![]() Seal the irrelevance of the past to the modern Turk is frustrating. But these early histories have left little trace on the banks of the river or in the hearts of the people who now live there. Later the river saw battles between Persia and Greece, missions by the Christian evangelists and more bloodshed as crusaders, Seljuks and Byzantines met. When the powerful early empires of India and Mesopotamia first began trading with the Aegean four millennia ago, cargoes of cotton and jewelry and ceramics passed through the region. If modern agriculture has degraded the Meander's ecology, its ancient history has simply been neglected. Beneath a flat sky the river now looped like a bowel, carrying its foul load, and me, towards evacuation." Like the birds, the fish and the turtles, they were gone, and with them went the last faint vestiges of the Meander's pastoral allure. The river's decline in modern times provokes some of the best writing in the book: "Potbellied mudlarks had either come to their belated senses or expired in the mephitic mire, for I passed no more groups of them. When we gorge on lush Turkish cherries, we are drinking precious Meander water. As elsewhere, the river has been sucked dry to feed the country's commercial orchards. ![]() Seal's progress along the meager Meander illustrates the river's parlous state. This is not a canoeing saga for adrenaline junkies. The only living things were the midges, dancing in a frenzy over the stretches of standing water." He drags his boat along the bank and plunges in again, but after a day's journey a dam appears cutting the river in two: "The river was almost empty. He begins with the river's headwaters near the town of Dinar but finds them dull: "I was done with these hydrographic curiosities." (Disarming honesty, for a travel writer.) The next day, when he unfurls his fold-up canoe upon the water, the current capsizes him. Seal aimed to descend the river by canoe, but this proved impossible due in part to the Meander's low water levels and, where there was water, to its rapids. The journey described in "Meander: East to West, Indirectly Along a Turkish River" did not take long: some 20 days. The river's bendy banks gave the conquerors who passed through this region pause and produced the epithet popularized by Strabo 2,000 years ago: "From the course of this river all windings are called meanders." Today the Meander is little more than an irrigation canal. The Meander, the subject of Jeremy Seal's book, was always a small river-300 miles of loops back and forth, flowing west from eastern Turkey to the Aegean Sea. In North America, so much water is taken out of the Colorado that it no longer reaches the sea. This problem is not hidden away in some hinterland: Every politician in Delhi is witness to the sacred waters of the Yamuna bubbling black with modernity's stink. Next door in India, rivers revered for millennia as goddesses are sluggish with effluent. In its lower reaches, the river runs-where it runs at all-through deserts of salinated fields, depopulated fishing villages and dying mangroves. The River Indus is a shadow of its former self, dammed by the colonial Brits, then the Pakistanis and most recently the Chinese in Tibet. Saddam Hussein caused outrage when he drained the marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates in the 1990s, but his crime against the Marsh Arabs has been replicated across the world in less deliberate ways. Rivers have not fared well in the era of global industrialization.
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