There is but little above ground at Nineveh now. The long walls remain, looking much like derelict railway embankments; and the great moat, fifty yards in width, and twenty feet deep, into which the waters of the river Khozr could be turned at will, still girdles the city round. Sunk as it is in conglomerate rock, this moat is a monument of patient labour. Of the two great mounds where the King's palaces stood, Koyunjik and Nebi Yunus, the former and larger has probably yielded the last of its important secrets to the British Museum. It is well, however, to remember that the same was said of Karnak, in Egypt, and the richest of all finds have come to light there since then. You can never be sure that you have got all that is in a mound, till, _more fossorum Germanicorum_, you have passed the whole of it through a fine sieve. Still, the search has been fairly thorough. The excavators however, left one of the great human-headed bulls above ground; and it may be of interest to record that this monument (which was presumably the property of the British Museum) first generously parted with its head to mend a mill; and was subsequently sold for the sum of three shillings and six pence by the Vali of Mosul (not worthy old Tahir Pasha, but his predecessor), and burnt into lime by its purchaser. The second mound, Nebi Yunus--alas, one can but gnash one's teeth in envy and anger when one knows that the favourite palace of Esarhaddon lies beneath it--that king whose smaller house elsewhere has yielded the finest specimens of Assyrian art yet known. And this, his _chef d'oeuvre_, cannot be examined, because of the mosque of Nebi Yunus (Jonah the Prophet) that stands in the midst of the Turkoman village that crowns it. The Prophet will be very angry if you disturb him, say the Mussulmans, and will take vengeance dire![40] If it were indeed Jonah that lies there, there might be something in the argument; for the Prophet is known to have had a temper. But it is not he. After all, seeing that his prophecy of the destruction of Nineveh was not fulfilled, the top of the mound that covers the ruins of the city is perhaps the one spot of earth where it is quite impossible for him to be buried! As a matter of fact, the mosque is an old Nestorian church, once the cathedral of that body in the days when their independent patriarchate was in Mosul; and the occupant of the tomb is John the Lame, a worthy Patriarch of the thirteenth century, who now gets compensation for a life of hardship in his posthumous honours as Jewish Prophet and Mussulman Saint. Mar John the Lame was a friend to knowledge and learning in his life; and it must be a real annoyance to the good old man to think that his corpse has been made into an obstacle to both of them now that he has done with it!