Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-08-07
A GREAT PROJECT.
Sir William Willcocks to Restore Fer
tility of Mesopotamia
From the London News.

from the LONDON News. tr 80
We stood looking out over London from
the top Of Queen Anne Mansions. All
round below us. far as the eye could reach,
we could see the signs of the teeming popu-
lation and the wealth Of the metropolis,
and here and there we could distinguish
in the distant haze signs of the rich fields
that lay beyond
Only a little while ago Sir William Will
cocks, with whom had come to have talk,
was looking over an arid, almost barren,
desert, vast in extent as England itself. a
desert which was once paradise on earth,
and had teemed with a mighty population,
and on which there had stood, queen among
many noble cities near her. what was then
the capital of the world, the finest city men
had ever built. This desert was once the
blessed Mesopotamia. the great plain be-
tween the Euphrates and the Tigrfs. part
of which, marked now by grove of palms,
is the traditional site Of the Garden of
Eden.
Long before the earliest days Of ancient
Egypt civilization and culture fiourished on
this now aching waste. Beneath its soil had
lain for their long rest men whose culture
influences the world to this day, though
their names had been forgotten centuries
before Moses was hidden In the bullrushes
or the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary
the miraculous birth Of Christ.
through ignorance. Nature has made 1t
independent OF meteorological chance and
placed her bounty at the disposal OF man
. unhampered by the hazard of the weather;
and man, lacking the skill to make It fruc-
tify. has called 1t barren. Christian man,
and Jewish man before him, has cast over
it the ban of superstitiouS loathing. The
name Of its capital, Babylon, is still the
synonym Of all that the clean Of mind would
shun. Only the evil, OF. BelshaZzar Is remem-
bered; the greatness Of Nebuchadnezzar Is
forgotten; indeed, he, too, is condemned.
since 1t was he who took Jerusalem and
held the Jews in captivity. and tried to
convert them by use of the fiery furnace.
Looking over 1t with the eye of one of
the greatest irrigation engineers Of the day.
and with the knowledge of thirty years
experience of irrigation work on vast
scale in Egypt and India, Sir William Will
cocks saw that bounding prosperity and
enormous wealth could be restored to that
barren land; that that pitiful desert could
be once again the Garden of the World.
For three years he worked among the
countless ruined cities and villages Of an
cient days in Babylonia, obtaining his data
OF the flow of water in the Euphrates and
the Tigris, of the levels of the country and
the nature Of the soil and other necessary
items. And now he has it in mind to re-
store the fertility to the soil by vast
irrigation scheme.
1--WE know from the ancient authors,
Herodotus, Pliny, Berosus and Ammianus
Marcellinus," he says. '.how wonderfully
fertile this great stretch of country was in
olden times. The problem Of perennial
irrigation had been entirely solved by the
Chaldean sages OF old. They we're n.y.
draulic engineers of no mean order. But
the task before us Is no greater than that
they oyercame. and we have the methods
of modern science to help us.
Pass where you will over the surface.
you come upon ancient canals and the ruins
OF cities or villages. have traced out
hundreds Of those old canals and marked
them on the map. Some of them still con-
tain water But none OF those are so old
even as Nebuchadnexxar. These remains
all belong to the much later period OF the
Caiiphs Of Bagdad. who also had solved the
difficulty"