Road through Kurdistan

Road through Kurdistan
The Narrative of an Engineer in Iraq by A. M. HAMILTON
with a foreword by Major-General Rowan-Robinson

... From whatever quarter the city is approached no one can forget his first sight of Baghdad as it appears on die flat horizon—tall minarets and even taller factory chimneys thrusting above the date palms and the domes of mosques. Often above the venerable town there hangs a pall of smoke. Factory chimneys and minarets! A strange combination: all of them leaning a little this way or that.

When the hot sun beats on the desert the mirage makes the whole silhouette stand clear of the earth, and it shimmers and waves above the skyline. T.ike the floating island of Laputa it seems to move over the land from place to place. Even to-day, half-modernized, half-antiquated, Baghdad can yet look a magic city as of old.

As one cornes doser this visionary effect diminishes till in the outskirts of the town the romance of the place is lost in squalid streets. Baghdad has only two main thoroughfares; the rest of the city is for the most part a rabbit warren of flat-roofed houses built haphazard beside the Tigris River. The incoming road from the west crosses a railway line which is actually a part of the famous Berlin-Baghdad railway planned by Germany for the conquest of India—a dream of the Kaiser's that never materialized...