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of daybreak is a great desideratum on the level, burning plain of Babylonia. For two hours, we travelled over a desert, stony tract, beyond which, we came to an Arab encampment, and some cultivation, and at this point we crossed the canal by a temporary bridge. There was a great mound of ruins to the south of us. We continued through the same kind of country, cultivation, and encampments, alternating with desert land, and dried-up canals of irrigation; for, in the time of Artaxerxes (Ardashir), as in that of the Khalifate, all this great plain—ever fertile, amid its various fortunes—was populated and cultivated. Some of the land was inundated, and the soil lately left by the waters cracked into a great irregular polygonal pavement, or rose up in piles of dust, that travelled about in spiral forms, sweeping upon their own axis, and yet having an onward movement superadded.

Throughout almost the whole length of the ride, we had the colossal fragment of a ruin, called the Akka Kuf, rising like a broken pile of rock out of the distant horizon, or towering out of the shining waves of the Schrab, or mirage, contorted into a hundred different shapes; at times thrown up into the air, as a long irregular pillar, and then again broken into pieces, and scattered like so many masses of rock over the plain. Still, however altered and variable the appearances which it assumed, it was always visible, and served us as an infallible guide. This is, no doubt, the key to the meaning of these lofty eminences on the plain; which, by guiding the fathers of the human race from Accad (Akka Kuf) to Babel, and from Babel to Erech or Ur, prevented their being scattered abroad upon the face of the earth till this was accomplished, for wise purposes, by the direct interposition of the Almighty.

The tower of Accad,^[1] like other Babylonian ruins, is built of sundried bricks, alternating with reeds and bitumen, but differing somewhat in the arrangement of these, and still more from all other mounds, as these, although in the centre, formed of solid bricks, are, from the decay of the surface, fallen off into mere heaps of earth, while the tower of Akka Kuf is, on the contrary, a fragment of one of these great mounds, and rises out of the plain a solid mass of building, with perpendicular or broken walls of brick, the holes in which are the safe resort of owls and birds of prey. All around, far and wide, are traces of extensive ruins, now level with the ground, and intersected by ancient beds of canals of irrigation, or washed by the waters of the Khor, the reed-clad banks of which shelter herds of wild boar.

Near to the ruins of Accad, was an Arab castellated farm, called Kaleh Yusuf Agha, (Mr. Joseph's Castle,) and not far from this, we arrived at a little isolated mound, surrounded by the waters of the lake, where we expected to find a boat to convey us to Baghdad; but it had just started, and the more we fired guns and pistols to endeavour to bring it back, the more it sped onward to be out of our reach. We were thus left to pass the night on this water-environed mound. The site of Baghdad was visible on the other side of the lake, where it appeared as a long grove of date trees, with here and there an occasional glimpse of rampart or flat-roofed houses, towered over by white-washed

1. ↑ "And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar."—Genesis, x. 10.