That accounts for the boarded up places you were seeing.
I guess that accounts for the cheek.
Histories and accounts of travels have been composed both in Arabic and Chinese.
On the Mesopotamian side there would seem, from the accounts of Xenophon and Ptolemy, to have been an affluent which joined the Euphrates between Deir and `Ana, called Araxes by the former, Saocoras by the latter; but no trace of such a stream has been found by modern explorers and the country in general has always been uninhabited.
There is, indeed, a flat contradiction between the two accounts, but a family of Greek MSS.