By Desert Ways to Baghdad

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 Eas...

"It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence. Just as you feel when you look on the r...

It was our first night in camp; little mysterious hillocks shut us into a world of our own; we had it all to ourselves and only the stars overhead knew, and they seemed to be co...

Brigandage. The capture of Miss Stone, ancient history as it now is, has served to give a vivid meaning to this word in the public mind. We were being continually asked if we wi...

One tree stood out in the middle of the field in which we were encamped. We spread our carpet under it and laid ourselves out for a lazy day. There were letters to write home an...

There is something very weird and uncanny in the terminus of a railway in the middle of a wild and desolate country such as this. The Monster runs his iron fangs into the heart...

a spot which seemed dry in the darkness. Next morning we awoke to find ourselves encircled by a loop of the river and in a dense white mist. It was so cold that the milk froze a...

The Taurus range bounds in a semicircle the base of the plateau we had crossed. We had always been over 3,000 feet above sea-level, and now the heights of the Boulghar Dagh, as...

In the line of country stretching from Tarsus eastward to Urfa, there is a series of stations of the American Mission Board. Travelling as we did, in the direction of this line,...

"And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees...

We were encamped in the khan, the native inn, at Severek, a dismal town in the dismal wilds of Mesopotamia; the weather and the depth of mud made it impossible for us to pitch o...

"The age and time of the world is as it were a flood and swift current, consisting of the things that are brought to pass in the world. For as soon as anything hath appeared and...

They say of Diarbekr that its houses are black, that its dogs are black, and that the hearts of its people are black--and they say so truly. The first moment that one catches si...

The snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan were just visible on the horizon line; toward them rolled wave after wave of low brown tracts of land, utterly destitute of any form or si...

As we approached the village the banks of the river rose perpendicularly in a wall of rock which was simply riddled with tombs. Many of them seemed to be quite inaccessible; tho...

Between Hassan Kaif and Jezireh, a distance of thirty-five miles, the scenery is very fine. The river winds through narrow gorges with steep walls of limestone rock riddled with...

We left Jezireh early next morning. The scenery was now much tamer; the banks of the river were low; stretches of conglomerate and red rocks were interspersed with grassy slopes...

At noon on the tenth day after leaving Diarbekr and the fourth from Jezireh we caught sight of the minarets and cupolas of Mosul, and floated for a couple of miles under the cha...

Fifty-three pairs of dark eyes were fixed upon us in unwavering scrutiny; it was dark and there was silence. The eyes, as they gleamed out of the darkness, might have belonged t...

The men were still very quarrelsome; the whole day their grating voices never stopped. They seemed, however, quite anxious to row now, and proposed at sunset that we should not...

I relieved my feelings at intervals by trying to express in my best Turkish to Hassan, through the wall, what I thought of the Mudir who dared to keep great English Pashas waiti...

We were now only sixty-five miles from Baghdad, and with luck we should reach it next day. We travelled on all night, and on waking up next morning found ourselves floating past...

"I read on a porch of a palace bold, In a purple tablet letters cast-- 'A house though a million years old, A house of earth comes down at last; Then quarry thy stones from the...

The eastern gate of heaven was unbarred; Shamash, the Sun-god of Babylonia, flamed forth and stepped upon the Mount of Sunrise at the edge of the world. As he had poured the lig...

There was a sense of stir in camp; a rattle of tins and a neighing of animals; a faint odour of lighted charcoal was wafted in at the tent door. I opened one eye; X still slumbe...

It burst upon us all at once, Palmyra, in the desert--a chaos of golden pillars in the glow of the setting sun. We had been riding all day towards an indefinite shape on the hor...

Arten was an Armenian; he was quick, thin, methodical, dirty, intelligent, and untruthful; he was also the cook. I say _the_ cook advisedly, for _a_ cook he was not. No doubt he...

Last night we were dirty, isolated, and free; to-night we are clean, sociable, and trammelled. Last night the setting sun's final message written in flaming signs of gold was bu...