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Updated: June 24, 2025
The master walked about gently, now stopping to read some well known inscription and ponder for a moment over the words; and now wandering across the stoneless mounds, content to be forgotten by all but those who loved the departed.
Presently, however, as Abner looked around the uninviting interior of his future abode, and then glanced at his young bride, he was sobered. "An empty hovel with unwhitewashed walls, stoneless hearth, and dirt-encrusted windows and floors, is certainly no fit welcome for you, my dearest," he said to her as they stood alone a moment, while Susan and Rache were taking a survey of the inner room.
Except for the occasional ridges of metamorphic rocks mentioned above, and some hills of intruded greenstone, the lower plain is stoneless, its subjacent rocks being covered with a thicker stratum of the same alluvium which is thinly spread over the higher table-land above.
Does poverty leave its signs over the graves? Look at that large tomb fenced round; read that long inscription: 'Virtue' 'best of husbands' 'affectionate father' 'inconsolable grief'-'sleeps in the joyful hope, etc. Do you suppose these stoneless mounds hide no dust of what were men just as good? But no epitaph tells their virtues, bespeaks their wifes' grief, or promises joyful hope to them!"
From the pouches which lined the interior of the cot, and from a willow basket which was part of its furniture, he brought forth materials for a meal: platters close-woven of the fibres of palms; wine in small gurglets of skin; mutton dried and smoked; stoneless shami, or Syrian pomegranates; dates of El Shelebi, wondrous rich and grown in the nakhil, or palm orchards, of Central Arabia; cheese, like David's "slices of milk;" and leavened bread from the city bakery all which he carried and set upon the carpet under the tent.
At places they have been found even thicker. So wide were they that on the top a four-horse chariot could easily turn. The hanging gardens of Babylon, said to have been built to please Amytis the consort of Nebuchadnezzar, were classed as among the Seven Wonders of the World. Terraces were constructed 450 feet square, of huge stones which cost millions in that stoneless country.
But otherwise they remained faithful to their architectural traditions, and raised in the comparatively hilly Assyria the exact type of building which nature and necessity had led them to invent and use in the flat and stoneless alluvium where they had had their primitive abode.
There is no road metal available in Mesopotamia. It is a stoneless place. The frogs trumpeted in chorus all night; packs of dogs or jackals swept about in droves, once at full pelt through our tent, like devils of the storm. It was nightmarish, but sleep brought that wonderful balancing force that sometimes clothes itself in dreams, and steeps the spirit in all that is lacking.
Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.
It has no wheels, like the ordinary iron plough has, to regulate the depth and width of the furrow-slice, because in wet weather, if tried on this almost stoneless land, the wheels become so clogged with mud and refuse, such as stubble from the previous crop, that they will not revolve, sliding helplessly involved along the ground.
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