The handling and moving of the ponderous blocks habitually employed by the ancients would tax even modern constructors, with all the resources of machinery and steam power which nowadays they have at command. But the Assyrians (like the Romans after them) could avail themselves of a limitless amount of dirt-cheap labour. The hordes of captives taken in their wars had to be used somehow; and no one raised any objection if they were rather rapidly used up. Men cost less than oxen or asses, and their strength could be applied more effectively. They could be drilled to keep step, and to give their tugs in unison. Moreover the old Oriental task-masters possessed an asset which we have lost--a supreme scorn for being unduly hurried. They could well afford to spend a generation or so on buildings which were designed to endure for centuries, and which might have endured for millennia if only they had been left alone.
But even their works of utility have been no more spared by posterity than the tablets which recorded their learning, or the palaces which were the trophies of their pride. And such a work also had its source at the quarries in the Gomel valley; one of those splendid irrigating channels which used to feed the desert with the waters of life.[74] Its course can be traced for some distance alongside the banks of the river; where for yards upon yards the ample conduit is hewn through spurs of solid rock. Werda had seen further remains of it far away on the plains to the southward; "and the villagers were carrying off the stone facing of the embankments to use in building their huts." It was "only the work of infidels," and consequently fair loot for anyone. Now European engineers are labouring to re-establish what might have been so easily preserved.
The "Pictures of Bavian" are at least exempt from the fate which has befallen most pictures. They are fixed for ever immovably in the position for which they were designed. They are like some forgotten "Old Master" which still hangs tarnished and ill-lit above the altar where it was dedicated; and which shows there far more nobly than when restored and exhibited in a brand-new gilded frame on a glaring gallery wall. There are far finer Assyrian sculptures in the Louvre and the British Museum than the grim, gaunt, battered sentinels that keep watch over the Gomel vale. But ranged along a Bloomsbury corridor they are obviously mere graven images; while enthroned amid the solitudes of their own eerie mountains they seem to be the very gods themselves.