The Eastern Marshes of Mesopotamia

Abstract

So I said goodbye to * Amara, proceeding next morning (15 January 1917) by launch own the Chahala canal to Musaida. ... I then pu sued my way by launch down the winding channel of the Husaiki canal, hemmed in on either side by splendid rice-fields extending to the limits of vision, to a point within a short distance of the Dawai and Battat canals, marking the boundary of the Michariya muqatda which I had inspected with Gertrude Bell. From here we retraced our course up the canal to the village of 'Araibi Pasha for a farewell visit of courtesy. The old man was well enough to walk a little, feebly, though I scarcely thought I should ever see him again on this earth as I shook his withered hand and said good? bye, before proceeding down the Zubair (or main) branch of the Chahala to the huge reed-hut village of his son and heir, Muhammad. . . . Next morning (16th) I was up early to begin the exploration of the marshes which, so far as I know, were at that time virgin ground to the European, though the Turco-Persian Boundary Commission had skirted their eastern fringes in February 1914. Leaving the launch to return to * Amara, we set out in three mashhufs provided by our host: my party including the faithful Mulla Rabat, the slave 'Abid and a lad named Minshad. . . . The Tal'a channel, which we followed, forks a little way below the village to form the A'aiwij and 'Adil canals; and it was down the latter that we now proceeded through rice lands of astonishing richness, studded at frequent intervals along the canal banks with enormous villages, teeming with humanity. . . . Here and there the canal broadened out into fair-sized lakes until we reached the great Haur, or marsh-sea, itself at the point where the two rejoined each other. At first we paddled the great canoes along the channels intersecting the reedy marsh. Then a great lake (or barqa) opened out before us, the crossing of which brought us to a large village of reed huts called Baidha, whose principal feature was a clay fort surmounting a slight eminence on a long thin tongue of dry land, extending, they said, to Halfaya on the Persian frontier. Our host here was the headman, Muhammad ibn Bahar, who received us with the courteous hospitality common to primitive man, and conducted me over the village. I was astonished to find here numerous traces of the brick foundations of an ancient