Chapter 50 iraq my river

Finally allowed to enter Iraq. The distance from Amman to Baghdad is more than 1,000 kilometers, and the suffering of driving is beyond imagination, but everyone understands that the more troublesome thing is entering the border. A lot of frightening persuasion has been heard these days, and we made up our minds not to show the slightest impatient look even when encountering the most annoying things.Imagine opening every box, tearing every package, any object is repeatedly pinched, any details are repeatedly questioned, and we always smile at the interesting scene.I thought to myself, what kind of temper do you have when you are in someone else's territory, not to mention that we found it ourselves, endure it, endure it, there is nothing we can't get over.

But it never occurred to me that the seriousness of our encounter far exceeded all expectations. Let’s not list it for the time being. This diary was published simultaneously in many newspapers at home and abroad. It cannot cause trouble for the team’s activities these days. understandable. In front of the barbed wire fence at the border guard station, I really couldn't understand what was happening right now, so I could only look up at the sky.We set off at four o'clock this morning, saw the sun rise from the sea of ​​sand in Jordan, watched it gradually shine above our heads, moved westward in our boredom, and finally sank in the blood-red sky. in the desert.At this moment, my heart skipped a beat, and I felt that this miserable blood red must be the most stable legacy of this land.

Every glory and every failure has this background, and there are people who stand in the desert like me.What they see in their eyes are the thousands of golden roofs in the sunset, or the corpses strewn all over the field in the sunset? I didn't see this today, but only saw that in the dirty and trivial, time was not treated as time, and dignity was not treated as dignity.Thinking about it, this is the oldest land, talking about four or five hundred years is like talking about a moment, and it has long been too tired to talk about victory and defeat. It was not until dark night that he reluctantly agreed to enter the customs.At this time, we are facing a desert of 600 kilometers, and the only road is the internationally famous death road.I don’t know how many terrible car accidents happened on this road. It is said that the ambassadors of more than one country ended their lives because of this.We had no other choice but to rush on with hunger and desperation.

I have already found out that there is nothing but a gas station along the way, but robbers often haunt this area.There is a mysterious car following our convoy on the road. We are fast and it is fast, and we are slow and it is slow. We deliberately parked aside to let it overtake it but not overtake it. This can be regarded as a dangerous situation here. Whether it is the police Even bandits are very troublesome.Later, for unknown reasons, it did not take any action, and the convoy finally arrived in Baghdad in the early morning. It's a rundown city with wide streets, sadly not the rundown of antiquity.It seems that a modern thing that is not elegant in the first place has been shelved for twenty years in the smoke and fire.There is no one on the road, and there are many fluorescent lights on, but there are no lights from the windows of the house.Maybe it was because we arrived too late, or too early.

In this indescribable silence, a gray river appeared in front of him. Since we bid farewell to the Nile, we have never seen such a calm and abundant river.Tigris!We finally realized that it is the mother river of all human civilizations at the beginning of all elementary school geography textbooks.I called out softly: Good morning, my big river! We have traveled so far, all looking for it.In Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, we saw clear evidence that Greece was nourished by Egypt. For this reason, we also went to Crete, the transit place for nourishment.Then we traced back to Egypt, but after amazed again and again, we became more and more aware that Egypt was not the starting point.Now, the world's academic circles no longer doubt that it is the Mesopotamian civilization in the Mesopotamia that nourishes Egypt, and the meaning of Mesopotamia is the Mesopotamia Plain.Archaeologists have discovered time and time again that the earlier the ancient language of Egypt is traced, the closer it is to the Mesopotamian civilization.The two rivers have been the center of gravity of early human civilization for at least three thousand years, starting from the first millennium BC.

The two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are so close together that almost half the world has been infiltrated by their civilization, so that these two unpronounceable names are repeated countless times in various languages.I see it now at last, in the dead of morning, in a kind of indescribable exhaustion, in the fear of not knowing what will happen to me tomorrow. But, once seen, everything changes.Thank you, my great river. November 9, 1999, Baghdad, Iraq, stayed overnight at the Dar Al-Salam Hotel