Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/95

 world"—a junction point for rail communication between Berlin and Bagdad, Calais and Calcutta, Bordeaux and Bombay, Moscow and Mecca, Constantinople and Cairo and Cape Town.[36] Seventy miles away from Aleppo, along one of the few good wagon roads in Turkey, lay the important Mediterranean port of Alexandretta. Leaving Aleppo, the Bagdad Railway was to turn east, crossing a desert country, to Nisibin and to Mosul, on the Tigris. From this sector of the railway it was proposed to construct several short spurs into the Armenian foothills, as well as a longer branch from Nisibin to Diarbekr and Kharput.

The city of Mosul is the northern gateway to the Mesopotamian valley, the "Land of the Two Rivers." In medieval times it was a center of caravan routes between Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia, and once was famed for its textile manufactures, which produced a cloth named after the city, "muslin." It is located on the site of a suburb of the ancient city of Nineveh and guards a high pass leading through the mountains into Armenia. In 1903 it had a population of 61,000 and bade fair, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, to regain some of its lost lustre. South and southeast of Mosul flows the Tigris River all the way to the Persian Gulf. Along the valley of this river was to run the new railway, through the towns of Tekrit, Samarra, and Sadijeh, to Bagdad.[37]

In 1903 the splendor of the ancient city of Bagdad was very much dimmed. Although it still was the center of an important caravan trade with Persia, Arabia, and Syria, its prosperity was but a name compared with the riches which the city had enjoyed before the commercial revolution of the sixteenth century. The population of 145,000—in part nomad—was to a large extent dependent upon the important export trade in dates and cereals, amounting, in 1902, to almost £1,000,000. All told, the trade of Bagdad