The Savannah morning news., 1902-09-21

/ penetrate his disguise il they became
| inquisitive as TO his business. So he
| took advantage of the fact that Mo-
| hammedans believe that insane persons
are under the especial care of Allah,
| and pretended TO be insane. This as
sured him of respect and good treat
| ment everywhere, and. although he had
many narrow escapes, he managed to
! play his role to the end and make his
| way back to civilization with his val
liable head still on his shoulders.
He saw the land OF the Djabala, then
crossed the Atlas mountain home of
/ the Berbers, and, to end his trip pleas
| antly, he wandered through the coun-
| try of the famous and savage Riff pi-
rates. There he spoiled the ESp-
| tons" for he gathered money in COM
pany with a begging pilgrim, in whose
! party he journeyed from tribe to
tribe.
The Lost City of NIiletus.
In Asia Minor the Imperial German
| Archaeological Institute has paid for
| excavations on the site of the famous
! old temple of Gordium, and enough
! finds have been made to prove that the
| workers are digging out an ancient
| settlement that was great and -four
/ ishing 1,500 years before Christ.
| other excavations in the peninsula
| Of Miletus, on the Aegean Sea, have
| produced results so tempting that pri-
| Yate German capital has been fur
nished, with which the greater part of
| the peninsula has been purchased out
right to assure successful prosecution
of the work. The territory thus ac-
| quired comprises the site of the great
| Metropolis and the Sacred Way lead
! ing to the famous Temple of Apollo of
| Didyma, the greatest holy place of
Asia Minor in its day.
This purchase, it is said now. will
| make far more wonderful place to
| visit than even Pompeii for when the
excavations are completed a perfect
| dream city will have been unearthed.
The entire hill in front of the city,
crowned by the famous theater be-
| longs to the excavators, also the an
Gent harbor basin with its entrance
| marked with two colossal marble lions
and with a port city with halls in it
more than 300 feet long.
Included in the purchase, also, are
the recently unearthed forum, the mar
ket place with a Roman fountain of
rare beauty, the baths and a mass of
ruins that have not yet been examined
or cleaned out.
The Land of BabyIOnia.
In the wonderful Mesopotamian val
ley, the scene of the most intensely in
teresting history of all mankind, there
has been digging in many places. Places
that were held against all study and
even entry by the powerful, unbeaten
Bedouin tribes. who successfully defied
exploration party after party in the
| past twenty years, have yielded at last
| to the railroad engineer. The valleys
of the Euphrates and the Tigris are
! being crossed and recrossed by Amer
| leans and Germans with surveyors
rods and theodolites. Their steel meas
uring tapes CLEAN on the tawny sands
| where once the Queen of Sheba trod
They are laying out the route of the
Bagdad railroad where once the As
| syrians "came down like the wolf on
the fold"
NimrOd's City of Ur.
Engineering troops have been climb
| ing around and delving in the ruins of
Urfa on a branch of the Euphrates-
old Or, the city of Nimrod the Hun
| ter, son of Ham, first ruler of Shinar
The engineers have been planning a
railroad station on the very site, per-
haps, of the place where he used to
entertain the great hunters of the
| Babylonian Kingdom that he is said in
| old Eastern tales to have founded.
| Prosaic mathematician have been
| drawing up long statistics on the stone
| tables that remain intact on the rocks
in front of Urfa and that still are
pointed out as the tables at which
Nimrod himself used to sit and drink
his wine and tell, no doubt, of his mar
row escapes and the big game that
he had killed.
When the steel rails are laid, they
may lead over those very stone benches
and tables. They will pass by the holy
Lake of Abraham, with its sacred
fish. By its banks, according to the
local Mohammedan tradition of to-day,
Abraham, the Patriach, designed to
| sacrifice his son Jacob.
The engineers have found that the
ancient tales of the Euphrates as a
mighty and terrible river were based
on good grounds. They acknowledge
in their reports that their modern sci
ence is going to meet with almost as
great a problem there as did the
science of the Babylonians; for in the
time of the annual thaws far up in the
mountains of Kurdistan and Armenia,
the river rises as much as eighteen
feet and tears away everything that is
in its path. So the olden troubles of
the banished bridge builders may be
experienced again by the present ones.
Devil WOrshippers of To-day.
These railroad engineers also have
enabled the world to learn something
at least about the mysterious and no.
torious devil worshippers of Asiatic
Turkey, who dwell in the hills east of
Mosus on the Tigris, near the ruins of
Ninevah- The Turks call them Extin-
guisher of Lights. They are Kurds,
and recognize two forces only in the
world-the good and the bad. Arguing
that the good can not do any one harm,
they worship the bad, in order to keep
solid" with it. They dare not even
mention the devil by name. If they re-
fer to him at all they call him 1.-THE
Mighty King" or 1.-The King Peacock"
The German explorers are making
new finds continually in the Black
Hills beyond Babylon. A recent ex-
caVation has unearthed q temple of a
animation of Babylonian copper and
bronze articles has convinced the ex-
plorers that the Babylonians under
stood the art of making bronze out of
an alloy of copper and anthony at
least five thousand years before Christ.
The Land of Arab Kings.
DR.. Wilhelm Helm, assistant cura tor
of the Museum of Natural
History of Vienna, and his
wife, have returned from a daring
and adventurous trip through
southern Arabia, the land Of independ-
cnt kings. who never have recognized
the rule of Turkey ana whose names
mostly are not known to the world at
all. The tour was undertaken for the
Vienna Academy of Sciences. It lasted
eli months and was