Similarly upon the eastern side of the desert, the Lakhmid camp had grown into an important town, which absorbed the generic title and was known as al-Ḥîrah, the standing camp _par excellence_, the capital of Persian Arabia. But no sooner did the Lakhmid princes find themselves enclosed within the walls of a city than they threw out fresh ḥîrahs into the desert: palaces, the magnificence of which haunted the imagination of Beduin poets of the Days of Ignorance and gave birth to legendary tales and to moral aphorisms which were recorded with pious, if uncritical, exactitude by the historians of Islâm. We know the site of the most famous of these pleasaunces, Khawarnaq.[58] Ibn Baṭûṭah, in the fourteenth century A.D., saw the remains of its immense domes on the edge of a canal which was fed by the Hindiyyeh branch of the Euphrates. In his day it was still inhabited. The existing ruin mounds, standing upon the brink of the Sea of Nedjef, are covered with the sherds of mediaeval pottery. The canal has now silted up and the Sea of Nedjef is dry. I was told at Nedjef that thirty or forty years ago the lake was full of water, and that the climate of the town, never very much to boast of, had been considerably affected for the worse by the change. Below the town, the bed of the lake is occupied by palm-gardens and cornfields, watered by a canal recently constructed. What was its condition in Sasanian times I do not know. The lake was dry in the Middle Ages,[59] but ‘Adi ibn Zaid speaks of the Nu’mânid lord of Khawarnaq as having looked from his palace walls and rejoiced at the sight of the sea.[60] It is difficult to imagine that any one could have rejoiced in the Baḥr Nedjef if it had worn its present aspect. The extent of the mounds of Khawarnaq is not large, though my impression is that part of the steep earth cliff overhanging the Baḥr Nedjef has fallen away and carried the castle walls with it. The ancient canal from the Hindiyyeh lies about a quarter of a mile to the north of the mounds. Legend has been busy in accounting for the origin of the castle. It is said to have been built by Nu’mân ibn Imra’ al-Qais, by order of the Sasanian king Yazdegerd I, who desired that his son, Bahrâm V Gûr, should be brought up in the salubrious air of the desert above Ḥîrah. This would place its foundation in the early part of the fifth century A.D.[61] The architect was a certain Sinimmâr, a Byzantine (Rûmi) according to some authorities,[62] nor need this assertion excite surprise. A century later Justinian lent workmen to Khusrau I, when the latter was engaged in building the new Antioch near Ctesiphon. Other Lakhmid ḥîrahs are mentioned besides Khawarnaq, but they are to us nothing but a name. Al-Sadîr stood in the desert ‘that lies between al-Ḥîrah and Syria’,[63] presumably not far from Khawarnaq, since the two castles are frequently mentioned together. We hear also of al-Ṣinnîn, where ‘Adi ibn Zaid was imprisoned.[64] Of greater importance