LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXXI WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND. [ In preparation ]...

Few adventurous incidents in our lives seem romantic at the time of their happening, and few places we visit are invested with that glamour that haunt them in recollection or anticipation. I remember comparing the colour scheme of a barge in Baghdad with that of one in Rochester. It was a comparison most unfavourable to Baghdad—a thing the colour of ashes with a thing of red and green and gold. Yet now that I am back in Rochester, the romance lingers around memories of dusty mahailas. It is easy

There is an unenviable competition between places situated in the region of Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf as to which can be the hottest. Abadan, the ever-growing oil port, which is in Persia and on the starboard hand as you go up the Shatt-el-Arab, if not actually the winner according to statistics, comes out top in popular estimation. Its proximity to the scorching desert, its choking dustiness and its depressing isolation, are characteristics which it shares with countless other places amo

Before the war, when Mesopotamia was a more distant land than it is to-day, Basra was often referred to as the Venice of the East. Few travellers were in a position to test the accuracy of the comparison, and so it aroused little comment. No Venetians had returned from Basra burning with indignation and filled with a desire to get even with the writer who first thought of the parallel, probably because no Venetian had ever been there. A few simple souls, who had delighted in the mediæval splendo

After a few days among the waterways of Mesopotamia one can get hardened against surprises. The most amazing and outrageous types of craft soon meet the eye as commonplaces of river life. Things that would make a Thames waterman sign the pledge proceed up and down without arousing any comment. Noah's ark, with its full complement, could ply for hire between Basra and Baghdad, and the lion's roaring would be accepted as the necessary accompaniment of a somewhat old type of machinery resuscitated

The story of Mesopotamia is a story of irrigation. "It is not improbable," writes Sir William Willcocks, the great irrigationist, "that the wisdom of ancient Chaldea had its foundations in the necessity of a deep mastery of hydraulics and meteorology, to enable the ancient settlers to turn what was partially a desert and partially a swamp into fields of world-famed fertility." The civilizations of Babylon and Assyria owed their very life to the science of watering the land, and even in the later

The irrigation officers at Hillah were ideal hosts, not only from the commonly accepted standpoint, but from that of an artist. They let me roam about and sketch what I wanted, not what they wanted. They gave me every means of transport, and such suggestions as they made as to possible subjects were excellent and offered with such tact that there was no difficulty in abstaining from sketching or going on with something else. How often does the unfortunate painter suffer from the well-meaning hos

Somewhere in Mesopotamia, in the desert country that lies between the Euphrates at Felujeh and the Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of a walled-in group of buildings known as Khan Nuqtah, in the month of February of this year, and on a singularly miserable and rainy afternoon, there might have been seen a dark object moving very slowly across the uninteresting field of vision. At a distance it would not have been very easy to make out the nature of the thing, and a newcomer to the scene, with no

I suppose there is no city to be found anywhere in the world that would quite reach the standard of dazzling splendour of the Baghdad that we conjure up in our imagination when we think of the City of the Arabian Nights in the romantic days, so dear to our childhood, of Haroun-al-Raschid. We expect so much when we come to the real Baghdad, and we find so little—so little, that is, of the glamour of the East. Few "costly doors flung open wide," but a great deal of dirt. Few dark eyes of ravishing

The statement often made that Mesopotamia is a vast desert through which run two great rivers, bare but for the palm trees on their banks and flat as a pancake, is true as far as it goes. It is possible, however, to picture a land entirely different from Mesopotamia and still stick to this description. I have met countless men out there who have told me that they had built up in their minds a wrong conception of the country and a wrong idea of its character simply by letting their imagination ge

Since I have returned to England I constantly run up against people who ask me, sometimes jokingly and sometimes almost seriously, if I have brought back any sketches of the Garden of Eden, and a conversation invariably follows as to the authenticity or otherwise of the traditional site. Is it true that Mesopotamia was the cradle of the human race, and, if so, are the descriptions in the book of Genesis concerning the world known to Adam and Noah, however figuratively they may be taken, in keepi

The future of Mesopotamia with its enormous productive potentialities is a subject fraught with great interest to all those who have studied her past. Will this country again become one of the granaries of the world, and will it ever be, like Egypt, an important asset of our Empire? At first, when the war had freed the country from the Turkish yoke, it was assumed that it would rise into unheard-of prosperity under the fatherly care of British protection. Schemes of irrigation, long planned and

With numerous Illustrations in colour and black and white by the Author. Crown 4to. 12/6 net. "Artistically, and from the literary point of view, it is one of the most delectable travel books that have been published for many a long day, for Mr. Maxwell has not only an eye for the picturesque, and a frank, clear style both of pen and brush, but he has the even rarer gift of finding old-world romance and adventure in places near at hand where their presence would never be suspected by the ordinar

With 100 Sketches In Colour, Monochrome, and Line made by the author in the autumn and winter of 1918, when sent on duty to Palestine by the Admiralty for the Imperial War Museum. Crown 4to £1 5s. net. "Exceedingly interesting.... The letterpress is full of vitality and humour; the reader is irresistibly carried on from one incident to another without a dull moment."— Saturday Review. "A very handsome book. It makes good reading, and a still better 'picture book,' and it is a valuable addition t