Judging by the precautions which, he informs us, he was continually obliged to take against these feral terrors of the desert, Thévenot was as much obsessed by them as he was by the hot and poisonous wind which, he avers, was such a deadly menace in the valley of the Tigris. This consuming wind is, he declares, the same as the _ventus urens_--burning wind--mentioned in the twenty-seventh chapter of the book of Job and prevails during the summer all the way from Mosul to Surat in distant India and is so fatal that if one inhales it one instantly drops dead, and his corpse immediately becomes as black as ink, and, if one touches it, the flesh falls from the bones.[404] But these are only samples of travelers’ tales that have been current regarding the East and its scorching atmosphere since the days of Strabo.[405] It is, therefore, quite evident that Thévenot did not purpose to allow his predecessors, including his countryman Tavernier, not to mention others, to enjoy a complete monopoly in the recounting of wonders and adventures. In addition to stories about the poison wind--the Samum of the Arabs--most travelers in the desert have something to say about the huge, yellow sand pillars that are sometimes seen scudding over the plain on the wings of the whirlwind. They are at times a positive menace to travelers and to the natives are objects of terror. According to Arab superstition they are “Jinnis of the Waste which cannot be caught, a notion arising,” Burton tells, “from the fitful movements of the electrical wind-eddy that raises them.”[406] The first place at which we stopped after entering the vilayet of Bagdad, which embraces the northern part of old Babylonia, was Tekrit. Although modern Tekrit is little more than a wretched village, the Tekrit of mediæval times, as is evinced by the vast area covered by rubbish and ruins, was a large and flourishing city. Writing of the modern town, Rich says its atmosphere “seems to be favorable to prosers, as the saying, ‘To talk like Tekreetli,’ which is common in these parts, apparently indicates.” To this statement he adds, “If the women exceed the men in this gift, in the due proportion of the sex, he is to be pitied who marries a Tekreetli wife.”[407] The German traveler, Baron von Thielmann, in the account of his journey down the Tigris, gives his impression of the town in a single sentence: “As for ourselves we saw nothing worth noticing in this miserable abode save two solitary palm-trees, the first which we had met with.”[408] Incidentally, he quotes as a statement of Karl Ritter, the celebrated geographer, “the striking remark that the furthest palm-tree in the East always denotes the limit of Arab sway and Arab life.”