MESOPOTAMIA

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 208, 31 August 1918, Page 13

MESOPOTAMIA

WHAT THE COUNTRY IS LIKE. CLIMATE AND POPULATION. (Specialty written for the " Star.") (By "L.") {So. II.) What of the land and the people involved in the British occupation of this huge area? The confines of the country are but ill-defined. There was a boundary commission a y«ar before the war. fa which British, Turkish, Persian and . Russian participated, which traversed tnd delineated a definite northern boundary, but. the associated Governments had not time to ratify the finding before war supervened. To the south of the Euphrates the cultivated fringe of the river merges into the desert of Arabia, and no ethnological boundary can be fixed, for Mesopotamia and Arabia are Arab countries. Over the whole of the. riverine territory are the ruins of the canals that made the country a rival to Egypt as the worlds granary. To-day cultivation is limited to the fringe of the rivers, and the paddy fields of the great swamp areas where the unbridled waters of the rivere run to riotous wnste. Away from thie magic strip of cultivated lands is everywhere the illimitable desert. Xot a desert as we generally understand it ] of-loose sand, but a huge, barren areu of j alluvial soil stretching out, on the south very many miles before it mingles with the sands of Arabia. These great flat expanses are the true lands of the mirage. Great lakes of water appear to be etretehing towards one, horsemen and groups of palms that have no real existence appear on the horizon, until it k difficult to determine what is real and what is illusion. In one of the desert fights, when our troops had advanced through heavy mud and driven the Turks from an entrenched position, they were robbed of the fruite of their victory 'by a mirage. Floundering- away ever the sodden level desert the enemy were swallowed by a mirage while still quite dose, though they were plainly visible from the u top" of a gunboat in the rirer. Our gurus ceased firing while the target was still cloee to them, for the living target had. from their point of observation, entirely disappeared, as If swallowed by the earth.

Mesopotamia extends between thirty and thirty-eight degrees north latitude; that is to cay that its nearest point is seven degrees removed from the tropics, and yet there are few places on eirth that have equal variations of temperature. The approach of the hot weather is noticeable in April, and in June, July and Angust there is no day throughout the whole region when the thermometer does not exceed 100. while in the two latter months anything from 110 t3 125 can be confidently expected every afternoon. Flies and mosquitoes practically disappear, while birds, almost fentlierless, sit with gaping (or breath. The only pest that survives is. a minute and pernicious sandfly, which

the 'finest nctfing fails to exclude. The

town resident jives under conditions that minimise the discomfort. Walls arc four feet thick, and shutters are closed as coon as the heat of the day commences. At night the temperature falls to 73 tD 80: everything is opened up, ami the residents sleep on the flat roof?. The result is that in a well-regulated house one pa?ee<; from a street tenippratiirc of 120 to a basement heat of about SO. The reeds, which, plniterl into mate, form nine-tenths of the building mntorial of the tribes, also hare the property of tempering the atmosphere. But- to the campaigner in his tent, or the enilor on his steel ship, where to touch the unprotected surface is to burn the hand as with fire, night comes as the only relief. Then for five monthe the climate is ideal, if one does not mind from two to eight degrees of frost in the oa.rly morning for a week or two in December.

The discomfort of summer in t,lio open spaces is enhanced by frequent dust and sand storms, some places being especially subject to these evil visitations. It is 'difficult to exaggerate the penetrating powers of the desert sand. Tt finds its way through one'e clothes, invades the remotest cranny of one's luggage, and mixes itself with all provisions that are not in airtight tins*. It even wedges itself between the leaves of ones books, and altogether is the source of untold misery. The population outside the few towns is almost exclusively composed of Arab tribal confederations who are immigrants from the Arabian deserts. Some established themselves in remote periods, others -within the last two or three hundred years. There has been for centuries a eteady drift of population northwards, due partly to the increase in population, partly to the depletion of a soil unfertilised except by such matter as is contained in the. river water used in irrigation. A leading factor has l»eeii the temptation of the fertility of the plains of Upper Irak and the rich pasture lands contiguous to the Syrian border, sparsely populated by peoples exhausted in earlier struggles for the acquisition and maintenance of their territories. The process of the conversion of the nomad camel breeder and raider into a comparatively peaceful tiller of the soil is as inevitable as it is progressive. Although settlement as tillers of the soil has involved a loss of caste, even sections of powerful tribes like Beni Tamim, who at the dawn of the Mohammedan era occupied the oases of the whole of Central Arabia, will now be found among the riverine population. A reversion to tents is not uncommon, and even the great reed villages adjacent to and in the heart of the great ewamp areas are eemi-nomadic. In any case, after the rains, half the village, ■with their household goods and flocks, trek into the desert, where they remain until the pools have dried up and the £ras3 withered. The Arabs of Lower Mesopotamia are well armed with modern rifles, but have given comparatively little trouble. This distinction has been reBerved for the Bani Lam, on the left bank of the river above Amarah, whose principal Shaik, Ohadhban, was a thorn in the side of the Turkish Government before the war, and the Bani Rabrah, on the Hai, which runs south from the Tigris opposite Kut, joining the Euphrates at Nasiriyah. The latter were always notorious pirates and robbers, and the policy of both seems to have been purely Irish— "agin" any constituted Government. It cays much for their astuteness and political acumen that both these tribes have very largely come in, the more lawless, the Bani Rabrah, quite recently, while an expedition was being organised to pay their hitherto uninvestigated area a compulsory visit. Though the population of the country is Arab, the towns, such as Basra and Baghdad, shelter a truly cosmopolitan crowd. In the latter are at least 50,000 Jews, who claim a purer

descent than the Jews of Palestine. Kurds and Persians, negroes descended from early slaves, Chaldeans, Syrians, Greeks. Indians, Armenians and Turks, crowd the narrow ways of the bazaars. They are for the most part a dirty-looking lot. The Arabs, who predominate, always appear to be filthily dressed. Centuries hi tlir desert, with the limited supply of water in the oases, have evidently given them a distaste for water. The' men are for the most part of Semitic type of countenance and commanding appearance, but even the headmen, dressed in costly silk abbas, convey no impression of cieanliness. But if the Arabs look grubby, the Kurds are entirely beyond the pale." To meet a. band' of Kurd labourers walking hand-in-hand means a very unpleasant assault on the sense of smell.