In contemplating the old classic streams of Greece and Italy, the Illisus, the Peneus, the Tibur, the Po--I always experience a kind of admiration bordering on respect. I am impressed not by the volume of water which they carry to the sea but by their picturesqueness, by the atmosphere of romance that hangs over them and by the venerable history in which they all rejoice. But when I gazed on the Tigris and its ruin-fringed banks, a surge of emotion pervaded my entire being and I was thrilled as by few other objects on earth. Under the name Hiddikel it appears as one of the rivers of Eden. To the prophet Daniel, who crossed it in his journeys to and from Susa, it was “The Great River,”[380] and on its banks he had some of his most remarkable visions. It carried on its waters the greatest fleet ever built by an Assyrian potentate. This was when in 694 B. C., Sennacherib inaugurated his campaign of devastation in Babylonia and when, with the aid of seafaring men from Cyprus and Phœnicia, he floated his boats to the lower Tigris and thence transported them to the Euphrates. It was during this ruthless war that he applied the torch to the great city of Babylon and left it with its magnificent temples and palaces and its splendid works of art--the result of long centuries of labor--a vast, smoldering ruin. It was along the Tigris that Xenophon and his heroic Ten Thousand returned homewards after the eventful battle of Cunaxa. This famous retreat revealed to the Greeks the weakness of the vast Persian Empire and led to its overthrow by Alexander the Great and to “the accomplishment of the promises of God, as made in the prophecies of Daniel, and prepared the way for the third of the great empires which were to precede the coming of the Savior of mankind.”[381] As the evening sun was disappearing behind a gorgeous gold and crimson mountain range of cumulus clouds, we heard, a short distance ahead of us, the roaring of the Zikr ul Aawaze, a noted cataract about twenty miles below Mosul and we then knew that we were near the celebrated ruins of Nimroud. These ruins formerly stood on the left bank of the Tigris, but, owing to a shifting of the river’s channel towards the west, are now about two miles inland. As we desired to visit the great tell of Nimroud the following day, we here tied up our kelek for the night. Early the next morning we were on our way to the ruins which, in the annals of Assyrian archæology, are almost as famous as those of Kuyunjik and Khorsabad. Here Layard unearthed some of the most prized treasures in the Assyrian department of the British Museum and here, there are reasons to believe, are still buried countless other treasures equally valuable.