deserts, who, mounted on their own matchless horses, are carried across the open border with as much facility as the drifts of desert sand so much dreaded by travellers. The rest of the country is left to nature's own devices and, wherever it is not cut up by mountains or rocky ranges, offers the well-known twofold character of steppe-land: luxuriant grassy vegetation during one-third of the year and a parched, arid waste the rest of the time, except during the winter rains and spring floods. 10. A wild and desolate scene! Imposing too in its sorrowful grandeur, and well suited to a land which may be called a graveyard of empires and nations. The monotony of the landscape would be unbroken, but for certain elevations and hillocks of strange and varied shapes, which spring up, as it were, from the plain in every direction; some are high and conical or pyramidal in form, others are quite extensive and rather flat on the summit, others again long and low, and all curiously unconnected with each other or any ridge of hills or mountains. This is doubly striking in Lower Mesopotamia or Babylonia, proverbial for its excessive flatness. The few permanent villages, composed of mud-huts or plaited reed-cabins, are generally built on these eminences, others are used as burying-grounds, and a mosque, the Mohammedan house of prayer, sometimes rises on one or the other. They are pleasing objects in the beautiful spring season, when corn-fields wave on their summits, and their slopes, as well as all the surrounding plains, are clothed with the densest and greenest of herbage, enlivened with countless flowers of every hue, till the surface of the earth looks, from a distance or from a height, as gorgeous as the richest Persian carpet. But, on approaching nearer to these hillocks or mounds, an unprepared traveller would be struck by some peculiar features. Their substance being rather soft and yielding, and the winter rains pouring down with exceeding violence, their sides are furrowed in many places with ravines, dug by the rushing streams of rain-water. These streams of course wash down much of the substance itself and carry it far into the plain, where it lies scattered on the surface quite distinct from the soil. These washings are found to consist not of earth or sand, but of rubbish, something like that which lies in heaps wherever a house is being built or demolished, and to contain innumerable fragments of bricks, pottery, stone evidently worked by the hand and chisel; many of these fragments moreover bearing inscriptions in complicated characters composed of one curious figure shaped like the head of an arrow, and used in every possible position and combination,--like this: [Illustration: 1.--CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS.]