FROM Pamir in the center a wide mountain-range, which is really nothing but a series of high plateaus, runs due west until at last it is stopped by the waters of the Black Sea and the Aegean.

All of these plateaus have familiar names, for they have played a most important role in the history of human progress. I might go a little further and say the most important role.For unless all our present ethnological speculations are wrong, these highlands and valleys between the Indus river and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean were not only the nursery which hatched that branch of the human race to which we ourselves happen to belong, but they also acted as a sort of grammar school in which we learned the rudiments of those sciences and the first principles of those moral tenets which eventually were to set Man apart from the rest of the animal world.

In order of their succession, the first of these highlands is the plateau of Iran. It is a vast salty desert about 3000 feet high, entirely surrounded by high mountain-ranges.Even in the north where it borders upon the Caspian Sea and the Turanian desert and in the south where it borders upon the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, there is not a suffcient amount of rain-fall to let this region have a single river worth the name.Baluchistan, separated from India proper by the high Kirthar range, and since 1887 part of the British domains, has a few indifferent streams which lose themselves into the Indus river, but its deserts have been feared ever since a greater part of Alexander's armies perished there from thirst on the way back from India.

Afghanistan, which was so much in the limelight a few years ago when it fell into the hands of a ruler who tried to publicize himself and his country by a very spectacular trip through Europe, has a river, the Helmund. This begins in the Hindu Kush, one of the high mountain-ranges that radiate southward from Pamir and which loses itself in the salty Lake of Seistan on the border between Persia and Afghanistan.Afghanistan, however, enjoys a much better climate than Baluchistan and in many other ways this country is of much greater importance.The original trade-route between India and northern Asia and Europe ran through the heart of this country.It went from Peshawar, the capital of the north-west frontier province, to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, by way of the famous Khyber Pass, and then crossed the high Afghan plateau until it reached Herat in the west.

About fifty years ago Russia and England began their fight for the ultimate control of this buffer state. As the Afghans happened to be excellent fighting men, those peaceful penetrations from south and north had to be accomplished with more than the usual care and circumspection.The disaster of the first Afghan war of 1838—1842,when a mere handful of English returned to tell how all the others had been massacred during the attempt to force an unpopular ruler upon the unwilling Afghan people, was never quite forgotten;and thereafter England proceeded across the Khyber Pass with careful tread.But when the Russians in 1873 occupied Khiva and were known to be heading for Tashkend and Samarkand, the English from their side were forced to make some move lest they wake up one morning to hear the armies of the Czar doing a little practice shooting on the other side of the Suliman Mountains.And so, while His Imperial Majesty's representatives in London and Her Royal Majesty's representatives in St.Petersburg were assuring the respective imperial and royal governments that their intentions towards Afghanistan were wholly unselfish and of a most respectable and laudatory nature, the engineers of both governments were working on elaborate plans to bless poor Afghanistan,“cut off by cruel Nature from direct access to the sea”,with a railroad system that should henceforth allow the benighted Afghans to partake at first hand of the blessings of western civilization.

The World War unfortunately interfered with these projects. The Russians go as far as Herat, from where today you may travel by rail via Merv in the Turkoman Socialist Soviet Republic to the Caspian Sea and thence by boat to Baku and western Europe.Another line runs from Merv by way of Bokhara to Kokand in the Uzbeg Republic and is to continue from there to Balkh.Balkh is at present a third-rate village, situated among the vast ruins of that ancient Bactria which 3000 years ago was as important as Paris is today.It was the original center of that highly ethical religious movement started by Zoroaster which not only conquered Persia and penetrated as far as the Mediterranean, but which in a modified form was so popular among the Romans that for a long time it was one of the most serious rivals of Christianity.

England meanwhile has been pushing her railroad from Hyderabad to Quetta in Baluchistan, and from there to Kandahar, where in the year 1880 the British had avenged themselves for their defeat of the first Afghan war.

But there is still another part of the Iranian plateau which deserves some attention. Today it is merely the shadow of its former greatness but it must have been an extraordinarily interesting land when the name of Persia stood for all that was most excellent in painting and literature and above all things in the difficult art of living.The first period of glory came six centuries before Christ, when Persia was the center of an empire which reached all the way from Macedonia to India.This was destroyed by Alexander, but five hundred years later, under the dynasty of the Sassanids, the Persians restored the ancient realm of Xerxes and Cambyses.They restored the Zoroastrian faith in all its former purity, collected the sacred writings into one volume, the famous Zend-Avesta, and made the desert flower with the roses of Ispahan.

Early during the seventh century the Arabs conquered Persia and Mohammed defeated Zoroaser. But if it is true that one shall know a country by its literature, then the works of Omar, the tent-maker's son from Nishapur, bear witness to the exquisite taste that flourished once upon a time in these desert lands between Kurdistan and Khorasan.A professor of mathematics, dividing his time between algebra and quatrains upon the delights of love and the beauties of old red wine, is a phenomenon of such rare occurrence that only a civilization both wise and mellow would have tolerated his presence in the hallowed halls of pedagogy.

Today's interest however in Persia is of a more prosaic nature. The country has oil, and that is about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a nation too weak to defend its own interests.Theoretically speaking, the natives of any given place are supposed to be the chief beneficiaries of the treasures that lie hidden beneath their ancestral grave-yards.In practice it works out differently.A few of the Sultan's intimate friends in far away Teheran grow rich from granting concessions, and several thousand men and women living near the wells may find occasional employment at pretty meagre wages.But the rest goes to the foreign investor who thinks that Persia is the name of a rug.

Unfortunately, Persia seems to be one of those countries which will always be poor and badly administered. Its geographical location is very little of a blessing and very much of a curse.It is a desert, but when a desert is situated on the main road, which in turn is part of a land bridge connecting two of the most important parts of the world, then that desert will forever be a battle-field and a bone of contention between opposing interests.And what I have just said of Persia holds true of this entire western part of Asia.

The final highlands in the chain of plateaus that run all the way from Pamir to the Mediterranean are Armenia and Asia Minor. Armenia, the westward continuation of the great platform of Iran, is a very old land, old in the formation of its volcanic soil and old in the suffering of its people.It is another bridge country.Whosoever wanted to wander from Europe to India had to pass through the valleys of the high Kurdistan Mountains, and among those travellers have been some of the most notorious cut-throats of all time.Its history goes back to the days of the deluge.It was on the top of Mount Ararat, the highest mountain of this entire region, which rises 17,000 feet above sea-level and almost 10,000 feet above the plain of Erivan, that Noah's ark landed when the waters of the earth had begun to recede.This we know for certain because when Sir John de Mandeville, the Belgian physician, visited these regions in the beginning of the fourteenth century, he still found parts of the old craft lying around near the top.But when the Armenians themselves, who belong to the racial group of the Mediterranean and who therefore are our very near cousins, moved into these hills is still quite uncertain.At the recent rate of extinction, however, there soon won't be any more of them left.In one single year,1895—1896,the Turks, who were then the masters of the Armenian plateau, murdered several hundred thousand of them;and the Turks are by no means their worst enemies and not half as savage with them as the Kurds.

The Armenians have always been very pious Christians. But although they had adopted Christianity long before Rome, their church had retained several institutions, such as an hereditary priesthood, which made it a most obnoxious organization in the eyes of all good Catholics of the west.Europe therefore sat quietly by while the Mohammedan Kurds slaughtered Armenians and stole their territory.

Then came the Great War, and the Allies, trying to get into Turkey by the back door in order to relieve the English in Mesopotamia, stamped across all this territory. Such names as Lake Van and Lake Urmia, of which the world had never heard before, although they are among the biggest of all mountain lakes, suddenly appeared in the news of the day;and Erzerum, an Asiatic frontier town of the old Byzantine Empire, attracted more attention than it had done since the days of the Crusades.

When the fighting came to an end, it is small cause for surprise that the surviving Armenians wished a plague upon all of their tormentors and joined the Soviet Union. They were allowed to form the republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia, between the Caspian and the Black Sea at the foot of the Gaucasian Mountains, which Russia had added to its territory during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Then, turning from the traditional victims of Turkish wrath to the Turks themselves, we wander a little further'westward and enter the plateau of Asia Minor.

Asia Minor, once merely a province of the empire of the old Sultan, is today all that remains of that Turkish dream of world dominion. On the north it is bounded by the Black Sea, on the west by the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which cut it off from Europe, and in the south by the Mediterranean, from which the interior is separated by the Taurus Mountains.Across this territory, which is considerably lower than Iran, Persia or Armenia, runs a famous railroad, the so-called Bagdad railroad which has played such an important part in the history of the last thirty years.For both England and Germany wanted to have the concessions for the railroad that was to connect Constantinople with Bagdad on the Euphrates, the great harbor of the Asiatic west coast, with Damascus in Syria and with Medina, the holy city of the Arabs.

No sooner had these two nations reached a compromise than French capital insisted upon a share in the future revenue. The French were thereupon given the northern part of Asia Minor where Trebizond, the export harbor for Armenia and Persia, was still waiting for suitable communications with the west.Foreign engineers then began to survey their roads through these ancient lands where the Greek philosophers of the Athenian colonies had first speculated upon the true nature of man and the universe, where solemn church councils had given the world the iron-bound faith by which the people of Europe had lived for over a thousand years, where Paul of Tarsus was born and where he had preached, where Turk and Christian had fought for the supremacy of the Mediterranean world, and where in some forsaken desert hamlet an Arab camel-driver had dreamed his first dreams of being Allah's one and only prophet.

This railroad as planned was to keep well away from the coastline, skirting those almost mythical seaports of ancient and medieval history—Adana and Alexandretta and Antioch and Tripoli and Beirut and Tyre and Sidon and Jaffa, the only harbor of the rocky had of Palesfine—and devot-ing itself chiefly to the mountains.

When the war broke out, the railroad played exactly that role which the Germans had expected. The railroad, with its excellent German equipment, together with the presence of two big German battle-ships in Constantinople, were the two highly practical“considerations”which made the Turks join the Central Powers rather than the Allies.And how well that road had been planned from a strategical point of view was shown during the next four years.For the war was finally decided on the ocean and in the west.The eastern front never collapsed until long after the western front had begun to melt away.And the world learned to its surprise that the Turk made as good a soldier in the year 1918 as he had done in 1288 when the Seljuk Turks conquered the whole of Asia and cast their first longing glances across the Bosporus at the impregnable walls of imperial Constantinople.

Up to then that mountainous plateau had been quite well-to-do. For Asia Minor, although part of the land bridge between Asia and Europe, had never quite suffered the fate of Armenia and the Persian plateau of Iran.This had been due to the fact that Asia Minor was not only part of a commercial highroad but also the terminal station for all the routes leading from India and China to Greece and Rome.For when the world was still young, the most active intellectual and commercial life of the Mediterranean was not to be found in Hellas itself.It flourished among the cities of western Asia which the Greek cities of the mainland had converted into Greek colonies.Where the ancient blood of Asia had mingled with the new race until it produced a mixture that for sheer intelligence and sharpness of wit has rarely found its equal.Even in the modern Levantines, of highly unsavory reputation in regard to business integrity and general honesty, we can detect traits of the old stock which for half a thousand years had been able to hold its own against its many enemies.

The final disintegration under the rule of the Seljuks was inevitable. As a degenerative force, the Turks have always been without a single rival.But today this small peninsula is practically all that remains of the ancient glories of the Ottoman Empire.The Sultans themselves are gone.Their ancestors, after residing for almost a century in Adrianople, the only other Turkish city left in Europe outside of Constantinople, had moved to the latter city in the year 1453,and from there had ruled a territory which included the whole of the Balkans, all of Hungary and the greater part of southern Russia.

Four centuries of inexpressible mismanagement sufficed to ruin this empire and make it what it is today. Constantinople, the oldest and most important example of a commercial monopoly which for thousands of years held the key to the grain trade of southerm Russia, that same Constantinople, so favored by Nature that its harbor came to be known as the Golden Horn, the Horn of Plenty, so filled with fish that no one ever need go hungry, was reduced to the rank of a third-rate provincial city.For the masters of the New Turkey, who had salvaged what was left when peace was declared, wisely concluded that the degenerate background of Constantinople, a hodge-podge of Greeks and Armenians and Levantines and Slavs and the accumulated riff-raff of all the Crusades, was not the place from which to try the well nigh impossible task of rejuvenating the Turkish people and turning them into a modern nation.They therefore chose themselves a new capital, the city of Angora in the heart of the Anatolian Mountains, more than 200 miles east of Constantinople.

Angora was old, very old. Four hundred years before our era, a tribe of Gauls had lived here, the same sort of Gauls who afterwards took possession of the plains of France.It had passed through all the vicissitudes of all the cites situated on this main road of trade.The Crusaders had captured the city.The Tartars had done likewise.Even as late as 1832 an Egyptian army had destroyed that whole neighborhood.But it was there that Kemal Pasha founded the capital city of his new fatherland.He purged it of all the elements that could not be assimilated.He swapped his Greeks and Armenians for Turks who lived in these other countries.He built up his army and his credit with equal brilliancy.And he made the New Turkey a going concern, though Heaven knows, the mountains of Anatolia, after fifteen centuries of warfare and neglect, yield little enough that is considered of any value to a Wall Street banker who is looking around for possible prospects in the loan market.

All the same, Asia Minor is generally recognized as being of the utmost importance for the future trade between Asia and Europe. Smyrna is regaining the position it already held when the Amazons, the female warriors of the ancient world, ruled this part of Asia and founded their curious state in which all male children were put to death and in which no man was allowed to set foot except once a year and then exclusively for the purpose of continuing the race.

Ephesus, where Paul still found the natives worshipping the image of the Chaste Diana, the ideal goddess, by the way, for a race of Amazons, has disappeared from the face of the earth, but the region nearby may become one of the most lucrative fig gardens of the world.

Further towards the north, past the ruins of Pergamum(the great literary center of the ancient world which gave us our word parchment),the railroad skirts the plain of Troy to connect with Panderma on the Sea of Marmora. Panderma is only a day's trip by boat removed from Scutari where the famous Orient Express(London-Calais-Paris-Vienna-Belgrade-Sofia-Const-antinople)has connections with the trains that run to Angora and Medina and those which via Aleppo-Damascus-Nazareth-Ludd(change cars for Jerusalem and Jaffa)-Gaza-Ismailia-Kantara connect with Suez and from there up the Nile as far as the Sudan.

If it had not been for the Great War, that road could have been made profitable by transporting goods and passengers for India and China and Japan from western Europe by rail as far as Suez and then sending them the rest of the way by ship. But by the time the damage of four years'fighting shall have been repaired, the aeroplane will probably be in general use for the passenger traffic.

The eastern part of Asia Minor is inhabited by the Kurds, the ancient enemies of the Armenians. The Kurds, like the Scotch and most mountain peoples, are divided into clans and have too much individual pride to take kindly to a commercial or an industrial civilization.They are a terribly old race, already mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Babylonians and by Xenephon in his“Retreat of the Ten Thousand”(what a dull book!).They belong to the same original stock as we do but they have been converted to Mohammedanism.As such they have never trusted their Christian neighbors, but this holds good of all the other Moslem states that were founded in consequence of the Great War, and not without cause as all of us who lived during those days, when“official misstatements”were part of the national strategy, have every reason to remember.

When peace was finally declared, nobody was satisfied and many new feuds and quarrels were added to the old ones, all the more as several European powers now installed themselves as“mandatory rulers”over parts of the old Turkish Empire and proved to be but little less cruel in their dealings with native races than the Turks had been.

The French, who had invested a great deal of money in Syria, took hold of Syria, and a French High Commission, amply supplied with money and troops, undertook to rule the three million odd Syrians who most certainly had not asked to be turned into a European“mandate”,which meant a colony but with a slightly less offensive name. Soon different elements that had been part of the old Syria were beginning to forget their dislike for each other in one common hatred for the French.The Kurds made peace with their hereditary enemies, the Roman Catholic Maronites of Lebanon(the old home of the Phoenicians),and the Christians ceased to maltreat the Jews, and the Jews ceased to despise both Christians and Mohammedans, and the French were obliged to erect a great many gallows in order to maintain themselves.But order apparently has been reestablished and Syria is rapidly becoming another Algeria.That does not mean that the people like their mandatory rulers any better than before but merely that the leaders have been hanged and the others lack the courage to go on fighting.

As for the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was elevated to the rank of a monarchy and the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh are now part of the Kingdom of Irak. But the new potentates hardly enjoy the freedom of action of Hammurabi, for they have been forced to recognize England's suzerainty.King Feisal has to await word from London whenever he wants to decide upon something more important than the re-digging of a few ancient Babylonian drainage canals.

As for Palestine(the land of the Philistines),which is also part of this region, it is so strange a country that I shall have to be very short about it for fear of filling the rest of this book with a description of a little state, no larger than some ninth-rate European principality like Schleswig-Holstein, but which somehow or other has played a greater role in human history than many a first-class empire.

The original ancestors of the Jews, after leaving their miserable villages in eastern Mesopotamia, and after wandering through the northern part of the Arabian desert, and crossing the plains between Mount Sinai and the Mediterranean, and spending a few centuries in Egypt, finally retraced their steps. They stopped when they had reached the narrow strip of fertile land between the mountain-ridge of Judea and the Mediterranean and engaged in bitter warfare with the original natives, whom they finally deprived of a sufficient number of villages and cities to found an independent Jewish state of their own.

Their lives cannot have been very comfortable. In the west, the Philistines, non-Semitic settlers from the island of Crete, were in full possession of the coastal region, cutting the Jews completely off from the open sea.In the east, one of the strangest natural phenomena of which we have any record, an enormous rift in the rocks, running a straight course from north to south and going as deep as 1300 feet below sea-level, separated their country from the rest of Asia.This sink, which is very much today as it was when John the Baptist chose it as his place of residence, begins in the north between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon and follows the valley of the Jordan, the Lake of Tiberias or Sea of Galilee, which is 526 feet below sealevel, the Dead Sea, which is 1292 feet below sea-level(the Death Valley in California is only 276 feet, and the deepest spot on the American continent)and from there(for the River Jordan stops dead in the Dead Sea, which contains 25%salt on account of the constant evaporation)through the ancient land of Edom(where the Moabites lived)to the Gulf of Akaba, a branch of the Red Sea.

The southern part of this sink is one of the hottest and most desolate regions of the world, full of asphalt and sulphur and phosphates and other diabolical ingredients which modern chemistry has made highly profitable(just before the war the Germans founded a formidable Dead Sea Asphalt Company)but which must have inspired the people of long ago with horror and fear, and which made them attribute the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by an ordinary earthquake to an act of vengeance on the part of their Gods.

The sudden change of climate and scenery when they had crossed the mountain ridge of Judea, which runs parallel with this great rift, must have made a tremendous impression upon the earliest invaders from the east and probably inspired that jubilant cry of a land“overflowing with milk and honey”. For the modern visitor to Palestine will find very little milk and the bees apparently have long since died for lack of a sufficient number of flowers.That, however, is not due to a change in the climate, as one hears so often said, for the climate today seems little different from the climate in the days when the disciples of Jesus wandered from Dan to Beersheba without bothering much about the problem of their daily bread and butter, since there were enough dates and there was enough native wine for the simple needs of all travellers.But the Turks and the Crusaders between them played the role of climate.The Crusaders began by destroying whatever remained of the old irrigation works which had been built during the day of independence and during the centuries of Roman domination.The Turks had, as usual, done the rest.A soil which only needed water to bring forth rich harvests was systematically neglected until nine-tenths of the farmer populace had either died or moved away.Jerusalem became a sort of Bedouin village where a dozen Christian sects and their Mohammedan neighbors were forever engaged in far from edifying quarrels.For to the Mohammedans, Jerusalem is also a very Holy City.The Arabs consider themselves the direct descendants of that unfortunate Ishmael who together with his mother Hagar was driven into the wilderness by Abraham at the request of the latter's wedded wife, the redoubtable Sarah.

But Ishmael and Hagar had not perished of thirst, as seems to have been Sarah's little plan, but Ishmael had married an Egyptian girl and had become the founder of the whole of the Arabian nation. Today therefore he and his mother lie buried just outside the Kaaba, the center of the most holy of all places of worship in Mecca which all Mohammedans must visit at least once during their lifetime, no matter how difficult the voyage or how far the distance that separates them from that hallowed spot.

As soon as the Arabs had conquered Jerusalem, they erected a mosque over the rock upon which, according to tradition, their distant cousin Solomon, another direct descendant of Abraham, had built his famous temple. That happened Heaven only knows how many centuries ago.But the fight for the ownership of that rock and the wells around it, part of which is the traditional“wailing wall”of the orthodox Jews, is responsible for the continual quarrels between the two races that now make up the population of the Palestinian mandate.

And what can one hope for the future?When the English captured Jerusalem, they found the people to consist of 80%Moslems(Syrians and Arabe)and 20%Jews and Gentile Christians. The English, as the rulers of the largest Mohammedan empire of the modern world, could not afford to hurt the feelings of so many of their loyal subjects and dared not surrender half a million Palestine Moslems to the mercies of less than a hundred thousand Jews, who had many entirely justifiable axes to grind.

The result was the usual post—Versailles compromise which satisfied nobody. Palestine today is a British mandate and British troops maintain order between the different nationalities.The governors are selected from among the best-known English Jews but the country is nevertheless a colony and does not enjoy that complete political independence of which Mr.Balfour had spoken so eloquently but also so vaguely when at the beginning of the Palestine campaign he referred to those regions as the future home of the Jewish race.

Matters would become a great deal simpler if the Jews themselves knew what they wanted to do with the old mother-country. The orthodox Jews of eastern Europe and especially those of Russia want to keep it as it is now, a vast theological seminary with a little museum of Hebrew antiquities.The younger generation, remembering the wise words of the Prophet that“the dead should bury the dead”,and feeling that too much weeping about the past joys and glories of bygone day is apt to interfere quite seriously with the glories and the joys of tomorrow, hope to make Palestine into a normal, modern state, something like Switzerland or Denmark, a going concern of men and women who have rid themselves of the memories of the Ghetto and who are more interested in good roads and good irrigation canals than in squabbling with their Arab neighbors about a few old stones which may or may not have been the well from which Rebecca drew the water but which are now merely a hindrance to progress.Since most of Palestine consists of rolling territory with a decided slope from east to west, it is indeed possible to reclaim the neglected and exhausted soil for purposes of agriculture.The sea winds which blow the greater part of each day spread their heavy dew across the entire landscape and make it ideally fit for the cultivation of olives, and Jericho, the only city of any importance ever built in the terrible Dead Sea region, may once more become a center for the trade in dates.

And as the soil of Palestine contains neither coal nor oil, it will escape the attentions of the foreign promoter and will be allowed to work out its own problerms as Yahweh and the Mohammedan majority will permit.