'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎11] (42/714)

INTRODUCTORY
11
now relapsed into stony wastes; and where great engineering
works, enduring memorials of a hydraulic ingenuity, and a public- ,
spirited zeal, to wliicli later centuries afford no parallel,
western 1 now raise their shattered piers amid a waste of untended
provinces wa ters and uncultivated lands. There great cities once
adorned the river banks ; great palaces reared their colonnades
and halls upon the summit of elevated mounds; great kings, a
Cyrus, a Darius, an Alexander, a Shapur, either swept past on the
stormy tide of conquest, or paused to taste the splendid luxury of
repose. Here I shall halt to notice the newly revived sparks of
industry and trade, which the present generation should not pass
without fanning into a livelier flame. This romantic region abuts
upon one still more famous in the annals of the past. Its borders
are washed by the broad estuary down which the Euphrates and
Tigris roll their commingled waters to the Gulf. Here we are in
a land of equal honour in sacred legend and profane history. We
may sail past the traditional Garden of Eden to the mysterious
site where, amid colossal mounds of pottery and brick, the
alphabet of Nebuchadnezzar speaks loudly from the ruins ot
sculptured palaces, of terraced temples, and Babylonian towers,
where Daniel prophesied, where Israel wept, where Alexander
perished. We are on the river threshold of Busrah, the Balsorah
of Sinbad the Sailor, that Arab Columbus of an earlier age. We
may fringe the soaring arch of Ctesiphon and descry on the
horizon the minarets and palm trees of Baghdad.
Finally, skirting in a vessel the southern and maritime borders
of Persia, I shall ask attention to a country and a sea little known
at home, to warring Arab tribes and piratical professions,
Persian to seaports, now dead and deserted, whose fame once
Gulf sounded through Europe ; to waters that have been
ploughed by the rival argosies of Portugal, Holland, and Great
Britain. If I am there tempted to unravel some few of the
threads that have been woven into a web of history, intensely
personal to our own country and race, I shall also be able to show
that Great Britain sustains, in a less acquisitive and martial age,
the prestige which she gained at the dawn of her career of Asiatic
conquest, and that the British name is still on these distant waters
a synonym for order and freedom.
' These will provide what I may call the pictorial aspects of my
narrative ; mingled with the normal and yet uncommon episodes