For one desiring a rest-cure the method may be recommended confidently. You lie on your camp bed under the shade of your grass hut, watching the shore slide past your sleepy eyes. If the heat grows too great, your servant dashes water over the grass matting, and you are cool. Is fruit your desire? He emits a doleful howl, which is answered from the bank, and presently a nude cultivator turns up alongside, buoyed up on the inflated skin on which he has swum out, and towing a large melon from one of the gardens that line the river, which conveniently floats just awash. Is a bath desirable? You strip and slide off the edge of your _keleg_, taking a sheep-skin to act as buoy, or pillow if you like. You swim for as long as you feel inclined, or drift down while the craft keeps pace with you. You are in the land of the lotus eaters on a _keleg_ voyage--but you had better take a few books to read! Altogether the writer fully sympathizes with the feeling of a Chaldæan bishop, who was scandalized at discovering that a certain Dominican Father held himself excused from observing Lent during a voyage of this kind "because he was on a journey." "Why, good gracious," said his lordship, "he might as well claim exemption from fasting in Paradise!" It must be owned that there is not much in the way of scenery in this portion of the river. If you want that, you must go to the upper reaches of the Tigris, and travel from Diarbekr down to Mosul, threading the great gorges _en route_.[151] There you will get magnificence, and it may be excitement too; for there are rapids in the defile, and _kelegs_ have been known to be wrecked in them. Mesopotamia does not give you mountains. Still, there is one stretch of fair scenery (though not a gorge to be compared with the canons of Tyari), where the "Jebel Makdul" crosses the river, and a fine stretch of dull red cliff, relieved by a wide streak of grey alabaster, lines the bank for some miles. Here stands a fine old stronghold, much resembling one of the Rhine castles, the "Kalat-el-Bint," or Maiden Castle. Shortly after, you pass a sulphur spring, which is not an uncommon thing in the land; still, it is not often that you find one so odoriferous as to awake the peaceful slumberer in mid-stream! Somewhat lower, the lesser Zab joins the Tigris, descending from a city that we visited at one period of our wanderings in the land, and of which we include a picture. This is Kirkuk, a town which contains, in its present name, one of the few memorials of the old Seleucid rulers. It is a contraction of "Karka d'Bait Seluk," the "Citadel of the house of Seleucus." As a city, it is far older than the kingdoms of Alexander's successors, for it stands on one of the largest and most ancient of "tels"; and the traveller may "acquire merit" by visiting the mosque where are the tombs of Shadrach and Abednego. Meshach, the guide will tell you, is there too, but the site of his grave has unfortunately been forgotten.