The Virginia enterprise. [volume] (Virginia, St. Louis County, Minn.) 1893-19??, 1911-11-24
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Tower Of Babel 10 Again In Use
Mesopotamia's RecIamation-Sir
William WilIcock's Great Project
Now in Course Of Realization,
BY WILLIAM T. ELLIS.

ALPHABETICALLY the greatest
present project of civilization, and
certainly the most romantic, the
reclamation of Mesopotamia, is
now In course Of actual realization.
During the time of my sojourn in
Mesopotamia the papers providing for
the construction of these vast irri-
cation works were signed by the Turk
ish government and Sir John Jackson,
the distinguished British engineer, to
whom the carrying on to completion of
the imperial project of Sir William
Willcocks has been entrusted. Sir
John has left one of his consulting en-
gineers in charge at Bagdad, and the
other men OF his staff are either al
ready here or on the way. The mag
nificent conception of SD William
Willcocks, to give back to civilization
the fertile land between the Tigris
and the Euphrates, which was the
birthplace of history, and the home
of teeming millions of people, is no
longer dream.
So dramatic an event as the rehab-
ilitation of this once-fertile land, now
become desert, is found to be full of
startling aspects. Not the least of
these l discovered when l came to
Babylon and saw that what the arch
biologists are agreed upon as the re-
mains of the Tower of Babel is now
practically hole in the ground; and
when l went out to the Hindia Bar
rage, where the Willcocks engineers
are at work, saw the bricks from the
Tower of Babel being ground up into
powder to make cement for the foun.
dations of the new barrage. There is
measure of fitness in this ancient
tower of deliverance being used to
help save the land from it's thirsty
aridity. Lest anybody accuse Sir Will
liam of being an iconoclast, it may be-
said that the bricks were taken from
their original site 30 years ago by the
Turkish government, which tried to
build dam that would send the wa
ters Of the Euphrates once more past
Babylon, or, what meant more to it,
past the modern town of Hillah.
Making the Garden Of Eden Bloom.
Sir William Willcocks, like all arch
biologists and students of the Bible,
locates the Garden of Eden in the
Tigris-Euphrates delta Sir William
fixes the site at point west of Hit,
the famous springs from which both
antiquity and modern times secured
cnnr1i1c 1f
ing and forbidding regions are said by
some to have given the ancients their
figure of the angels with the flaming
swords at the gates Of the garden.
No doubt is entertained by the arch
biologists that it was in this region
that civilization had it's birth. Here
were the great empires of antiquity
From beneath the drifted dust and
sitting mud of Mesopotamia the schol-
ars with spades are digging up the
wonderful stories of Babylon, Niffur,
Tello, Ninevah and Asshur, while
other tells" or mounds, such as mark
the site of Ur of the Chaldees, the city
of Abraham's ancestors, await the
coming of archaeological expeditions.
The Garden Made a Desert.
AS every traveller in this part of the
world has remarked, the Moslem is
not builder, but waster. The
statement is commonly made concern
ing the Arab, but it Is equally true
of the Turk. 1t seems as If the ia
talism and physical excuses of Mo-
hammedanism cut the nerve of in1tia-
tive and endeavor. Certainly the fol-
lowers of the Prophet found this re-
gion a garden; but they have made it
desert. have Travelled over a con-
siderable part of Mesopotamia, by
kelek, horse, wagon, donkey, small
boat and afoot. Everywhere the same
story is repeated. 1t is all poverty,
ruin and desolation. The Arabs live
in the same black tents that Solomon
sang about, or else In miserable mud
novels. They have none of the con-
veniences Of civilization. Life is a
hand-to-mouth existence. The appli-
ances Of agriculture are primitive be-
yOnd belief-a small triangular
shovel, little hoe about the size and
shape of an adze, and sharpened
stick for a pillow.
Only a small strip OF territory, lying
along the rivers, or the few subsidiary
canals that remain, is cultivated. Wa
ter is raised by the "cherit," leather
bucket let down to the stream, and
hauled up by oxen, donkeys, camels
or cows. The process is cumbersome,
expensive and inadequate. In a few
places oil engines and pumps made in
Britain and America, have displaced
the cumbersome cherit, and it seems
inevitable that they should become
general in the new day that is dawn
ing for Mesopotamia.
Back of these cultivated areas lies
the Mesopotamia desert. have
traversed sections of it where not a
plant bigger than the camel thorn
could be seen. It looks quite as DESC
late as the sandy Arabian desert to
the west of the Euphrates. Yet it is
every foot good gray earth, friable
and productive, needing only water to
make it pour forth crops to enrich the
markets of civilization and to deliver
the present population from dire pow
erty. And the water is still available,
as fully as it was when this region
was the worlds granary.
The Father of the Nile DAMS" Sir
William Willcocks, who has also had
extensive experience in irrigation
work in India, has for years been call
ing the attention Of the world to the
Irrigation possibilities of the delta OF