Nur Mountains

In its upper reaches the Euphrates collects a number of small affluents, the most important of which, the Karasu, has often been confounded with it.

Near the middle of its course, the Sajur on the right bank carries into it the waters of the Taurus and the Amanus.

On the left bank the Balikh and the Khabur contribute those of the Karaja Dag.

From the mouth of the Khabur to the sea, the Euphrates receives no further affluent.

Their most extravagant devotion, however, cost them less money and effort than that of the pharaohs their contemporaries.

While the latter had to bring from a distance, even from the remotest parts of the desert, the different kinds of stone which they considered worthy to form part of the decoration of the houses of their gods, the Chaldean kings gathered up outside their very doors the principal material for their buildings.

Should they require any other accessories, they could obtain, at the worst, hard stone for their statues and thresholds in Magan and Milukha, and beams of cedar and cypress in the forests of the Amanus and the Upper Tigris.

Under these conditions a temple was soon erected, and its construction did not demand centuries of continuous labor, like the great limestone and granite sanctuaries of Egypt.

But we were getting out of the Cilician plain, and the Taurus was with us again.

The branch which runs southwards from the main chain to the coast at Alexandretta, the beautiful Amanus Range, still cut us off from the fertile plains of Mesopotamia.

For three days, we rode on the outskirts, now climbing gentle wooded slopes, now winding round a stone valley path.

Every evening, we found ourselves at a higher altitude.

From Avjilar, the road wound round grassy hills and through richly wooded slopes, where the crimson berries of the carob tree hung over our path and the leaves of the golden plain dazzled our eyes in the sunlight.

The woodman would be busy too, and we would hear the sound of his axe in the pine trees or brush past a mule loaded with long scratching bundles of firewood.

The Amanus Range sloped very abruptly to the plain on the opposite side.

It was not till the tenth day after leaving Adana, owing to our delay at Hamidiye, that we reached the gap in the trees at the summit of the pass, which gives you one short glimpse of Ain Tab on the plain below.