I picked up one or
two excellent rugs for very little, and a few odds and ends, dating from
Seleucid times, that had been unearthed by Arab laborers in their gardens
or brick-kilns. There were some truck-gardens in the outskirts, and we
traded fresh vegetables for some of our issue rations. There are few
greater luxuries when one has been living on canned foods for a long
time. I saw several ibex heads nailed up over the doors of houses. The
owners told me that they were to be found in the near-by mountains, but
were not plentiful. There is little large game left in Mesopotamia, and
that mainly in the mountains. I once saw a striped hyena. It is a
nocturnal animal, and they may be common, although I never came across but
the one, which I caught sight of slinking among the ruins of Istabulat,
south of Samarra, one evening when I was riding back to camp. Gazelle were
fairly numerous, and we occasionally shot one for venison. It was on the
plains between Kizil Robat and Kara Tepe that I saw the largest bands.
Judging from ancient bas-reliefs lions must at one time have been very
plentiful. In the forties of the last century Sir Henry Layard speaks of
coming across them frequently in the hill country; and later still, in the
early eighties, a fellow countryman, Mr. Fogg, in his _Land of the Arabian
Nights_, mentions that the English captain of a river steamer had recently
killed four lions, shooting from the deck of his boat.
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