Zelabi. If this be accepted as the true course of the Sinjar, we must view it as throwing out two important spurs.
Mention should be made in these pages of a night sail of a hundred miles, boldly carried out in 1849 by M. Arban, which took the voyager from Marseilles to Turin fairly over the Alps. The main summit was reached at 11 p.m., when the "snow, cascades, and rivers were all sparkling under the moon, and the ravines and rocks produced masses of darkness which served as shadows to the gigantic picture."
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