_Rabban_ Werda in personal appearance was the image of the immortal Sancho Panza; and he wore, with his gorgeous purple trousers, a European frock-coat and a fez. But his worth is not to be gauged by his rather uninspiring exterior. Though his views of our twentieth century may have sometimes a tinge of artlessness, in his own mediæval environment he is as intelligent and reliable a henchman as anyone need desire.
For the journey into the mountains does indeed carry us back to mediævalism; or at least to the Highlands of Scotland as they existed two hundred years ago. And the sensations of Bailie Nicol Jarvie on his trip to the glens of the Lennox may be easily recaptured by a modern tourist in the Highlands of Hakkiari to-day.
We crossed the pontoon bridge at Mosul, and the broad alluvial levels which have silted up the ancient channel of the Tigris; and had soon ascended once more on to that wide rolling wold which stretches to the snow-capped mountains that lie along the horizon to the north. On our right we left the vast enclosure which marks the site of the city of Semiramis; and the mounds which cover those mighty ramparts which the old Assyrian conquerors once kept festooned with the skins of captive kings. But we have many a mile to travel before we are really clear of the site of ancient Nineveh, for the space comprised within the walls was only its inner nucleus; and without was a great Garden City of mansions and parks and orchards, analogous to the present garden city which environs the town of Van. Greater Nineveh may well have embraced the outlying palaces of Khorsabad, and the temples of Nimrud; and this would easily account for the "great city of three days' journey," (_i.e._ of about sixty miles in circumference) of which the Prophet speaks.[66]
The annihilation of this huge metropolis is one of the most astounding cataclysms in all the world's history. We possess its most intimate records almost up to the hour of its agony: and those records tell only of continual conquests, and of the building of palaces by its kings. Then falls a sudden great silence. For fifty years we hear nothing. And when fresh records take up the story, these are written in another language, and in another character, and tell of cities and peoples which have hardly been even named before. Nineveh had vanished utterly; and within two hundred years of its fall Xenophon's army marched across the very site of it without so much as dreaming of giving its ruins a name.