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A DWELLER IN MESOPOTAMIABeing the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden
by
DONALD MAXWELL
With Sketches in Colour, Monochrome, and Line
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE LAST CRUSADE
ADVENTURES WITH A
SKETCH BOOK
WITH BIBLE AND BRUSH
IN PALESTINE
[ In preparation ]
THE BODLEY HEAD
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN TOWERS OF KHADAMAIN]
[Illustration]
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, Vigo Street New York: John Lane
Company MCMXXI
William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles, England.
PREFACE
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 to forget discomfort and insects and feel a certain glamour coming
back to things which, at the time, represented the commonplaces of life.
There certainly is a glamour about Mesopotamia. It is not so much the
glamour of the present as of the past.
To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held sway, to have
walked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to have stood in the great
banquet hall of Belshazzar's palace when the twilight is raising ghosts
and when little imagination would be required to see the fingers of a
man's hand come forth and write upon the plaster of the wall, to wander
in the moonlight into narrow streets in Old Baghdad, with its
recollections of the Arabian Nights: these things are to make enduring
pictures in the Palace of Memory, that ideal collection where only the
good ones are hung and all are on the line.
Although it was for the Imperial War Museum that I went to Mesopotamia,
these notes are not about the War, but they are a series of impressions
of Mesopotamia in general. The technical side of my work I have omitted,
and any account of the campaign in this field I have left to other
hands. The sketches here collected might be described as a bye product
of my mission in Mesopotamia; but most of them are the property of the
Imperial War Museum, and it is by the courtesy of the Art Committee of
that body that I have now been able to reproduce them.
THE BEACON,
BORSTAL,
ROCHESTER.
June 12, 1920.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE FIERY FURNACE 1
II. THE VENICE OF THE EAST 15
III. SINBAD THE SOLDIER 27
IV. THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST 37
V. BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON 49
VI. ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919 67
VII. IN OLD BAGHDAD 89
VIII. PARADISE LOST 97
IX. THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD 109
X. THE KINGS OF THE EAST 119
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES IN COLOUR AND MONOCHROME
THE GOLDEN TOWERS OF KHADAMAIN Frontispiece
ABADAN, PERSIA, THE OIL QUAYS 4
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