Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/79

50 west, this rival stream feeds many marshes, especially the great lake called the "Sea of Najaf"; and, after a wide circuit, rejoins the Euphrates above its junction with the Tigris. There was in olden times another branch called the "Trench of Sapor" which, intended as a bar to Bedawi incursions, and taking a yet wider range to the west, returned into the parent river near Ubulla. This branch, now dry, originally carried a stream, which like the other helped materially to widen the green belt pressed in upon by the western sandy desert. The lower Delta again, subject to tidal flow, alluvial, low and watered with ease, is covered with a sea of corn; and from its beauty has been called the "Garden of the world." Besides the familiar palm, the country abounds with the fig, mulberry, and pomegranate. But the climate is close and oppressive; the fens and marshes, always liable to inundation, were aggravated by neglect of dams and sluices in those days of anarchy; and so the invading force, used to nothing but the sandy steppes of the Peninsula, gazed wonderingly at the luxuriant growth of reeds and rushes, and at the buffaloes driven by pestiferous insects to hide their unwieldy bodies beneath the water, or splash lazily along the shallow waste of endless lagoons. Chaldæa from the estuary upwards was cultivated, as now, by Fellāḥīn or Arab peasantry, and these were lorded over by Dihḳāns, or district officers of the Persian Court.

Such, then, was the magnificent province lying between the Desert and mountain range of Persia—the cradle of civilisation and the arts—which now attracted the Muslim arms. The first to oppose them was Hormuz, Satrap of the Delta, a tyrant hated by his Arab subjects. To him, as master of the tribes gathering in front, Khālid addressed a letter in the haughty type of Muslim summons: "Accept the Faith and thou art safe; else pay tribute, thou and thy people; which if thou refusest, thou shalt have thyself to blame. A people is already on thee, loving death even as thou lovest life."