The stones of the dam were locked securely together. The waters poured over it in a cataract. Layard visioned the men in past ages building that dam, saw the waters held back and flowing into the canals to make the desert into a fertile plain. He galloped over the desert and saw traces of the silted-up canals, and he knew that the fertile land of the past and the desolate land through which he rode were one and the same. The neglect of man, the passage of time, and the absence of water were responsible for the change. He left Mosul on a raft of goatskins, floating down the Tigris to Baghdad as men had floated down for thousands of years. As he glided by on the slow-moving river the hillocks on the banks were beckoning to him, and he vowed to lay bare the past with a spade at the very first opportunity. It was two years before that opportunity arrived. When he got back to Mosul he found a Frenchman, M. Botta, was digging. For a long time Botta found little to encourage him to proceed with the work. A few fragments of brick and other trifles were all that turned up under the pick. Then one day an Arab gazed down on the trenches that Botta’s workmen were digging, wondering what on earth his compatriots from Mosul were searching for, and why they were going to all the trouble. “What are you looking for?” he asked at last. The labourer who was digging straightened his back, and glancing round among the rubbish he had turned up, picked up a piece of brick with a few cuneiform characters on it. “This,” he said. The Arab laughed. It seemed to him a huge joke that men should be wasting their time digging in the earth for bits of broken brick. “Why, where I live there are thousands of them,” he said. “We find them when we are digging the foundations of our houses.” Botta was told what the peasant had said. The Frenchman was very dubious. He had heard such things before, and the rumours always proved false. The diggers, however, were so insistent, that at last he sent one or two off to the village of Khorsabad, where the peasant lived, to see what they could find. It was some little time before the diggers could persuade the villagers to allow them to sink a test hole. Eventually, the inhabitants were won over, and the excavators sank a shaft—which quickly ended at the top of a mighty wall! Hastening at once to the spot, Botta set his men furiously to work. They unearthed an ancient Assyrian palace. Great slabs of stone were covered with sculptured scenes of war. Botta was astounded. He, nor any other modern man, had never seen the like.