akers. The fact that all the stock-in-trade of a
township amounts to a few pots and pans and house material of cane
matting and mud makes it impossible to impress them by destroying their
houses. In a few days everything would be rebuilt as before. It could
often happen that the punitive expedition arrived to find the town moved
to some district not mentioned in the orders for the day.

[Illustration: A BRITISH CRUISER IN THE PERSIAN GULF]

Mesopotamia under the Turks was in some ways worse off than others of
his badly governed possessions. The officials who were sent from
Constantinople into various provinces regarded the job as a poor one, as
far as the amenities of life were concerned, and one to be endured while
making as big a pile as possible from the ground-down natives. I should
imagine that one of these officials would be about as popular with the
landowners as a publican was among the Jews.

An ancient prophecy foretells that the great river Euphrates shall be
dried up that the way of the kings of the East shall be prepared. The
time has come, if the war was indeed Armageddon. German engineers in
1914 had made a highway and effectively "dried up" the waters of the
river for the passage of the armies. They themselves expected to be
kings of the East although coming from the West, and some, it is
interesting to note, explain the Prussians as of Oriental origin. At the
same time the claims both of oil and empire kept us busy in the Persian
Gulf. It looked as if we were to share this new kingdom or sphere of
influence with Germany, until the war came and sorted things out.

There are some who see in vast irrigation schemes a "drying up" of the
Euphrates that shall bring colonists from the Far East so that the
denizens of China or Japan shall begin, like the Saxons in Kent, to get
a footing in the country and become, in very substance, the Yellow
Peril.

He is a rash man who would prophesy concerning the future of Mesopotamia
as far as our empire is concerned. Perhaps before these pages are in
print something decisive will have occurred. We read daily in our
newspapers of rumours of war with restless tribes around Mosul, and of
raids and skirmishes.

The land of Shinar, where Abraham dwelt, with its silent traces of the
great civilizations which it fostered, Babylonian and Assyrian, Persian,
Greek and Arabian, is once more, by the chances of war, an open book,
and time alone will show what is to be written th