_All hail, Euphrates! stream of hoary time,_ _Fair as majestic, sacred as sublime!_ _What thoughts of earth’s young morning dost thou bring!_ _What hallowed memories to thy bright waves cling!--_ _The bowers are crushed where Eve in beauty shone,_ _Ages have whelmed, beneath their ruthless tide,_ _Assyria’s glory and Chaldæa’s pride:_ _But thou, exhaustless river! rollest still,_ _Raising thy lordly voice by vale and hill;_ _Sparkling through palm-groves, washing empires’ graves;_ _And gladdening thirsty deserts with thy waves;_ _Mirroring the heavens, that know no change, like thee,_ _A glittering dream, a bright-leaved history!_ No river in the world has played so prominent a rôle in the annals of our race, and none, not even the Nile, can boast of nobler traditions or a more illustrious history, or is richer in beautiful myths and soul-stirring legends. On its fertile banks, it is believed, was rocked the cradle of mankind and its glistening waters whisper secrets of long-forgotten dynasties and murmurs the names of peoples of whom history has no record. It was long the barrier between the contending powers of the East and the West; between the forces of Persia and Greece, of Parthia and Rome. Eastern poets never tired in singing its praises and Arabian geographers loved to dilate on it as one of the great rivers of the earth. In the Bible the name of the Euphrates occurs as early as the second chapter of Genesis. According to scholars of repute the patriarch Abraham on his way to the Promised Land crossed it at Birejik, but a few miles north of where it is now spanned by the great steel bridge of the Bagdad Railway. In the Covenant which God had made with him the dominions of his posterity were to extend “from the river of Egypt[294] even to the great river Euphrates.” And, obedient to the command of the Lord to “go forth from kindred and out of his father’s house ... Abraham took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all the substance which they had gathered and all the souls which they had gotten in the land of Haran; and they went out to go into the land of Canaan.”[295] Crossing, then, the Euphrates near the spot where we crossed it ourselves they must, in order to find the necessary sustenance for their flocks and herds, have traversed the same fertile plain that had so engaged our attention on the way from Aleppo to Djerabis and probably by one of the sinuous caravan tracks that we noted from the car window.