Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike pay considerable reverence to the shrine, although the two former are not allowed access to it. All believe in the ingenious story with a blind faith that should shake our modern sceptics. Unfortunately it is practically impossible, in these days of miracles explained, to believe in the fish of Jonah, that either slid across dry land, or, as Mr Fraser[11] remarks, “must have been a clever fish to swim 20,000 miles ... in three days and nights,” unless, as he sagely observes, “the fish ... according to the Scriptures, had been specially prepared, doped perhaps, as they call it in America.” The Bible, with that protective ambiguity not always absent from its more wonderful tales, says that Jonah embarked from Tarshish. Now Tarshish, the Phœnician name for Spain, is just exactly the direction in which the unwilling Jonah would have fled in order to escape the tedious desert journey to Nineveh. We are not told how far they got when the tempest broke out, but there seems no reason why one should not assume it to have occurred promptly, and to have driven the ship back upon the Syrian coast, when Jonah might possibly have landed, if we can ignore the fish. Certainly the fish is unfortunately assertive, and its curious feat of carrying Jonah to a point three days from Nineveh is explainable only as hazarded above by Mr Fraser. Also, the Tigris is hardly deep enough even for sharks above Tikrit, many miles towards Bagdad. At any rate, one explanation is as good as another with so Biblical a history. It would seem reasonable to suppose that Jonah, finding himself once more in Syria after his shipwreck, set forth for Nineveh, a journey which must have taken him anything between twenty and forty days. But here, if we accept the foregoing theory, we are faced by another remarkable feat of travelling, for “Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days journey,” which has been taken to mean that Nineveh was three days away from where the fish vomited up Jonah. But it is a noteworthy fact that the magnitude of the city is mentioned, so to say, in a breath with the distance from somewhere, and this supports a theory which, in all humility, is here advanced. Those unfamiliar with Eastern colloquialisms cannot be expected to know that in these lands of camel and mule travel, the unit of travel is “one day,” and since miles and furlongs do not exist--the parasang is a Persian, not an Arabian measure--“a day” means about twenty miles. Would it not be intelligible to say--when it is remembered that the name of a city still comprehends the cultivated lands about it--“Nineveh was an exceeding great city of sixty miles (in extent),” _i.e._, with its irrigated lands, around which was, and is, sandy waterless desert. [Sidenote: JONAH]