By Desert Ways to Baghdad. Louisa Jebb Wilkins

By Desert Ways to Baghdad - Louisa Jebb Wilkins


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       Louisa Jebb Wilkins

      By Desert Ways to Baghdad

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066206031

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       CHAPTER V

       CHAPTER VI

       CHAPTER VII

       CHAPTER VIII

       CHAPTER IX

       CHAPTER X

       CHAPTER XI

       CHAPTER XII

       CHAPTER XIII

       CHAPTER XIV

       CHAPTER XV

       CHAPTER XVI

       CHAPTER XVII

       CHAPTER XVIII

       CHAPTER XIX

       CHAPTER XX

       CHAPTER XXI

       CHAPTER XXII

       CHAPTER XXIII

       APPENDIX

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
Map Frontispiece
A Well in the Konia Plains 64
Hittite Bas-relief and Inscription. Ivriz 129
Jacob's Well. Harran 160
"Drawing Skins of Water" 225
Palmyra. Triumphal Arch 256
Hassan 321
Erech. Syrian Desert 352

      PROLOGUE

      It was a hot midsummer's day; X and I sat on the long grass under an apple-tree: she had a map of Asia and I had a Murray's Handbook. We were about to travel together in the East. X was going primarily in search of health; but she had studied comparative religions and was prepared to be incidentally intelligent about it—visit mosques and tombs, identify classical spots, and take rubbings of inscriptions.

      I was merely going with X. She had unearthed me from a remote agricultural district in the West of England with the idea that contact with the agricultural labourer would have fitted me for dealing with the male attendants who were incident to our proposed form of travel.

      We were fully agreed on one fundamental point—that we should choose a country which could be reached otherwise than by sea; and that, having reached it, its nature should be such that we could travel indefinitely in it without reaching the sea.

      Now of all the continents Asia Minor is the one best adapted for this purpose; for if you were a giant you could easily step across the bit of inland sea which separates Europe from Asia in the neighbourhood of Constantinople; and once landed on the other side your field of operations is practically unlimited, extending even into the adjoining continent of Africa; for any one who could step across the Bosphorus could also step across the Suez Canal.

      But having once settled on the particular continent, our ideas were somewhat vague. How indeed can they be otherwise if you propose travelling in a country which has not yet been ticketed and docketed for the tourist? This product of a modern age can, thanks to Messrs. Cook and Lunn, already tell, in the corner of his own fireside, the exact hour at which he will be gazing at the dome of St. Sophia on any particular day, or at which he will be eating his dinner, with the number of courses specified, in the hotel the outside appearance of which is already depicted on the itinerary. But it was not to be so with us. What we should eat and what we should gaze upon was still wrapt in the mystery of the great unknown.

      X took a pencil and marked a straight line from Constantinople across the Anatolian Plateau and the Taurus Mountains to Tarsus. "That looks a good point to make for," she said, "Alexander led an army over the Taurus." Then, having stopped within measurable distance of the sea, she drew her pencil eastwards across the Euphrates to a point on the Tigris high up in the Kurdistan mountains; from here she drew another line following the Tigris to Baghdad. At this point we were coming dangerously near the sea, so turning back she marked a line in the contrary direction across the Syrian desert to Damascus.

      "That will do for a start," she said; "we can fill in the details when we get there."

      Now this method of undertaking a journey might have its disadvantages in what is known as a civilised country; for here we are all such servers of time


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