Tower and Town, May 2019 (view the full edition)Time Is Like A RiverThe character of the six years old Little Prince of the Terraces in 1956 Mosul (Iraq) was introduced in the May 2018 edition of Tower & Town, (Awakening), pp 8-9. This second instalment is narrated by the boy himself, and it is again laced with some scientific annotations. It unfolds in the early spring of 1957, a noted annual time in Mosul which is nationally described in Arabic as Um-AlRabe'ain, (Mother of Two Springs). It is also the time of the year when excess of water downstream of the river Tigris is generated by the thawing of snow in the Taurus Mountains that separate the Mediterranean region of Turkey from the central Anatolian plateau. The setting for the present narrative is Mosul's old metal Bridge which consists of two footpaths physically separated from a central path for the traffic of animals and vehicles. The bridge was constructed during the post WWI British Mandate of Iraq as a replacement for the Ottoman pontoon connecting the old Mosul quarters, developed on a cliff that overlooks the Tigris, with the east bank where Nineveh and Nabi Yunis, (Arabic for tomb of Jonas), are located. Baba, (Dad), and I have just arrived half the way across the northern footpath to look upstream when I settled my arms and chin upon the bridge railings whilst baba stood by my right shoulder. Here some sad thought crossed my mind. If time, as baba once said, is like a fast river that we can not stop or swim against, then I shall not be seeing him again down the stream. But as thoughts were drifting through I perceived that the local tumult behind me was fading away. Here, my field of sight unconsciously started to narrow and I sensed the bridge moving steadily forward against the flow of the river. I was now at last sailing back in time! Revisiting my Bridge over Troubled Water And eventually March 2019 came along when I journeyed back 'in my mind' to the same spot on the bridge to try travelling back in time again to find baba. But as I once more narrowed my field of sight and the ambient noise began to recede I was stirred by the sight of many drowned children floating swiftly past the pillars of the bridge. And in those moments of awakening I looked up left at the old Mosul cliff and discovered that the cliff dwellers had long gone. And then I looked over my right shoulder to where my 'Bridge over Troubled water' once stood, and I found out that baba is no more. (In March 2019 a ferry capsized upstream from the Mosul metal bridge. Over a hundred people, mostly women and children, drowned in the spring water of the Tigris. Old Mosul, including the cliff dwellings, is currently uninhabited as the 2017 battle to dislodge the Islamic State from Mosul brought utter devastation for the city.) Raik Jarjis |