In anycase, Mesopotamia is not likely to be a white man's land. It is too hot. An Ameri can traveler, speaking of the British army in Mesopotamia, said: "Through the months of gasping heat when from eight to five no soldier is supposed to do any work and even the animals do nothing, when people must wear helmets made of cork, and spine pads made of wool all day, when men out in the blue lie pantingly in their tents longing for night to come, the most important piece of knowledge is the location of the heat-stroke station." Now that we know how to build railroads in almost any kind of a place, the discovery of minerals may make a busy town almost anywhere in the Great Desert. In Tunis thou sands of nomads have quit following their flocks, anci have moved into the towns of tin shanties and sun dried brick built around certain phosphate mines that are sending more than a million tons of phos phate rock a year to feed the fields of Europe.
In the little oases the native, by hard work, is often using every bit of water in raising crops. In some places on the edge of the desert it is possible for olives, and per haps for other tree crops, to bring agriculture where now there is only pasture (Fig. 459). However, life at the desert's edge must always remain uncertain, as the lost civilizations of the Syrian desert show.
597. A lost civilization.— Between the Jordan River and the upper Euphrates, the desert is sprinkled with the ruins of villages and houses, which show plainly that it once had a greater population than any part of the United States or England outside of the great cities. We know that this region is at least twice the size of Maryland, although no one has yet traced all its limits. Historians know that it was populous when the Old Testament was written, and that it was in the height of its prosperity from the time of Christ to 600 A. D. The ruins of olive presses and wine presses prove that it was a land of the vine and the olive tree, as the Medi terranean world was then and is to-day. The ruins of the villages show that the people lived in comfortable stone houses. Inscrip tions on the buildings show that wealthy citizens left public baths, monasteries, churches, and other gifts to their towns. In the year 610 A. D. this territory was conquered by the Persians. Soon after that it was conquered by the Arabs. Misgovern ment helped to ruin it and so did erosion. Bare fields were washed into gullies until only rock remained. To-day this great region is a marvelous and desolate scene of the ruins of ancient glories, and a warn ing to us about our own civilization.