MOSUL

Evening Star, Issue 18239, 2 April 1923, Page 5

MOSUL

THE COVETED CITY. ' MUD AND MARBLE. Air Perceval Landon writes from Lausanne to the London ‘Daily Telegraph’: As day succeeds day and the course of the conference unfolds itself in a series of worm-like stretches and rcooilments, so more and more do the eyes of the delegates—even thoso who aro in no way directly interested in the question —turn almost involuntarily, but with increasing interest, to the one city the possession of which they believe, rigWTy or wrongly, will decide the fate of tho congress. It is curious to think of the blank and total incuriosity with which Mosul in its turn regards the conference. Yet it may be of interest to some to road a rough sketch, of a city which scarcely one of the men who here take so vital an interest in her has ever seen.

About noon one leaves behind the famous—tho all too famous—oilfield of Quayyarah —tho outflow which has caused all tins jealousy and covetousness, and of which it will bo necessary to write on another occasion—and l for fifty miles one works one’s'way northwards across an almost entirely barren plain, _ intersected: with shallow ravines dropping to tho river on one’s right. There are two roads. 'Chat by the river is the safer, and that across the last edge of the desert the shorter—and you are not always allowed to take your choice. At last, after dipping down into Hammam Ali, whore the sulphur baths are, one rises again, this time on the splendid fragment of an English road, which was indeed abandoned last year, but still remains ns a witness to the different standards of East and West in such vital matters as transport. Then the last fold is won, and the plain of Mosul lies below one. ,

There is .something that is reminiscent of Damascus in the first sight of Mosul. At about the same distance as that from which Mahonnned himself lookedl down upon Damascus and decided that to enter so lovely a place might endanger his hopes of a celestial paradise, Mosul and Nineveh, the living and Hi*, dead, the provincial and the imperial, are spread out before the traveller. Between the dense streets of Mosul and the open grey verdure where Nineveh lay within tho straight grassy folds that betray her ancient walls flows the Tigris in a yellow flood torn into ribbons by willowed and sandy javeaux as if. conies south to meet one. Tho new road now runs straight through gardens and orchards to the Bab-el-Jatfid, or southern gate, leaving on tho right between itself and the river most of tho military and civil administrative quarters of our occupation.. The Political Officer, Mr Nalder, had a beautiful house on the bank of the river next the chib, but the general’s headquarters, 500 yards away, were even more attractive. There had once been here a religious community, and inside the cloister there is the strangest of strange combinations—the absolute peace and solitude of an Italian monastery all the day, and every evening the strong pervading smell of the petroleum that continually forces its way upwards through the soil of the bank of the ligns, and even up through its very bed, staining with iridescent clouds tho dull brown surface, and at times almost making one cough as one comes across from Nineveh in the dusk. Did Ezarhaddon think of it except as the emanation of the Evil One, or did Sardanapuhis know enough to saturate his famous Inncral pyro with crude petroleum? , . Mosul has no great claim to distinction, except, perhaps, the leaning minaret of the Jami-cl-Kcbir, winch is indeed a giant pillar and is a mark for miles around in places whore nothing else can be seen of the city. Its streets are marrow, except for the great street, Jadat-el-Kebir, which a Turkish vizier began and which we completed in 1920-a, wide thoroughfare, 60ft in width, which cuts its way through the raffle of mean houses which for the most part is all that Mosul can boast, sparing only the Syrian Caiholie School in the heart of the city. On the desert side the old walls remain but within them, to tho west and north, the town has shrunk nearly a qua icr of a mile, and a rough lion, parcelled by Mill trac “ bl ® tracks where nothing grows, has taken the place of tho hovels which once filled the space. The markets aro not unlike those of other towns, but aro not covered, except in one or two streets near the bridge. Here, by the water side, the hfo of Mosul centres. , Last year we presented to tho city a new boat bridge m the place of tho old patched and unsafe causeway, which showed clearly enough .the tragedies it had suffered, and tho many hands which from half-millennium to half-millennium had helped to remake its continuity. Beside it rises the Aghwat mosque and minaret the most picturesque m Mosul, ami bovond it, across the river, but a mi o awav arc the long, low slopes of the walls of Nineveh, still treeless, houseless, and unbroken from end to end except, by the towering church and monastery ol Jonah —in common justice, the, patron saint of Ninevnh. ~ There is not much more that so rapid a sketch as this can recall. Probably the first discovery that a stranger makes is the fact that 'the city is built of mud and marble. The, quarries are still worked I outside the walls, on the line of flic Bagdad Railway to Nisibin, which still can bo (raced by the long abandon'd cuttings. The marlilc is the same broad, soft, while crystallised limestone as that which was used for the human-headed bulls which Layard brought, back to the British Museum 1 and there is hardly a house in Mosul so mean that it has not door and window-sills and jambs and lintels and corner posts of this beautiful material. The rest of the house is sunburnt brick of unusually poor quality, and buttresses are ■almost universal. The real charm of Mosul is tho mixed crowd that wanders through her streets, free from the blighting touch of the West, All the Near and Middle East comes to tho city of muslin soon or late. Guebres and Jews and Armenians, Arabs from west and south, Kurds from north and cast, Persians and Russians and Punjabis and Turks, and—more strange than all—Yczidis, who worship tho Devil and cannot abide the sight of the color blue—all the flotsam and jetsam of neutral Iran and Tunin, you may find it all in Mosul. Nor is it only Mosul itself and the rolling downs which represent the ancient Nineveh that are, of interest here. Twenty miles lower down, on the opposite side of the Tigris, rises the huge mass of Nannul, the most southerly of the four great corner castles of Nineveh. This, liko the others, consists of a square, each side of which is of the mystic length of 7,000 ft. The square of Nineveh has been lengthened to the south beyond the little stream so that the latter now cuts the area of the ruins in two. It is hero that the monstrous and magnificent human-headed bulls | of marble wore found by Layard. And here to this day the marble heads and wings of half-buried figures jut upwards through the turf —too often, alas! tho quarry for the Arab and tho Bagdad Turk. I As yet we have but scratched the ground of Assyria. Khorsabad—another of these corner palaces—has been surveyed, but scarcely more, and Nineveh still has square miles of silent history to yield. Across the river Bhargat—now the railhead of the Bagdad line— >vas as magnificent once as Nimrud; indeed, the whole way down to ! Bagdad one runs past scores and hundreds • of hills, each one the mounded grave of i some lost town. At Quayyarah, between Mosul and Shargat, are the famous oilfields. The smell of them taints the air for miles, and in i their present condition there seems little to justify the world-wide and brazen covetousness that they have evoked. On a, bluff above the river is a foul black swamp i of raw and stagnant petroleum, halfspanned by a broken bridge, and edged at a respectful distance by the coarse bents of a mangy grass. A few refining kilns of blackened and tumbling brick barely stand upright a stone’s throw away from the tiny offices, where for months and years an ex-officer of the Navy has worked like a Trojan from a single shallow well to supply the Northern division with oil. At first sight, it is strange that half tho world is ready to quarrel about tho development

of this remote and lonely spot. But here there is the new life-blood of the world, and perhaps it will bo found that, there is no other field in any continent which can rival in extent the enormous reservoir, which possibly stretches for a hundred miles to the north and south of Quayyarah. Wo aro bound in honor and equity to see that the peoples who, relying on our given word in the early days of the war, broke away from their servitude to Turkey, shall not he bereft of their source of food; and to the outer world we arc, almost equally bound to see to it that, so far as we can ensure it, the supply of oil shall not fail through our neglect or faintheartedness.