BAGHDAD

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9618, 26 March 1917, Page 3

BAGHDAD

THE CITY OF IMPERIAL DREAMS. (By Edmund Candler.) An ancient though hardly a beautiful city, yet possessing an indefinable charm of its own. Entering it from the east, after having spent years in tho other easts, I felt that I was coming into tho real East for the first time, the dry, parched, and crumbling, unlusuriaut, biblical East, the East of Sir Richard Burton and Nebuchadnezzar, the original and essential East that is printed on the mind in childhood through the Bible and the Book of Hours. One sees date palms, domed Arab tombs, and veiled women going to the well with pitchers, in other Oriental cities scattered far and wide; hut one has to come back to the Arab to evoke the familiar scene, the Bedouin walk, the desert gaze, the peculiar hang of the turban and poise of tho head. Bagdad, or Ba-agh-daad, as the Arabs style it—tho two “a's” are rolled and the "li" is sounded—is a city devoid of any kind of grandeur. The narrow, tortuous alleys are impassable to carriages. Tho saddle-bags of tho camels rub against ITte walls of yellowish brick and jam uncomfortably at the corners. Many of tho streets are too narrow for beasts of burden other than the mangy ragged little mules and asses winch descend in a continual stream with their empty water-skins to the Tigris bank. ■' THESE FRETTED JEZEBEL WINDOWS.

Tho bazaars are often roofed, and the houses, except in the upper stories, present a blank wall to the street. Hero tho high-gabled windows on either side almost meet, and one catches a glimpse of an arm and sometimes a face of a surprising paleness, which hurriedly or reluctantly veiled according to the degree of modesty that impels tho action. These fretted Jezebel windows are in keeping with tho hoarded romance of the city. It is the architecture of the illustrations in Lane’s "Arabian Nights. One feels that a black slave may appear behind the curtain with a naked scimitar, or an afrit (evil spirit) peep out of a neighbouring, window. I saw one fair as a Circassian, violently seized by tho shoulder from behind and drawn back into tho room by a jealous hand, and hoped that it would not bo her fate to be sewn up in a skin and cast into the Tigris. , , • , My companions in tho hotel were a Greek, a Jew, a Turk, an Armenian, a Levantine, a Bombay Eurasian, and Italian-Abyssinian half-caste, who tola me that he hod had French lessons from General Gordon in Khartum. He dealt in liquorice, and I remember a seller of roots coming into the city, an .Arab, a dweller in black horse-hair tents driven to Bagdad by hunger, as distrustful of walls as of a cage, and afraid to enter the door of a. house with his wares. He struggled and spat when the Abyssinian, who wanted to buy his stock, dragged him over th.o thtcsfcolu. THE MOUTH OF HELL.

Mt bedroom -window opened into a verandah overlooking the river and tn.e Bridge of Boats. Here every, morning I was reminded of the antiquity of the city as I watched the gufas (coracles), described by Herodotus, "round like a buckler and freighted with casks ot palm wine.-” He tells how they floated down stream from Armenia each with a live ass on board, and how when they arrived at Babylon the vessels were taken to pieces and the ribs of willow, date palm and pomegranate sold with the merchandise, and the covering of skin carried back on the asses to the merchant's own country. Afterwards 1 saw the bitumen wells of Hitt on tho Euphrates, where the pitch is exuded with which the gufas arc plastered over to-day as in eld times. They are still belching forth tho clouds of dense smoke which made the ancients believe them the mouth of hell- • ■ No doubt the -Turks, who have commandeered all the craft- of the Tigris, have a fleet of these cauldron-like boats' freighted with supplies and munitions of war spinning down stream from above Nineveh, each with "the two navigators standing upright," who will bo lashing the stream furiously to reach Bagdad against tho day when our first armoured motor-cars invade the palm groves of the city.

i remember evenings spent in the house of an Armenian, K Effendi—it is not safe" to give his name—when with shutters barred and doors closely ■guarded a servant would stand by the glowing brazier and sing national songs. TWELVE DAYS ON A DROMEDARY. Tho Turk is mot loved by subject races. Tho Jews and Armenians in the city, if they escaped with their lives, would no doubt welcome the sound of the British guns. Yet in all social relatione tho traveller will find tho well-bred Osmuuli of the old school what tho German eminently is not—a gentleman. Like the Bedon, he has a code. There are things which are done and things which are not done, and expediency does not juggle with the rules.

The most picturesque figures in the city are the Arabs: the Bedou, with his keen eyes cast from long habit on tho horizon; the grave sheikh with his staff, his long grey beard and steadfast gaze, and turban bound with the black aagal. The Bedouin distrust the Turks, and their antipathy is seasoned with contempt. Outside the city they were free as the wind. There was no armed control beyond a gunshot from the walls. The sheikhs of the tribes were subsidised to let the camel post go through vo Damascus, and the Turkish Government had no hold on them unless one of their number came into tho bazaars of Bagdad for supplies. I made the journey across the desert with an old haji, who guided himself by the stars. Twelve days on a fast dromedary, riding eighteen hours at a stretch with two short-halts for meals, and the beast had only one drink between the Euphrates and Damascus.- I was held up and robbed a day and a half ffom Hitt, and owed it to tho haji that I got through alive. When we entered Damascus we found the old city turning in its sleep after an imperial visit. We saw painted on all the facades of tho houses what I should have recognised, if I had been wise, as "the writing on the wall,’’ the mark of the beast, the beginning of all this coil, tho finger pointing to Bagdad. Horizontal stripes of red, black, and white, the brandy of the Hohenzollerns. William, the friend of Abdul, had visited the oldest city In the world. The Sultan was—literally perhaps, figuratively certainly—to be clasped in a tight and, as after events may prove, a suffocating embrace. Not a sacred dwelling was spared, not even the house of Ananias or the house where St. Paul was let down in the basket; and the little mountain train that takes one on to Lebanon and the sea wore on every carriage the same livery. And, last profanitv of all, even at Baalbec on the temples of Jupiter and the Sun was inscribed the legend, "Imperator GermanoVum visitavit."