Outside of Nimroud and Assur, there is little during the first half of the journey to Bagdad to claim one’s attention except the numerous Kurd villages, composed of squalid stone and mud houses and frequent groups of black tents occupied by various tribes of Arabs. Around the Arabian encampments one sees occasionally quite large flocks of sheep and, in the vicinity of the stone and mud villages of the Kurds, one will note the feeble attempts which its inhabitants make to cultivate the land. Considering the primitive methods of irrigation that exist here, one is not surprised to find that the poor husbandman’s return for his labor is very small. In marked contrast, however, to the unpromising grain fields on the arid plains were the luxurious fields of Indian corn in the small islands which dotted the Tigris. During the entire journey between Mosul and Bagdad one is never long out of sight of ruins of some kind or other--ruins of old strongholds, ruins of monuments to Moslem saints, ruins of mosques and minarets, ruins of towns and cities long since deserted or destroyed by the ruthless invader. They certainly give the country a most desolate appearance, but they, at the same time, tell in the most eloquent fashion how great must have been the wealth and prosperity of this ill-fated country in the palmiest days of the great Caliphs and during the reigns of the wise and beneficent monarchs of the Sassanidæ and the Achæmenidæ. However rich the flora and fauna may formerly have been along the Tigris, there is now visible but little of either. Older travelers speak of the long stretches of woodland along the river. Now one sees little more than small clumps of Acacia and Glycyrrhiza here and there and even these seem to be rapidly disappearing. Wild fowl are said to be abundant, but during the first half of our journey on the Tigris we saw only a few shy francolins, pelicans, and cormorants. Farther down the river, however, the number of fowl appreciably augmented. Among them were some snipe and a beautiful species of duck with snowy-white plumage. Singing birds were exceedingly rare. According to early travelers, large game formerly abounded the whole way from Nineveh to Bagdad. Thus Jean de Thévenot in his entertaining work on the Levant assures us that in the vicinity of El Fatha, lions were as numerous as sheep elsewhere--_des lions--que l’on y voit en aussi grande quantité que des moutons ailleurs_.[403] He tells us particularly of an extraordinarily large and powerful lion which took a man from every caravan--except his own--that ventured to pass by that terrible place. That his caravan escaped the payment of the tribute exacted by the ferocious brute from all others, was, he opined, something glorious--_ce qui devoit être bien glorieux pour la noire qui ne lui paia point ce tribut_.