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In the dog-days, when the mid-day sun rendered all work a punishment, the innermost of these three rooms was the only habitable part of the house. The serdabs, or subterranean chambers, are used under the same conditions. They are inconvenient in some ways, but the narrowness of the openings, through which light, and with it heat, can reach their depths, gives them advantages not to be despised."
Even in these days, when commerce and industry have fallen so low in those regions, the gypseous alabaster from the neighbourhood of Mossoul is transported in no unimportant quantities as far as Bagdad. It is used for lining baths and those serdabs to which the people retreat in summer. The remains of the great capital show no trace of dressed stone.
Here, we believe, M. de Sarzec is in error; the only refuges against the inflamed breath of the desert were the serdabs, the subterranean chambers with their scanty light and moistened walls, and the dark apartments of Assyrian palaces with their walls of prodigious thickness.
They divided the unfortunates in gangs, and supervised the issue of dates on which they were fed. Such as were physically able were employed in cleaning the town. The Kurds are a fine, self-respecting race and it was easy to understand Soane's enthusiasm for them. In Baghdad you lived either in the cellars or on the housetops. The former were called serdabs.
So, it transpired, did his decorative boatmen, who had not expected to row twenty-five miles upstream at a time when most people in that climate seek the relief of their serdabs which are underground chambers cooled by running water, it may be, and by a tall badgir, or air chimney. The running water, to be sure, was here, and had already begun to carry the barge down the Karun.
At certain times of the year and day they would retire within the shelter of their thickest walls and roofs; just as at the present moment the inhabitants of Mossoul, Bassorah, and Bagdad, take refuge within their serdabs as soon as the sun is a little high in the heavens, and stay there until the approach of evening.
Even in the more northern part of the country, the district about Baghdad, the thermometer often rises during the summer to 120 deg. of Fahrenheit in the shade; and the inhabitants are forced to retreat to their serdabs or cellars, where they remain during the day, in an atmosphere which, by the entire exclusion of the sun's rays, is reduced to about 100 deg.
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