We camped that night six hours from Sheramîyeh in a sheltered place among the hills beside a spring of which the waters were bitter with sulphur and not unmixed with pitch; our companions drank of it, but my servants and I quaffed royally from the flasks which Jûsef had filled at the Tigris. While the tents were being pitched I walked to the top of the hills, and on the banks of watercourses that had but recently run dry I found flowers, blue larkspurs and purple gentians and a wide selection of the thistle family. A bowl of larkspurs was set upon my dinner-table, and Jûsef was very loath to throw them away when we struck camp, so rare and delicate a possession did they seem to us. But I assured him that the German professors at Ḳal’at Shergât would have flowers fairer than these. A more wonderful sight was in store for us on the next day’s march. We had travelled barely two hours when we splashed into a pool of rain-water, and then into another; there was grass round them, green, abundant grass: “More than we have seen all the way from Aleppo!” exclaimed Jûsef. The region of the drought was over, and when our path led us to the top of the Jebel Ḥamrîn, here sunk to a low hog’s back, I was scarcely surprised to see the slopes down to the Tigris red with poppies. But even the poppies could not withhold the eye from the great mound of Ḳal’at Shergât by the river’s edge, the mound of Asshur, crowned with the crumbling mass of a huge zigurrat, the temple pyramid of the tutelary god of the Assyrians. With the general aspect of the first capital of Assyria I was already familiar, thanks to the excellent photographs published by the German Orient-Gesellschaft, but I was not prepared for so magnificent a prospect. The Tigris in high flood washed the foot of the temple mound; far away to the north ran the snow-clad barrier of mountains whence its waters flow--a barrier which Nature planted in vain against the valour of the Assyrian armies; and across the river the fertile plain stretched away in long undulations to where Arbela lies behind low hills. Bountiful gods had showered their gifts upon the land.