The reclamation of this arid country was undertaken in 1908 by British engineers headed by Sir William Willcocks. In the Delta region of Mesopotamia, comprising the entire drainage valley extending south of Hit on the Euphrates and of Samarra on the Tigris, between 12 and 13 million acres of first-class irrigation land were to be converted into productive areas. In spite of Turkish opposition the work advanced with sufficient rapidity for the Hindiyeh Barrage to be inaugurated in 1914. At a distance of twenty centuries a handful of plucky northerners had, notwithstanding well-nigh insurmountable obstacles, put the last touches to a drainage project begun on the same spot by Alexander the Great, the construction of a new head for the Hindiyeh branch or Pallocopas having been that monarch’s first public work in Babylonia.[205] In the Persian Gulf British influence advanced by great strides during the present century. Within the last ten years the policing of the gulf waters and harbors has been undertaken by Britain’s men-of-war. An appreciable curtailment of the trade in firearms followed the tracking of gun-runners by British captains. The important towns of the Persian and Arabian coast are virtually British possessions. Bushire[206] on the eastern shore, Koweit on the west are protectorates. The trend of it all is to advance India’s western frontier to the line of the Euphrates. For Great Britain’s attitude toward Turkish politics is dictated by Delhi rather than London. As ruler of the most numerous political group of Mohammedans in the world, the king of England’s residence in his European capital cannot affect India’s geographical needs, among which the maintenance of a clear road from its shores to the mother island is of prime import. Thus the establishment of a British zone in southern Persia and the attempt to substitute British law in Mesopotamia where, after all, the Sultan’s authority is most precarious in character, merely reveal England’s necessity of consolidating her power over the approaches to her great Asiatic colony. In dealing with Indian geography and the vast body of Mohammedan Hindus, attention is necessarily riveted on the question of Arabia. British stewardship of the peninsular table-land seems inevitable. Not that those huge wastes of burning sand contain resources convertible into profit; but Arabia represents a wedge of barbarism driven in between the civilizing influences exerted by Great Britain in Egypt and India. The danger of its becoming a generating center of revolutionary currents involving British colonial policies in destruction is not mythical. Millions of Indian Moslems turn daily in prayer toward the direction of the Kaaba. A glance at India’s history suffices to reveal the extent to which the Sea of Oman has linked the two peninsulas.