THE CITY OF BAGHDAD.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1686, 15 March 1917, Page 1

THE CITY OF BAGHDAD.

A PICTURESQUE CENTRE. PAST GLORIES RECALLED. Who that lias ever read Unit wonderful collection of Eastern tales, “The Arabian Nights Entertainment,” with mil its enchanting descriptions of Eastern life, can ever forget Baghdad, the centre of most of the stories, and the home of the famous and best-beloved of the Calips Haroun-Al-Raschid. To this day the Chaldeans, Arabs, Kurds, Persians, and other races of Mesopotamia, the “land between the two rivers,” speak of the good Caliph, and also of the terrible storming of Baghdad in 1259 by the Mongols, who took the city after six days’ tierce lighting, and put the 800,000 inhabit ants to the sword, piling them up into mountains of dead. From a distance Baghdad still appears to be the wonderful city of Eastern history and romance. It is a city of the plains, and reaches far out on each side of the Tigris, fringed with a fairyland of green,' in which innumerable groves of date-palms, olives, and fig trees form thick fringes. The town is divided into two parts by the broad Tigris, the eastern part, founded by Caliph Abu Jaafer al Mansur in 703 on the site of a former city, being the real ancient Baghdad. From it the Caliphate removed toward the end of the eleventh century to the west side of the river, and the better class of the population following, old Baghdad became a sort of suburb, still inhabited chiefly by the poor. To-day, as nigh a thousand years ago, t lit* two parts are connected by the famous bridge of boats, and through means of “gouffahs,” or large round wicker baskets (coracles), coated with bitumen, propelled by native boatmen with in Unite dexter-

The whole area of the town, on both banks, is surrounded by a high and thick wall of brick and mud, now much decayed, Hanked at distances with towers, many of them dating back to the times of the Caliphs. The entire wall is about five miles in circumference, but a large portion of it encloses gardens and plantations of date and fig trees. Under the wall there is a ditch of considerable depth, which may be tilled from the Tigris. A DISAPPOINTING INTERIOR, Inside, this most famous and ancient city of the East is very disappointing. There are few towns oven in Asia which’have such narrow and winding street.--. Narrow dark, and frequently like tunnels, the streets of Baghdad were built to keep out the terrible heat, which for weeks a I a time is 125 degrees in the shade. They are often walled over with brick, or mud, straw, and poles; and in the numerous bazaars the booths of the merchants are arranged along the sides of these tunnels. Unpaved and full of holes and heaps of rubbish, dead carcases, and all kinds of rubbish, the streets are genuinely Oriental, and would endanger the piddle health were not the worst removed by the innumerable unowned and half-savage dogs. The bazaars, where each shopkeeper is seen squatted on a rug before his pile of goods, and the great Arab market-place, are Just as busy and picturesque as they were (100 years ago, when the famous mediaeval traveller, Marco Polo, stayed in Baghdad, and sent home gold-woven shawls and other rarities to his friends in Venice. As picturesque are the crowds of Bedouins, camel-drivers, Jews, Turks, Chaldeans, Kurds, Persians, and other races making up the very mixed population of the city of Haroun-Al-Raschid, ONCE A SEAT OF LEARNING. Baghdad was at one time, especially under Caliph Mustanser Billah, the centre of light and learning in the Old World. The structure of the college, then the seat of more science and intellect than existed at that lime in any other part of the world, still stands near the bridge of boats; but it was turned into a “khan,” or caravanserai early last century, and the old kitchen is now the Custom House.

Far beyond the present city walls the ruins of old buildings and the lines of streets destroyed by the Mongols are to he traced. On the west side these extend nearly to the “Mound of Nimrod,” which many archoeologists have asserted to be the real Tower of Bnbel, as against that in the vicinity of Babylon. Time and the weather have destroyed it much to a shapeless mass of brickwork about 12(5 feet in height, J.OO feet in diameter, and 300 feet [Concluded on page 4,]