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THE GOLDEN TOWERS OF KHADAMAIN
A DWELLER IN MESOPOTAMIA
BEING THE ADVENTURES OF AN OFFICIAL ARTIST IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
BY DONALD MAXWELL
WITH SKETCHES IN COLOUR, MONOCHROME, AND LINE
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET
NEW YORK: JOHN LANECOMPANY MCMXXI
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE LAST CRUSADE
ADVENTURES WITH A
SKETCH BOOKWITH BIBLE AND BRUSH
IN PALESTINE[In preparation]
THE BODLEY HEAD
PREFACE
Few adventurous incidents in our lives seem romantic at the time oftheir happening, and few places we visit are invested with that glamourthat haunt them in recollection or anticipation. I remember comparingthe colour scheme of a barge in Baghdad with that of one in Rochester.It was a comparison most unfavourable to Baghdad—a thing the colour ofashes with a thing of red and green and gold. Yet now that I am back inRochester, the romance lingers around memories of dusty mahailas. It iseasy to forget discomfort and insects and feel a certain glamour comingback to things which, at the time, represented the commonplaces of life.There certainly is a glamour about Mesopotamia. It is not so much theglamour of the present as of the past.
To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held sway, to havewalked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to have stood in the greatbanquet hall of Belshazzar's palace when the twilight is raising ghostsand when little imagination would be required to see the fingers of aman's hand come forth and write upon the plaster of the wall, to wanderin the moonlight into narrow streets in Old Baghdad, with itsrecollections of the Arabian Nights: these things are to make enduringpictures in the Palace of Memory, that ideal collection where only thegood ones are hung and all are on the line.
Although it was for the Imperial War Museum that I went to Mesopotamia,these notes are not about the War, but they are a series of impressionsof Mesopotamia in general. The technical side of my work I have omitted,and any account of the campaign in this field I have left to otherhands. The sketches here collected might be described as a bye-productof my mission in Mesopotamia; but most of them are the property of theImperial War Museum, and it is by the courtesy