"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [و‎‎٣‎٤‎٤] (٨٦٢/٦٩٠)

PORTS AND INLAND TOWNS 535
and a rich agricultural region, but its history is purely local. The mound
of Hit and others in the locality testify to the continuity of occupation in
the neighbourhood.
General Description
The small walled town covers its hill from top to bottom and overflows
into the plain at its foot, where there are khans, warehouses, and boat
building yards. There are two gates in the walls, and a broad street divides
the hill town from the buildings in the plain. Otherwise streets are narrow
and twisting. Houses are of a dark brown colour and usually of two stories.
There is a bazaar of some 100 shops and a police post. Many furnaces
for smelting bitumen cover the town with a continual pall of smoke and a
characteristic smell of sulphur, from sulphurous springs near by, and of
boiling bitumen. There were formerly five bitumen springs or groups of
springs, four on the right bank west of the town and one on the left bank.
The pitch ebbed out of the largest, spreading into a wide carpet. It is ex
ported for use in surfacing roads, house construction, and boat-building,
and is used locally in the boat yards, being smeared upon boat-frames made
of tamarisk or mulberry boughs, reeds and straw, and also to waterproof
buckets used on water-lifts. A second local industry is the salt-works
south-west of the town, and there are quarries at Mamura whence stone
was shipped down the Euphrates for building the Hindiya barrage. Water
is from the Euphrates.
Communications
Water: The Euphrates is navigable downstream to Falluja by vessels
drawing not more than 3 feet at all seasons and upstream to A 1 Qaim, but
above Hit the channel is rendered dangerous by the stone piers of water
wheels built out into the stream (fig. 76). A ferry crosses the Euphrates
at Hit.
Land: The road [4] through Hit is metalled, but beyond the town it
continues unmetalled north-west along the Euphrates to A 1 Qaim and
Syria and south-east to Ramadi. Track north-east across the Jazira to
Tikrit. Track west across the western desert to Kubaisa oasis and the
pipe-line road [14], which it joins between stations Hi and Hz.
Air: Landing-ground about half a mile south-east of town.
Kadhimain. 33 0 23' N., 44 0 21' E.; alt. c. 112 feet. Pop. 20,000.
Kadhimain, ‘the place of the two Kadhim’, is a small town almost sur
rounded by palm-groves on the right bank of the Tigris lying half a mile
back from the river, 4 miles north-west of Baghdad, and opposite the
suburb of Adhamiya, to which it is connected by a pontoon bridge. Its
inhabitants are nearly all Shia Moslems, and include Persians and Indians.
Like Najaf, it consists of a rectangular huddle of houses built around a