Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them. To see a larger, more detailed, black-and-white version of the [map] near the end of the book, click Larger below it.

TO MESOPOTAMIA AND KURDISTAN
IN DISGUISE

A JAF CHIEF, S. KURDISTAN.

[Frontispiece.

TO MESOPOTAMIA AND
KURDISTAN IN DISGUISE

WITH HISTORICAL NOTICES OF THE
KURDISH TRIBES AND THE CHALDEANS
OF KURDISTAN

BY E. B. SOANE

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

PREFATORY NOTE

The following chapters are a plain narrative of a journey across Mesopotamia and in Southern Kurdistan, made up from a journal kept throughout the voyage from Constantinople to Bagdad through those countries.

I think I may fairly claim that I have given here a description of a great deal so far undescribed, also a view of places, already known, from another standpoint.

Several of the situations have made it necessary to mention the fact of a knowledge of Persian, extensive enough to enable the writer to pass among Persians as one of themselves. Lest this appear a needless and offensive boast, I would say that the incidents demand its mention, and it is explained in the course of the narrative.

In the historical portions of the book, in so far as more modern history is concerned, I have been enabled to give some entirely new matter, for that on Kurdish history was supplied me in letters received from Shah Ali of Aoraman, Shaikh Reza of Kirkuk, Tahir Beg Jaf, Majid Beg Jaf, Muhammad Ali Beg Jaf, while a great part was communicated during conversations at Halabja and Sulaimania. This information, then, I think is unique. As to the chapter on Chaldean history, I am deeply indebted to M. Badria, Rais-i-Millat of Mousil, also to his brother Habib Badria, who, having access to old histories in Mousil, were generous enough to allow me the benefit of their information.

There is, I am afraid, an overwhelming use of the first personal pronoun, which I trust may be forgiven, for without it the story would not be a personal one.

The tone of the narrative may betoken, perhaps, a partiality to the Kurds; and I must admit, that having met from them more genuine kindness—unclaimed—than from any other collection of strangers met elsewhere, I owe them a large debt of gratitude, the least return for which is to throw some light upon a national character hitherto represented as being but an epitome of all that is savage, treacherous, and inhuman.

E. B. S.

Mohammerah.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TO MESOPOTAMIA AND
KURDISTAN IN DISGUISE

CHAPTER I
IN STAMBOUL

When I descended from the train one dismal morning in Constantinople, in a bleak terminus just like a hundred others of its kind all over the Continent, it was with the intention of staying in the Ottoman capital for some time. A long residence in the Middle East had rendered me susceptible to the magnetism it certainly exerts, and at the same time had given me a very thorough appreciation of the comforts and conveniences of the Occident. As I was quite ignorant of the western parts of the Turkish Empire, and entertained the same ideas regarding them as I suppose do most people at home, it seemed that Constantinople must furnish a delectable resting-place, a point from which to look out upon East and West with equal facility, choosing from each the features necessary to a pleasant life that should be within reach of books and libraries, and afford equally a way of escape among Oriental people and surroundings, without necessitating a long journey and longer bill.

Unfortunately I knew neither Constantinople nor its winter climate, nor its inhabitants. I had never had dealings with Turks, and had left out of my calculations the Greeks, who make up thirty-five per cent. of the population of this capital, once theirs by right of sovereignty, and still almost theirs in all that concerns the world of commerce.

As a matter of fact, the sum total of my knowledge at the moment I arrived was that Constantinople consisted of three quarters or districts, Pera, Galata, and Stamboul, and possessed an hotel called the Pera Palace, the expenses at which were far too grand for my cottage style of purse.

By some person of doubtful nationality, I had been advised to go to a French pension in Galata, which I was assured was cheap, clean, and comfortable. As French pensions in other parts of the world may be, and often are, all these three, the scheme seemed an excellent one; so having escaped from a weary and bored Customs official at the station, I piled my belongings upon a victoria, and we started to clatter over the knobs of stone, and through the mud-pits that are the roads of Constantinople. Through mean streets we rolled and banged our way where horse trams clanked and crawled, between rows of shops whose wares were just those of the cheap streets of any continental city, to the floating bridge over the water called the Golden Horn, a most perfect misnomer in December, suggesting the crowning sarcasm of some disappointed tourist.

At the approach to this curious bridge, we were halted amid a dense crowd of foot-passengers in the everlasting fez—sprinkled with bowler hats and the headgear of every European nation—and made to pay five piastres (10d.) for the right to pass. In order to prevent any passenger evading the toll, a row of Turkish officials stood across the road, clad in a conspicuous enough uniform—a white smock.

The Golden Horn was of a very ordinary mud colour, and below the bridge, prosaic enough with its crowd of steamers and the busy ferry-boats that ply up and down the Bosphorus and to the Asiatic shore. The wharfs were lined with unbeautiful Customs, port, and shipping offices, backed on the rising ground by the indescribably hideous imitation French and Viennese architecture of Galata and Pera. Tall barracks with rows and rows of filthy windows looked out upon the prospect, and at their vis à vis in Stamboul across the water, and, crowning the mountain of wall and window formed by the successive tiers of houses up the hill-side, rose the Tower of Galata, a circular erection topped by a Turkish flag.

A Mixed Crowd

The roadway of the bridge being laid with large baulks of timber placed transversely, no two of which ever arrive at a common level, prevents rapid travelling even were the road clear of foot-passengers, who use it in preference to the footpaths. The Galata end plunges into a street absolutely packed with human beings, carts and carriages, where all the money-changers of Galata—Constantinople’s business town—seem to have congregated. A turn to the right leads to more trams, and a long and weary cobbled street of shops large and small, along whose pavements saunter the deck-hands of steamers hailing from every European and Levantine port. Greeks of course are in the majority, many in their national costume of blue tights, with a huge and pendulous posterior, coloured shirt and little zouave jacket, and a hat of the “pork-pie” order. Armenians, too, abound, and Levantines of all kinds. Italians, in this Italian quarter of Galata, are everywhere, and the language of the streets is anything except Turkish. Here and there an incongruous group of fierce and savage fellows, with packs of stuffed leather upon their backs—the Constantinopolitan edition of “the Porter’s knot”—shout and joke in a tongue understood of none even in this cosmopolitan city. They are Kurds, the strongest, most manly of the population, and the most despised, probably for those very qualities—in this town of sharping and guile.

Leaving this street and crawling up some very steep inclines lined by tenement houses, the carriage reached a long road running along the side of the hill. I suppose it should be called a street, for want of a better, or worse, name; but as we associate the word with another order of thing, it is well to explain that this, an important enough artery of Galata traffic, was—and doubtless still is—a wide alley of cobble paving, with huge holes at frequent and irregular intervals. In the absence of underground drainage, the paving sloped to the middle, and after filling the holes, the excess liquid filth flowed downhill. The solid variety, however, to which every resident contributed with assiduity, lay in heaps and figures about the street, proclaiming in the language of putrescence the quality of the inhabitants. In describing this main street of the Italian quarter,[1] I have described most of Constantinople, excepting only a few excellent streets on the Bosphorus side of Pera, where the wealthy foreigners live.

At the door of a kind of restaurant I was deposited, and no sooner had the carriage stopped than an ancient woman opened the door and welcomed me in fluent Italian. As my knowledge of that language is limited, she called loudly for “Marie,” a shrewd and kindly woman of about thirty, who appeared from a sort of cellar from behind the eating-room, and in French informed me that she had a room, told me the very reasonable terms, and asked for a deposit; and very soon I found myself installed in an uncarpeted apartment furnished with an iron stove, a bed, a washhand-stand, and a small table. This was the best room. A powerful and eloquent odour pervaded the house, telling of the thoroughly Italian nature of the cooking, and hinting at the existence of innumerable cesspools on the premises. I found afterwards that there were five latrines in the house.

It needed but a dinner in the eating-room to complete the tale of excellence of this exceptional pension, where one met Armenians and Levantines performing the usual skilful feats with knives and awkward morsels, regarding the fork as an instrument fit only for the inexperienced and timorous.

Next morning I climbed by devious alleys, and through lakes and torrents of filth to Pera, and spent hours trying to find better accommodation at a moderate price; but after being shown the loathsome dens of various Armenians and Greeks, and retiring with the best grace possible before the astonishing charges of every clean and relatively wholesome place, I was fortunate enough to meet a Russian, a tenant of an “appartement”—the Constantinopolitan flat—who wished to find an occupier during a three months’ visit to Moscow.

MY LIFE IN PERA

To my great delight the “appartement”—in a new building close to the Pera Palace Hotel, in one of the best parts of Constantinople—was clean and well-furnished, and we closed, with as much satisfaction on his side, I hope, as on mine. At any rate, he insisted upon sealing the arrangement with innumerable “aperitifs,” followed by vodkas and liqueurs at various brasseries about Pera, and having become friendly with a resplendent lady of Roumania, he bade me farewell and departed with his new acquaintance.

While in Constantinople I never regretted the arrangement, for the place was comfortable and convenient, and being in the midst of Pera, which is nothing but a semi-French town with no more evidence of Turks about it than a few porters and cabmen in fez, and drunken police, I began to forget what I had come for, namely, to get in touch with the Oriental side of the city. As a matter of fact, one made so many curious and interesting acquaintances among the French, Armenian, Roumanian, Russian, Balkan, and other elements, that one’s time seemed fully absorbed with them. I quite forgot to commence studying the Turkish language, and acquired a fine proficiency in French, and picked up a little Greek, a language as useful in Constantinople as Turkish. After some time, however, when the execrable weather permitted, I began to make excursions to Stamboul, and avoiding all guide-books, found out the show-places myself, and many other interesting corners, among which I counted the shops of the Persian Turks in the Great Bazaar, where I always was sure of a warm welcome, simply because I affected a liking for their Persia, and hoped with them—perhaps against hope—for her regeneration and independence.

In the Great Bazaar, too, was just a touch of that East in which I had lived, and was to see once more, though the effect was so often spoiled by the interpreter of Mr T. Cook and his train of amiable creatures, seeking the “secret of the mysterious East” in the shops of Greeks.

There, donning a fez, I would stroll, my headgear saving me from the disagreeable attentions of the Greek shopkeepers, the most pertinacious of their calling in the city. For a long time among the natives of Persia in the bazaar I could find none but Tabrizi. Persian Turks often enough know little Persian; but at last I found a native of Shiraz, much to my delight, for a residence of two years among the Shirazi has always been a pleasant memory, and this particular Shirazi, too, seemed as glad as I was to meet a sincere admirer of the Jewel of Southern Persia, “The Pearl among the Emeralds.”

At any rate, if kindness and hospitality be any criterion, my Shirazi was certainly pleased to find a kindred spirit.

Great amusement was caused among my friends of Persia by a passage-at-arms I had with the Persian Consul. I had heard that an old acquaintance was second secretary at the Consulate, and one day found my way by the steep and crooked alleys of Stamboul to the dirty red-painted building that flies the Persian flag. Entering the courtyard, I was accosted by the doorkeeper in Turkish, and as at that time I had considerable difficulty in understanding that language, I addressed him in Persian. This was more than he had expected from a stray European, and as his knowledge of Persian was as feeble as mine of Turkish, he passed me on to a suave little “mirza” or clerk, a Teherani.

I asked after my friend Mirza Hasan Khan, and was told that he had left for Persia some time ago, so I turned to leave the place. I had hardly reached the gate, however, than the little man came running after, and in polite Persian asked me to “bring my excellence” to the Consul-General, who desired to see me.

Following him upstairs and through a group of waiting peasants of Azarbaijan, I was introduced into a large room well carpeted with Persian rugs, where sat at a writing-table the Consul-General, a middle-aged Persian gentleman. Beside him upon a couch was his first secretary, a smiling little man from Tabriz.

I was at a loss to know why he wanted to see me, and could only suppose that he wished to know who I was and what was my business with Mirza Hasan Khan. Entering, I saluted him in the Persian fashion, whose etiquette demands that the entrant shall first salute the occupants of a room. Receiving the usual reply, I accepted his invitation to be seated, and waited for him to speak, again following Persian custom, which forbids the less important of two men to open conversation.

PERSIAN CONSUL-GENERAL

He began by asking if I had been long in Constantinople, whether I intended to stay, how I liked it, and so on, and having exhausted his preliminary questions a pause occurred, during which the two Persians regarded me in a steadfast and interested manner, which I was at a loss to account for, as they are usually far too well-mannered to embarrass a visitor in any way.

After a rather awkward minute thus, the Consul, in an abrupt and official manner, exclaimed—

“Why this disguise? wherefore these lies? the truth were better; tell me your native town.”

For a moment astonishment held me; this kind of conversation is possible from a Turk, but from a Persian! To say nothing of being quite at a loss to account for this extraordinary change of manner, I could not at all fathom the reason for such inquiries politely or impolitely made. In my innocence I had imagined myself paying a mere complimentary call, and found myself addressed as a defaulter of some kind, and so waited for further enlightenment.

“Lies?” I asked.

“Yes, lies; it is evident to me that you are a Shirazi, your tongue betrays you, and I wish to know what you have done to render expedient this kind of appearance, and this weak story of being an Englishman.”

It occurred to me suddenly that here was the representative of Muhammad Ali Shah who had, six months before, by a coup, replaced himself upon the throne of absolute power, dissolving in the most drastic way the Chamber of Representatives, many of whose supporters had fled to Europe and were travelling about in European dress. Evidently I was being mistaken for one of these.

In this dilemma I bethought myself of my passport, and fortunately discovered it, together with a number of letters, including one from the Persian Ambassador addressed to “Mūsīū Soon,” and after some difficulty succeeded in proving my identity.

The Consul’s cordiality returned in a moment. With the utmost effusiveness he invited me to a large armchair, produced cigarettes, and called for tea. The visit from that moment took the form of usual ceremonial call upon a Persian. As I took my leave, remarking that I hoped he would not seek to have me arrested as a revolutionist, he said, thinking the whole affair a good joke:

“Well, you shouldn’t speak Persian so fluently; you see your countrymen are usually so backward in acquiring our language, that when one appears talking as we do, can you expect us to believe it?”

I saw him several times afterwards, and he always met me with the air of a man who shares some great and confidential jest with one.

About this time, December 1908, the Turkish Parliament was inaugurated, and amid the discord of Turkish bands and through avenues of flags and festoons, the procession of deputies and foreign representatives fought its way to the House at Stamboul, to sit for a few months and prove its futility.

The attitude of the Persians, who had been the first to experience the pains and penalties of popular representation, was interesting. It was, of course, popularly supposed that the Persian element in Constantinople and Smyrna—some ten thousand people—displayed heartwhole enthusiasm for the Turkish “Mejliss,” and if the addresses and congratulations of the Persian political clubs were to have been believed, this supposition would have been true. Persians, however, are always alive to the value of expediency, and obviously clubs which, existing only by the tolerance of the Turks, propagated doctrines only to be regarded as heterodox by the Persian Ambassador and consuls, must display conspicuously their sympathy with any popular Ottoman movement.

PERSIAN AND TURK

In the privacy of their own houses, the sarcasm and deprecation of foreigners so near the tip of the Persian tongue found ready articulation.

As Shi’a, these refugees, to put it but mildly, lack sympathy with any movement of the Sunni Turks, and having seen repeated in the election and the arrangement of the Turkish “Mejliss” several of the errors which contributed to the discord and downfall of the first Persian Parliament, were disposed to look on with supercilious superiority at the efforts of a nation which they ever regarded as rather barbarian. Besides which, bad as Persia was under the old regime, the lot of the peasant and the humbler town-dweller was never so bad as was that of the equivalent classes in Turkey; and if there are degrees in the perfection of corruption arrived at by the administrative powers of both empires, there are few experienced Turks and Persians who will not give the palm for completeness in this art to Turkey, at any rate in her Asiatic provinces.

So the Persians, looking on, seeing all the difficulties to be surmounted, difficulties complicated by the turbulent and treacherous temperament of Greek and Armenian, waited to see an eventful crisis, and when it came as they had predicted, the triumphant attitude of “I told you so,” for which they had prepared themselves, was intensified by the feeling of having also scored off an old enemy.

The only immediate outcome of the Parliament’s inauguration, so far as it affected the dweller in the city, was to provide a number of newspapers with columns filled with reports of speeches—no whit more or less puerile than those provided by our Parliament for the London papers—and a large increase in drunkenness, particularly among the police. The provinces responded with their own interpretation of “Hurriat” by lawlessness of every description, which increased to a point almost unknown in Turkish history, at least in the Asiatic provinces, with which alone this book is concerned.

After all, it was a faithful enough repetition of Persia in early 1907, when the dying Muzaffar ud Din Shah granted the first Persian Constitution. In that unfortunate country the ignorant mass looked to the Majlis to produce, within a few days, a panacea for the ills that had grown up and become an integral part of the nation during centuries of misrule, and the failure of the people’s representatives even to adjust minor matters resulted in the outbursts all over the country which eventually, fanned by Muhammad Ali Shah, enabled him to regain his absolute power for a time.

In the Turkish Empire practically exactly the same thing happened. Needless to say, a very large section of the people was vitally interested in the existence of Sultan Abdul Hamid as a despot, particularly those powerful priests and place-holders who amassed wealth by means possible only when the Sultan was there to consent, and participate. The victims of this large class expected that with the proclamation of “Hurriat” (“freedom”) these tyrants would retire swiftly into oblivion, but as time went on and the bloodsuckers (and bloodspillers too) continued their operations with increased vigour, the people, emboldened by the new political doctrines, rose in every direction. Tribes of Arabs and Kurds, who had regarded the new regime as a partial revival of their importance and a return—in a degree—to some of their ancient independence, finding levies upon them of taxes and recruits undiminished, rebelled against the Majlis and Sultan alike—a situation resulting which, at the time of writing,[2] bids fair to give the Turks and their army as much as they can do for some time to come.

It is fair to add that many of these outbursts are said to have been aggravated secretly by Sultan Abdul Hamid, who had submitted with a meekness never seen in the Persian monarch to the drastic changes his people effected. At any rate, his end was the same as that of Muhammad Ali Shah, for after a few months both find themselves deposed and in retirement.

In any case, the politics of Constantinople are too well known to need ventilation here, so we may as well return to our original subject of Persians.

SHAIKH UL ISLAM

I learned soon after my arrival in Constantinople that Kurds abounded, but all of the Kermānjī or Zaza tribes of Northern Turkish Kurdistan, and my hopes of finding a Kurd of Southern Persian Kurdistan seemed as if they would certainly end in disappointment. My reason for wanting to meet one of these people was to complete certain studies to which I had already devoted a year, in Kermanshah of Western Persia.

By chance, however, one of my Persian friends informed me one day that a priest had recently arrived from Sina of Persian Kurdistan; but beyond telling me his title, Shaikh ul Islām, and indicating vaguely where he imagined him to be living, in one of the curious caravanserais of Stamboul, he could tell me nothing; and as the Shaikh in question was a fanatical Sunni, I naturally could not expect my Shi’a friend to interest himself more deeply.

I was resolved to find him, however, and so spent some days tramping up and down the terrible alleys and streets of Stamboul, inquiring at every Muhammadan hotel and doing the round of all the caravanserais I could find, asking for the Shaikh ul Islām of Sina, a question that evoked considerable merriment among most of the Turks to whom I succeeded in communicating my meaning in the few Turkish words I knew. As is always the case in Turkey, inquisitiveness was the greatest impediment and nuisance. Anyone of whom I asked would put a string of questions as to why and wherefore, and who and whence, which my ignorance fortunately prevented my answering.

At last, however, by dint of getting a list of caravanserais, and taking them one by one, I found the Shaikh’s habitation. This particular serai was like most in Constantinople, a two-storeyed building of tiny, windowless rooms round a courtyard, amid which a small house was erected, equally containing separate cells. The first floor had a gallery running round it upon which the rooms opened, and I found my man in a corner cell, or rather found where he was when at home. All this time the weather was indescribably awful, daily blizzards, rainstorms and blizzards again, freezing hurricanes from the plains and uplands to the north and west; and I wondered how this native of sunny Persia, a stranger to these terrible days of darkness, could live, and what is more, raise the courage to go forth into the mire and filth of Constantinople streets.

His servant I saw, a Kurd of Sina, who spoke a little Persian, and who was so astounded at hearing a European speak Kurdish that he quite lost his tongue. However, we made an appointment, and two days after saw me once more facing a blinding snowstorm to shuffle for half an hour from Pera through Galata across the Golden Horn, now a funnel where all the winds of all the ice on earth seemed to blow into Stamboul.

Crawling over the heaps of snow in the caravanserai courtyard, where not a soul was visible, I ascended the rickety staircase and knocked at the low door at the gallery end. Some one shouted in Persian “Kī a” (“Who is it?”), and getting a reply in the same language, told me to walk in—which I did.

A small skylight sufficiently illuminated the place, and at once its arrangements stamped the occupants as natives of Persia. Opposite me, a tin road-samovar sang behind a row of little tea-glasses. Upon the samovar head sat a squat little teapot, and the Kurdish servant was filling a Persian hubble-bubble beside a brazier. Three or four Persian wooden boxes ornamented with brass-headed nails were by the walls, and in a corner were the necessaries of the road, earthen water-pots, tin “af tābeh”—a kind of jug for ablutions—tin wash-basin, and other articles with which every traveller in Persia is familiar. Commencing half-way and covering the floor to the farther end was a gilīm, a kind of carpet, woven in Persian Kurdistan, and seated facing one another, their legs concealed under a quilt apparently supported upon a stool, were two men. Him I sought was a black-browed and bearded priest, an individual surly looking enough to scare away any uninvited visitor. His companion was but an older edition of himself. Their heads were covered by small white turbans, but whether they had changed their native dress for that of Constantinople I could not see, as they both wore heavy overcoats.

A CURIOUS INTERVIEW

The stool under the quilt covered in its turn a brazier of charcoal, and formed the “kursi,” which is the Kurdish method of keeping oneself warm. Obviously the heat, which is considerable, is confined to the space under the quilt and does not escape into the room, which in this case was bitterly cold.

The Shaikh had been informed of my coming, and welcomed me in Persian, with just enough Kurdish accent to be perceptible; and I squeezed my legs under the quilt, which he pulled up to our chins, and spent a few minutes exchanging compliments with him and the older man. The situation might have struck an outsider unused to a “kursi” as absurd: the spectacle of three men apparently sitting up in a kind of a huge bed, for the quilt was an ordinary bed-quilt, and pillows supported our backs—nodding gravely over the top of the bed-clothes at one another.

They were much depressed by the weather, but on my telling them that I had been to their Kurdistan and knew their country and language they revived somewhat, and with tea and cigarettes became jovial and communicative, supplying me with a great deal of the information upon tribes, that I had come to seek, but had not hoped to acquire in the first interview.

However, the climate of Constantinople had done sufficient to disgust them with the place, and the Shaikh announced his intention of leaving by the first steamer for Beyrouth, and returning to a place called Halabja, on the Persio-Turkish frontier, in the Southern Kurdish country. Not unnaturally I was curious to know, first, the reason for his leaving Kurdistan; and second, why he did not propose to return there, stopping short on the frontier at the nearest spot. Tentatively I put a question or two, but he evidently had a suspicion of all strangers, and I had to be content with my own theories, which could evolve nothing more probable than classing him as a political refugee; at any rate, he seemed pretty miserable in these strange and squalid surroundings, and, bearing in his language and manner the strong reminiscence of Persian Kurdistan, seemed terribly out of place in this town that aped Europe and all its meanest features.

In all, I had three interviews; he would not be induced to come over to Pera, which he had heard of as a town full of European women and shops “à la ferangi,” where he considered his priestly turban and flowing garments very out of place. So each time I found him under the quilt with his companion, much depressed, very silent, sighing heavily, and talking of nothing but places and people he had left behind in his native mountains.

My acquaintance with him, though little enough, was the cause of ripening an idea which ever since I had arrived in, and disliked, Constantinople, had gradually been springing up in my mind. Though no Kurd, nor separated from kin and custom, yet as a former dweller in the east of Persia, I yearned for the freedom of plain and mountain, the slow march of the clanging caravan, the droning song of the shepherds on the hills, the fresh clean air, and the burning sun. His talk was of all this, and my thoughts of it too. His dialect and his rough Persian recalled too vividly scenes of a year before. Irresistibly pictures arose of the plain and hill of Kurdistan, the glorious sunsets over plain and on snowy peak, and the more I gave way to these day-dreams, the more I let the rude accents linger in my ear, the stronger grew the attraction of the road.

The Shaikh left and I heard no more of him, but I missed him and his little room, a corner of Kurdistan in Constantinople, with occupants whose home habits remained unassailed by all the temptations of the city’s coffee-houses and comforts, and daily I could not help picturing his progress across Syria, and gradually to the borders of Kurdistan, the Tigris lowlands. I even hailed the day he should have got to the first Kurdish town as notable, little dreaming that he had been robbed and nearly killed before he got there—by Kurds.

DISGUISED AS A NATIVE

At last I made a compact with the weather: if it really cleared and warmed by a certain date, I would stay; otherwise, permitting no other consideration to hinder, I would resolutely book a passage to Beyrouth, and find my way to Kurdistan.

Funds certainly were scarce; I could not afford to travel as a European usually does, with servants, paying double for everything and occupying the best quarters everywhere. If I went I must don a fez and pass as a native of the East, must buy my own food, and do my own haggling, must do all those things which no European could or would ever think of doing. In Persia I had had experience of life in disguise as a Persian, and this would be an easier task for I was a stranger among strangers, and any difference in our ways and habits would be put down to that fact. There was a certain attraction, too, in going unattended by anyone, knowing practically no Turkish nor Arabic, across Syria and down the Tigris to Kurdistan. Once there I should be more at home, for I knew two or three dialects and Persian pretty perfectly, which would enable me to pass as a Persian among the Kurds, and to hide ignorance of that habit and custom which are the rule of life in the East. As to Muhammadan observances, I had in Persia learned all that, and as a Shi’a could say my prayers, and dispute the Qur’an with the best of them.

So, all things considered, the scheme recommended itself. It was cheap, I should see much new country, and many new tribes. I should learn many more Kurdish dialects, and when I had finished should be in possession of a truer knowledge of the people, their ways and nature, than a European possibly could in ten years.

So I sat down and waited for the decision of the weather.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER I:

[1] The Rue Luledjie Hendek.

[2] Autumn 1909.

CHAPTER II
FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO HIERAPOLIS

“Chauakānam kaot ba chūl u raikadā

Halmbarī chū be vairān jakadā.”

(“My eyes were turned towards the solitude and road,

And I rose up and went to desert places.”)

Song of the Erzinjan Kurds.

The weather was not so fond of me as to clear up for the sake of keeping me, for as the day of decision approached it grew steadily worse, and it was in a driving storm of cold rain that I waded down to Galata and booked a passage by the Messageries Maritimes steamer to Beyrouth.

There were few arrangements to make; a passport I possessed; it was but necessary to provide myself with a document called a “tezkere i ubūrī,” a travelling passport in Turkish, issued by the police. So having obtained an order from the Consul, I found my way to a collection of huts, called the “Eski Zaptié,” in Stamboul, and after running from hovel to hovel in order to interview numerous effendis, whose duties apparently consisted of making marks upon the application form, I was suddenly presented with the document from an unsuspected corner of a dirty courtyard. The writer was absolutely unaware of my existence in the building, nevertheless I found myself described in Turkish as of medium height, dark-haired, and beardless, with black moustache, all fairly accurate—last and most, of the “Protestant” religion. I was to pass during most of my journey as a Muhammadan, and here I found at the outset all my plans checked by a Turkish clerk who described me in his fatuous passport as a Protestant. Naturally enough I protested, and vigorously, against the right of these omniscient police clerks to brand me as of any sect or creed; but they were mildly astonished at my objections, and could not be brought to see any point except that all Turks were Musulman, all Armenians “Kristiāan,” all French “Kātūlīk,” and all English and Americans “Purūtestān.” They but regarded these as the religious names of the nations, and could not conceive that an Englishman might be any one of the innumerable dissenting sects. That he could be a Catholic was too obviously absurd, and the increase of their contempt for my intelligence was most marked as I asserted the possibility. So the offending word had to stand, and I resolved secretly to erase or destroy it whenever necessary.

PASSPORT DIFFICULTIES

The day of departure was like the preceding months, rainy and cold, and I looked with pleasant anticipation upon the prospect of seeing in a few days the sunny hills of Syria. Our ship was the Saghalien, a comfortable and roomy old boat. The early spring season had brought with it the first of the tourists to Palestine. Arriving on board, I heard the first English that had fallen upon my ears since I had left London. The parties were incongruous enough. Four or five Roman Catholic priests escorted a company of pious “bourgeois” to the pilgrimage at Jerusalem, while another and much larger party of manufacturing folk of wealth and accent had been gathered from Leeds, Leicester, and a dozen other of the Midland towns of England. A second party had been formed by some imitator of Mr T. Cook, and included no less than six gentlemen of religious profession, each from a different sect of British dissenters. These were all provincial too. An American and his wife, a Turkish Pasha and his family and attendant effendis, and some unattached and inconsequent Germans and French, pretty well made up a full ship.

As I had to start wearing a fez sooner or later, I thought I might as well begin at once, and pass for a Persian going to Persia, which would excuse my ignorance of Turkish, which no other disguise I could have adopted would have been effectual in doing. In the guise of a native of a far land, and en route for places where the name “English” was hardly known, I felt strangely cut off from my fellow Europeans when I heard them talking about their tour, planning expeditions and journeys new—when they should have “done” Palestine and Egypt, and returned once more to their Midland towns—experienced Oriental travellers.

It is strange what a simple exchange of headgear can do. Here was I, by the mere fact of wearing a fez, isolated, looked down upon by types one would pass unnoticed in London, audibly commented upon as “quite a civilised-looking Turk,” exciting wonder as to “’ow many wives ’e’s got,” and such traditionally Oriental questions. The ignorance of these people was wonderful and colossal. We sighted, I remember, Mitylene one morning, and all the force of parsons and tourists hung over the rail with guide-books and glasses, disputed whether the high land was Chios or Rhodes, oblivious of the big chart on the top of the saloon stairs, where our position could be reckoned on the route line at the expense of two minutes’ thought. They certainly appreciated the beauties of the glorious archipelago through which we passed, not too quickly, and faithfully enough raised enthusiasm in the places the guide-books recommended. Rhodes, when we did get there, and they were certain it was not Cyprus, created great excitement among them, the controversy anent the Colossus and his legs was heated enough to keep the subject alive quite two hours after the island had disappeared beneath the blue horizon, “quite as blue as the sea at Blackpool,” as one Manchester man affirmed, in a spirit of rash generosity.

Before we had been two days at sea, I was drawn into uttering some words of English in a moment of thoughtlessness, and that to a very hearty individual from Newcastle. He trod heavily upon my feet, and as I quite involuntarily replied to his apology with an English phrase, he looked at me in the most utter astonishment, ejaculated, “Great ’eavens, you speak English.”

MY DISGUISE SUCCEEDS

“Yes,” I said, “I was brought up in England.”

“Oh,” he replied, apparently relieved, “that accounts for it, you—er, where are ye goin’ to?”

I told him I was going to Persia, and his hasty conclusion saved me the trouble of any equivocal statement for the moment, for he continued:

“Oh, then, I suppose you’re one of those Persian gentlemen that’s been in England lately for the Persian Parliament. ’Ow d’you like England, what part d’you know best?”

“Kent and Sussex,” I replied, perfectly truthfully, ignoring his first remarks, “and all the south, for I have never been farther north than Lincoln.”

Here we were joined by one of my interlocutor’s friends, and I was introduced with some enthusiasm, my discoverer announcing in the tone of a naturalist who had just found a rare bug,

“This gentleman speaks English as well as you and me, every bit; ’e’s a Persian, goin’ to Persia.”

Well, from that moment, I became very popular among these folk, and found them very hearty indeed, especially when I gave them the information that Persia looked to constitutional England for sympathy and help, and regarded her as a natural and ancient friend; in contradistinction to the Russians, whose Cossacks she detested. The fact of my being a Persian—naturally enough, they seemed to think—gave me a claim to their friendship, and nothing pleased them more than to get me to tell them of my country’s wrongs, her aims and ambitions, her history and customs, her religion and literature, and every conceivable subject. On every such occasion I had a sympathetic and interested audience, who asked innumerable questions, and whom I was pleased to be able to enlighten considerably. They had to confess that their preconceived ideas were very changed, and the general attitude they acquired and which they were at no pains to conceal, being genuine and honest, if unpolished fellows, was that of well-informed superiority, which should assert itself on their return to England.

In playing this part I suppose I was playing also a very mean trick, the only excuse for which is that I am a sincere well-wisher of Persia, where I have spent some pleasant years of my life, and this disguise afforded my assertions an extra credence and weight which no Englishman, however well informed, could hope to obtain from his countrymen on so remote a subject as Persia.

So agreeably did the time pass, that I was sorry to see the hills of Beyrouth draw closer and closer. These were the last Englishmen that I should see for a long time, for my disguise quite prevented my being able to call upon consuls where they existed in towns upon my route. With considerable regret I bade them good-bye and saw them depart, led by one of those terrible creatures, a native Christian, the lust of tips and perquisites gleaming in his eyes. As I watched them, helpless and confused, being shoved this way and that, I almost envied them; for they were going to “sail” through Palestine in special trains and carriages, put up at the best hotels, and return in the same lordly fashion to England; while I was embarked upon a very different enterprise, to be conducted always with an eye to the elusive piastre, and a ready, lying tongue.

And so I found myself sharing, with two Turks and an Arab Christian of Aleppo, a small boat, from which we were bundled out into the Customs with a herd of Arabs, Turks, and all kinds of Levantines.

I was recommended by a Syrian who spoke French—like everyone else in Beyrouth—to put up in a small hotel on the quay, and was given a room overlooking the harbour, with a little verandah in front, where one must sit warily, for dirty locomotives shunting in the street had a way of stopping just underneath and firing with a particularly poisonous kind of coal, the while they blew off steam from remarkably noisy safety-valves. This was the terminus of the Lebanon Tramway, which crawls up the hills to a point called Rayak.

The hotel, kept by a Turk, was clean and cool, but to feed one had to go round the corner to a kind of restaurant, “à la ferang,” where an incongruous party of pilgrims of every race returning from Mecca sat uneasily on small chairs, and regarded with distrust the array of knives and forks a Greek waiter set before them.

AT BEYROUTH

Beyrouth—once one of the greatest maritime cities of the Phœnicians, when Tyre sent out her ships to the Tin Islands—has grown since then, and is now a flourishing and picturesque city, built upon the slopes of the hills that separate Syria from the Mediterranean. The population is, I should think, mostly Christian, and only in the alleys of a small bazaar does one see the real signs of an Oriental city. For the rest, there are broad and dusty roads, a large public square and gardens, and electric tramways everywhere. The language of the place is more French than Arabic, and English receives good attention at the American college there. Like Haifa and Tripoli on the same coast, it is on a little point of land and faces north, protecting its harbour by a strong sea-wall, enclosing a deep basin.

In the East one looks out as the first preparation for any journey, what the Turk calls a “youldāsh,” and the Persian a “hamrāh,” or travelling companion. On this occasion and without looking for him, he appeared, in the person of a Konia Turk, who was staying in the same hotel. We were to leave at sunset for Aleppo by the train, and my fortunate meeting with him, though our conversation was perforce limited owing to my ignorance of Turkish, enlightened me to the fact that we should be twenty-four hours en route, and must take pretty well whatever we wanted to eat with us. So we made an excursion to the native bazaar, and from the sellers of comestibles in baskets, procured a large quantity of excellent oranges and some bread and various kinds of sweet cakes.

At six o’clock we hired porters and carried our goods to the station, a shed on the quay a few yards away, and having registered our luggage at exorbitant rates, apparently solely by the overwhelming condescension of a military-looking effendi of abominable manners, we took tickets—second class to Aleppo. So well do the French control their employees, that my companion found afterwards that he had been charged two medjidies excess on the luggage and one on the ticket, which the effendi and the booking-clerk doubtless appropriated. I escaped these impositions apparently owing to the attentions of a young Arab porter, who for some inexplicable reason took me under his protection, as he refused all “bakhshīsh” when the train started.

The carriage in which we found ourselves face to face, with our knees knocking together, filled up with ten other persons. As the rolling-stock of this masterpiece of French railway engineering is barely six feet high, and narrow gauge, the temperature rose swiftly with the odour of the occupants. The seats or benches, which I surreptitiously measured, are exactly fifteen inches broad, and in this vehicle we were to—and did somehow—pass the night. Our fellow-passengers were four terribly frowsy Italian employees of the railway, and six uniformed individuals. Turks away from the towns whose inhabitants are Turkish seem always to be uniformed, and it is hopeless to guess at their standing and importance, which is always to be assumed in one’s intercourse with the officials of this eminently officious race. These individuals were of course all “effendis,” and three of them wore swords, which may have meant anything, as from subsequent observations it seems even a Customs clerk has that right. Fortunately, they were too taken up with their own affairs to notice us, and we consequently escaped for a time the merciless curiosity which emanates from a Turk, private or official.

About four in the morning, after uneasy and very shaken sleep, we were turned out in darkness and desert on the metals. This was Rayak, where the broadgauge line for Aleppo branches. Fortunately our new train, somewhat more commodious, was ready, and we made a rush, our new quarters being less crowded. Having taken our places, and while we were yet waiting, a sound as of flustered people, just arrived, and fearing to miss the train, broke the stillness. The first train had departed and every one was seated, and we apparently were stopping to allow passengers a nap in perfect quietness. The noisy knot of people thus naturally attracted attention, but what was my surprise to see in this Turco-Arabian land the face of an Isfahāni, of Persia, look into our window, glance away at companions following, and shout in the Persian of his native town that there was room.

PERSIANS INSULTED

A small crowd of very worried Isfahānis clad in their national dress came running, and doubtless would have left some of their number in our carriage, but that several effendis pursued them and headed them off wherever they attempted to gain entrance. Most of them knew no Arabic nor Turkish, but were obviously bent on getting to Aleppo. Puzzled at the inexplicable attitude of the omnipotent effendis, refusing place to these poor strangers, who emphatically announced that they had paid their fare, I leant out and asked one in Persian what was the trouble. For a moment he seemed to be dazed, hearing his own language spoken by a fezzed Turk, but his ears at last convinced him, and he poured out his woes.

“Bah! la’nat ullah ’alaihim” (“God’s curse upon them!”) he shouted. “From Damascus we had second-class tickets. They put us and our women in a cattle-truck, these sons of Sunni dogs; offspring of Turkish prostitutes, and now they refuse us even that;” and even as he spoke I heard a raucous voice shouting in Arabic, “La makān ul ’Ajam” (“There is no place for Persians”), and in the hated Turkish, “Get desharda! keupek oghlu!” (“Get outside, son of a dog!”)

The unfortunate men—pilgrims returning from Mecca they were—were hustled from door to door, cursed and reviled for heretics and Shi’ahs, refused room anywhere. No insult was bad enough for these unfortunates, no jibe too cutting.

Suddenly from somewhere a French official appeared, who had as little sympathy with Sunni as with Shi’ah Musulman, and he solved the question by tacking an extra coach on, wherein the Persians were accommodated, and kept separate, their quarters infinitely more roomy and comfortable than those of their oppressors; and so we started and fell asleep, to wake in the early sunlight at Baalbak, a place great with memories of the past, but all too quickly left behind in the present, when the train, that cares nothing for the worship of Baal, pauses but a few moments, and continues its way over rolling plains with low hills in the distance to Homs and Hama, two Arab towns, whose Christian population saves them from the decay inseparable from Turkish rule and Musulman subjectivity.

Within some hours of Aleppo, two uniformed officials boarded the train, and shoving aside a passenger—not uniformed—installed themselves. After a few minutes, one, a fat, squinting person, produced a dirty and ragged little note-book and commenced making marks in it, the while looking at the passengers as one who sketches. Having completed this mysterious operation, he passed it to his companion, who, after reading it, passed it back with a “Pekī ’alā” (“Excellent!”), and both commenced eating oranges, dropping the peel carefully under their neighbours’ feet. For half an hour or so they were thus engaged, when one, looking at his watch, remarked that it was late, and departed swiftly out of the door and along the foot-board. Some time after, he reappeared by the same way, and seating himself, reproduced his note-book and revealed his identity. He was a police officer; his duty was to ascertain whether all the passengers in the train might be allowed to enter Aleppo without danger of their inciting political riots or committing crimes of all sorts. This was four months after the inauguration of the Parliament, four months after we had been told that the old restrictions on travel instituted by the Sultan and his spies were absolutely abolished as being an abomination and a relic of despotism and darker ages.

However, this particular effendi was apparently far above such laws, as I found out everybody else to be later on, and insisted on full information. There was an unfortunate German mechanic travelling to Aleppo for the factory of a merchant there; and because he was a European, I suppose, the effendi subjected him to every annoyance possible, affecting to disbelieve his statements, practically accusing him of being a criminal. His profession worried the policeman, too, and I think, probably, exposed ignorance caused the petty revenge he took, for when he asked the European’s profession, he was told “Muhandis,” an engineer, and did not know the meaning of the word. My turn at length came, and I was in some fear of uncomfortable queries; for to state that I was an Englishman would have been utterly disbelieved in a land where our countrymen travel only in first-class reserved carriages, wear “solar topee” hats, and are attended by servants. To call myself a Persian would probably have satisfied the man, but there was always that damning passport, and of course I did not know but it might be examined in Aleppo side by side with this creature’s notes.

CONVENIENT IGNORANCE

So, knowing but little of his Arabi and Turkish, I feigned total ignorance, indicating by signs that I was going to Persia, pointing to myself, the eastern distance, and repeating “B’il ’Ajam” (“to Persia”). He asked me innumerable questions, which had I answered would have tied me up in a terrible confusion of contradictions, but at last, failing to get any reply from me he suddenly desisted, finding no amusement in the sport, I suppose, and passed on to a more intelligible victim.

About four o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at Aleppo, or rather at Aleppo station, terminus of that creeping railway, rejoicing in the extraordinary name of “Chemin de Fer de Damas Prolongement Homs et Hama.”

To my surprise, no one asked for passports, the only annoyance was that second-class passengers’ registered luggage would not be distributed for another hour. While receiving this information I was furiously attacked by a kind of hotel tout, fortunately the last I was to see, for I left both hotels and touts behind with Aleppo. However, I submitted to be thrust into a carriage and found myself careering along a straight, broad road towards the town, whose chief feature is the castle upon its flat-topped mound. Modern Aleppo is obviously an Arab city, the language is Arabic, French has not yet displaced it as at Beyrouth, while it possesses a few broad streets, where the badly written French signs of Greek, Armenian, and Syrian shopkeepers, photographers and hotel-keepers hang. The majority of its ways are stone-paved alleys between high walls, with the lattice-windows always associated in the Western mind with Aleppo. Beyond that it possesses a splendid bazaar, rows and rows of booths in the ordinary Oriental style, whose owners squat within, selling the European and native articles to be met with in all bazaars from Constantinople to Afghanistan. To him who has dwelt in the farther East, it comes like the first step towards the old country again. With joy I roamed through these busy alleys of shops, and purchased my road apparatus, candles, sugar, tea, tin and glass tea utensils, knobs of cheese, fruit, etc., of Arabs sitting behind rows of pendant sugar loaves and tin cans, entrenched among masses of heterogeneous wares.

In point of view of the antiquity of Aleppo, only excelled in Western Asia by Damascus (which after 3500 years of importance, still maintains its premier position), some note of its history is due.

That it was a city of the Hittites is witnessed by the inscriptions in that language within the citadel gates, and at present we know of no antiquity greater in Syria than that of this wonderful empire, that lasted for the enormous period of 3000 years (3700–700 B.C.), and of which there will be occasion to speak later. Though little, if anything, is heard of Aleppo in the ancient chronicles, it is so near to the ancient Karkhemish (Corchemish of the Old Testament), that it probably stood and fell with it during the wars with Assyria, which lasted from 1100–700 B.C., though no mention of it occurs in the stone inscriptions of Nineveh, Kalah, Kuyunjik, and Asshur.

In the storm of nations, Scythians, Cimmerians, Arabs, and—above all—Medes, that raged when Assyria fell, Karkhemish is forgotten and Aleppo is not heard of till Christian times.

KARKHEMISH

It was probably converted to Christianity about the time St Paul sent his message to Antioch (Acts xi. 19–24), but it is in Muhammadan times that it really begins to play a part in Syrian politics. It was then the see of a bishopric, and was sufficiently important to be contended for in the early days of Islam, when a great battle was fought in the vicinity (A.D. 657). In A.D. 1056 the great conqueror Alp Arslan took it, and a century later saw Saladin defending its castle against the Crusaders. It fell, like all Western Asia, before the barbarian Mongols in 1260, and was sacked.

It has in more recent days produced many theologians and men of Muhammadan learning.

In the Turko-Egyptian war of the middle of last century, fighting took place there, the Egyptian army bombarding the city. A large barrack built by their commander, Ibrahim Pasha, still stands, to harbour Turkish soldiers, just outside the town.

That I was unable to explore the now empty fortress was a great disappointment, but even had it been possible, I could have learned nothing more than the many historians and archæologists who have visited it, and provided the reading public with every detail of its history, past and present. Besides this, Aleppo has been one of the best known of Oriental cities, particularly to English people, for here have lived and died agents of the Levant Company, and our Levant trade has ever had Aleppo for a prominent buyer.

Like Diarbekr, Mosul, and Bagdad, Aleppo lost much of its importance with the opening of the Suez canal, previous to which time it had been on the northern overland route to the East. Still, the advent of the railway, feeble as that is, has done something to restore it to its former importance, though the Turks, as everywhere else that they rule, have cast the blight of their presence upon it. At present it manufactures a large quantity of cotton cloth which is exported very largely Eastwards, and forms the principal dress material for the population of Southern Turkish Kurdistan and Northern Mesopotamia.

I had hardly been in Aleppo half a day, at a filthy place boasting the name of “Hotel de Syrie,” kept by an Armenian—a fact which did not prevent Musulmans staying there—when a Turkish coachman turned up willing to take me to Diarbekr, the next big town on my route. I held out for two days’ grace, but he, having clients at the other end waiting to be brought back, would hear of no delay, and so after a few hours I found myself mounted in one of those queer vehicles that ply between the cities of Syria.

The concern is rather like a punt on wheels. A wooden or canvas-covered top shelters passenger and driver, and curtains, when they exist, may be let down to guard the traveller from sun and storm. In this all the luggage must be placed, and comfort depends upon the skill with which things are arranged. Fortunately I had little, and putting my only trunk at the fore end I was able to retain a large square space, with a mattress under me to sit or recline upon.

Small articles like water-pots or samovars are tied on outside at various points, and there exist till broken or squashed, their almost inevitable fate. Commissariat has also to be arranged, for the supply en route is sometimes uncertain. Travelling light as I was, we only carried flaps of bread, some dates and onions. Fruit was unfortunately not in season in this month of March.

My coachman for some reason took me for a Haji returning from Mecca, and I found this such an excellent disguise, ensuring such civility on the road, that I was content to let it stand, till too late to change, and forthwith wound about my fez the white handkerchief which is a sign of the pilgrim homeward bound. We left Aleppo in our carriage thus one noonday, and a few minutes outside the town and over the ridge, one looked round and saw nothing but the yellow Syrian desert devoid of hills, the surface only occasionally disturbed by Arab villages, like clusters of anthills, the style of architecture as far as the Euphrates being all of the sugar-loaf pattern. For some hours our two ponies took us along the level track—there is no made road—till nearly sunset, when among a few mounds we suddenly came upon a village the natives call Bāb. Doubtless proximity to Aleppo may account for the excellent little bazaar, cleanly and good caravanserai, in one of whose upper rooms, overlooking the courtyard full of mules, donkeys, camels, horses, and sheep, I found a resting-place. Built of white stone, this caravanserai in point of comfort was one of the best I have seen in many years’ wanderings. Design it had none—one block of rooms, some nine feet above ground, formed one side. Opposite were large stables, on the roof of which was the row of rooms of which I occupied one. The entrance to the caravanserai was the usual kind of deep porch with small chambers on either side, and above the archway of the entrance the enterprising architect had constructed two excellent rooms with glass windows, for the wives of wealthy travellers, opening on to a little fenced space of roof where they might promenade. The “khanchi” or keeper of the serai pointed to this with pride. The rooms, he informed us, were special accommodation for travelling pashas and such great game, and the chicken-run of a promenade was considered to be absolutely the last word in the progress of architecture.

BAB

The first experiences of travelling in native guise reveal many little things one never thought of before, when, as Europeans, we arrived at a stage, had our room quickly swept and carpeted, camp tables and chairs set out, and steaming tea swiftly produced. Certainly I did not have to sweep my room on this occasion, though subsequently I learned to wield the three blades of grass they call a broom in these parts. Water, too, the khanchi fetched. But my small belongings, which it was not safe to leave in the carriage, I had to bring up, and made several journeys up and down the narrow steps from courtyard to roof, laden with mattress, quilt, blanket, and the bags and bundles without which one finds it impossible to travel in the East.

Then I discovered that I needed tea very badly, so I had to go downstairs with my tin samovar, draw water from a well, fill it, and beg the lighted coal from a coachman whom I saw smoking a hubble-bubble. This done, I retired to my heights again, and after some time enjoyed a glass of tea and some dry bread.

At this juncture my coachman appeared, and expressed his astonishment that I had not followed the custom of travellers arriving in a strange place—to visit the bazaar.

This I had omitted to do, in fact had not thought of it. Now it was just sunset, I had no dinner to eat, the bazaar was closing; and worse, there was nothing, not even bread, in my bags for to-morrow’s twelve hours in the desert. By this time I could get on fairly well with Turkish, but suddenly my coachman exclaimed, in a fit of geniality, “Az kurmānjī dazānam” (“I know Kurdish”!), and I found in a moment a new means of communication, for though I did not know the Kermanji dialect well, it is sufficiently near some others I did know, to be intelligible. I found afterwards that from the fact of my hailing Kurdish as an old friend, my coachman, who had been at some pains to find out my native place, a point always to be settled with one’s travelling companion in the East, had at once registered me as a native of Persian Kurdistan. So with status as a Haji of Kurdistan conferred on me, I was introduced as such by my friend the coachman to all and sundry.

Here he proved a real friend, for he offered to show me the bazaar and try to get bread and some dinner before closing time. The bazaar was a small one, but fortunately there was a tiny cookshop, where exactly three kinds of very greasy pilau were on sale. From these I selected the least uninviting, and arranged for the proprietor to send a couple of plates of it to the caravanserai. We went into the village baker’s, and there I found the great advantage of being, first, a Haji, and next, a strange Haji. At first the man, who was closing his shop, was very loth to serve us; but my guide, in tones of pained remonstrance, mentioned that I was a Haji, and the man hesitated, and finally began to throw bread into his scales. As a means to get full weight, Muhammad, the coachman, threw in the remark that I was a stranger from far away, knowing neither tongue, nor country, nor custom. The worthy baker, with a sententious remark upon the virtue of honouring the stranger and the acquisition of merit, threw in an extra piece and looked to me for the pious expression that was his due, and which I was fortunately able to supply in Arabic, much to his gratification. When we asked him the price, he actually told us the right amount without any haggling, and remarked upon the wickedness of harassing the stranger. This excellent attitude I found in many places, that is, wherever there were Kurds or Arabs. Turks are another race in manner and custom. I found my dinner waiting at the caravanserai, and invited my coachman to partake, for I knew that the humble station I occupied in the social scale was only equal to, if not lower than, that of a coachman.

A JUST MAN

With frank gratitude he squatted opposite me, and with our fingers we finished the mess. Previous experience in Persia had taught me how to negotiate semi-liquid dishes with a piece of bread and two fingers, or consume piles of rice without feeding one’s surroundings. Also I knew the style of ablution necessary, and the formulæ of thanksgiving after eating. This latter was not called for on the road, for religious observance falls into considerable desuetude among the slaves of the desert track. Dinner finished—it took about three minutes—we shared each other’s cigarettes, and as he departed to attend to his horses and I retired under a fold of my coat in a corner of the room, I felt that once more I was back in that generous and genial East that I had known before, so many hundreds of miles nearer the rising sun.

Next morning before daybreak we were up and on the way, and the sun rising showed us the same yellow undulating plain with now a range of distant hills to the north of us. We were not taking the usual track across the desert, which goes as a rule more northwards towards Birejiq, a town whose chief feature is a castle built during the wars of the Crusade.

Our way lay towards Membich, a city with almost the most ancient history of the Syrian desert—Karkhemish always excepted. We were traversing the lands which have seen the cultivation of the great Hittite nation that is said to have had its capital at Karkhemish but a few miles from here, about 3500 B.C., an age only excelled by Babylonia herself. From that time till the conquest of these lands by the Assyrians, some 700 years B.C., the king of the Hittites ruled over what was then doubtless a fertile country. It is about the Euphrates banks that some of the greatest battles of the world have raged. Hittite, Assyrian, Greek, Parthian, have all fought for Syria, and won and lost it; and Membich, that had a temple to the goddess Atergatis (of whom more hereafter), existed as a wealthy city, and stood for all these centuries, to be despoiled at the hand of a Roman plebeian, a place-buyer, whose ambition and greed eventually brought him to well-deserved ruin. This was Marcus Lucius Crassus, who in 54 B.C., in a campaign against the Parthians, “entered the shrine, carefully weighed all the offerings in the precious metals, and then ruthlessly carried them off.”[3]

The town was not, however, destroyed, for it was ceded by Anthony, some twenty years later, to a deserter from Parthia, who, after holding it for a few months, once more returned to Parthia, leaving it in Roman hands.

To a field of ruined walls, piles of enormous carven stones, mounds betokening ancient buildings, we came that evening. Upon the highest mound is now a little mosque, and the place is peopled by a number of Circassian immigrants, who in their Cossack dress looked singularly out of place among the Arabs around them. On all sides are the remains of ancient buildings, stones too great to carry away. Their principal use to-day appears to be to wall in the fields of grain, and when not too large for transport, to form new buildings in the dirty, squalid village, whose accommodation—three filthy rooms, all that remains of a caravanserai—is in keeping with the tone of the place.

MEMBICH

Here we blessed the foresight that had made us bring some eatables from Bāb, for the surly inhabitants refused to supply anything but eggs, which were at the price of six for the equivalent of a penny. The water was bad, our supply being from a shallow well (just outside a particularly odorous cesspool), from which half the village came to draw water.

Since there was no bazaar to go to, nothing to do, nothing to buy and eat, I spent the time sitting on my door-step, for there were too many flies to share the room with, and nightfall and sleep came very welcome.

FOOTNOTE TO CHAPTER II:

[3] Rawlinson, Parthia, p. 152.

CHAPTER III
FROM THE EUPHRATES TO THE TIGRIS, EDESSA (URFA), AND AMID (DIARBEKR)

There are, I believe, no remains in Membich of the temple of Atergatis which Crassus spoiled, and even at Karkhemish there is nothing but a mound unopened and kept closed by the Turks, to show where a great goddess, probably the greatest goddess of ancient times, was worshipped.

In reading the histories of Chaldea, Syria, Canaan, the Hittites, Israelites, Phœnicians, and Greeks, there appears as the chief goddess in their mythology always a goddess of victory, or love, and it is interesting to trace the course of this deity through the religions of the ancient East. The Chaldean race, which inhabited the lowlands, at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris, from ages far beyond our knowledge, had, from earliest times set up a goddess, “Belit,” the lady, and it is from her that the later goddesses of other nations, or rather the later names and worship, sprang.

It is now known that the Hittites (for whose history the world is indebted to the wonderful research of Professor Sayce) were an extraordinarily powerful nation, that held the lands of Syria from about 3700 B.C.[4] to 700 B.C., when the Assyrians overcame them. During this period they came into contact with the civilisation of Babylon, and, long before the appearance of the Syrians as a nation, probably adopted the worship of Belit or Ishtar (the same deity), whose name they altered to Atergatis. The worship of Atergatis was general among the peoples of Canaan (Syria), under the name of Ashtoreth, or Ashtaroth as we find it in the Bible.

BEL AND ASHTORETH

The Canaanitic mythology also supplied a fundamental idea of male and female essence in Baal and Ashtaroth, with whom we are familiarised by the Bible stories; and this idea of the origin of fecundity and power, Baal, the God of all the living principles, according to the Canaanitic peoples, was the deity after whom the Israelites so often strayed; and Ashtaroth, the goddess of motherhood, love, and sensuality, necessarily was coupled with him.

Baal or Bel, or Moloch, the Sun-god, or Dagon, are all names of the same god, according to different tribes and peoples, who adopted this, probably the earliest conception of any worship of the supernatural arising from reverence of the sun and moon as the emblems of day and night, fire and moisture, heat and cold, light and dark, life and death, as twin gods of these antithetic phenomena—in short, the symbols of existence at all.

So we find the goddess Ishtar worshipped by the Phœnicians as Ashtoreth, by the Hittites as Atergatis, by the Philistines and Canaanites as Derketo, the fish-goddess (whose emblem and likeness was that of a half-woman, half-fish, as that of Dagon, the god, was that of a fish-man).

It was of course to these that the high places whereon they erected “Asherah,” or places of adoration, were dedicated, and against them that the prophets of Israel were sent.

Thus we find Elijah sent against the priests of Baal (the Syrian version, the fire-god), who called upon their god, since he had in their mythology retained the first principle of fire, to send down that element.

However, Ishtar, or whatever one of her names we may call her, played a more important part in the history of Western Asia than the Sun-god himself. To her, temples were erected by all the nations worshipping, and she retained through all, the suzerainty over the planet Venus, her particular sign and emblem.

Yet even among the Assyrians, who probably exalted her name more than any other nation, she bore a dual character, for we read that she had a temple at Nineveh and another at Arbela—a place dedicated originally to four gods. Now the Ishtar of Nineveh was essentially a goddess of love and luxury, who ruled the planet Venus; but she of Arbela gave victory in battle and strengthened the arm of the warrior.

It was at any rate a powerful and compelling religion this, that lasted through four thousand years of battles, of races that appeared, rose to importance and vanished, of peoples as little in sympathy with natural feeling as the Phœnicians and Assyrians, as the Hittites or Chaldeans. The worship of this goddess went on claiming homage from the mighty kings of the Hittites, the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians, keeping subject the host of nations, great and small, from Persia to the Mediterranean coast.

And now we are told that the Hittite kingdom extended to Ionia, and temples were erected to the goddess at Ephesus and Smyrna. Here came the Greeks as colonists, and, adopting the hosts of female attendants and priestesses as a basis, founded the legend of the Amazons. Not only that, but they adopted and adapted the worship of Atergatis, giving her a Greek name, under which she achieved a greater fame and commanded a greater reverence than any goddess of the pure Greek mythology.

And here, in this hamlet of Membich that was called Hierapolis during Greek supremacy, was one of the chief Syrian temples in the last day of her worship (54 B.C.). When this occurred, the Hittites had been gone into the oblivion of the past some 650 years, but the goddess, and perhaps her temple, an offshoot of the greater temple of Karkhemish, still stood.

For what we know of the Hittites we are indebted, as above mentioned, to Professor E. G. Sayce, who first announced to an astonished world of Orientalists and students, a great Hittite nation, the existence of which had been to that day—not two decades ago—absolutely unknown.

THE HITTITES

We now know that the Hittite empire lasted for the enormous period of about 3000 years.

The Chaldean chronicles mention them as a nation, in the date 3500 B.C. (circa). The seat of the nation appears to have been at Karkhemish, but before that they had been domiciled in the Taurus Mountains and the hills of Armenia, whence they descended, a hardy mountain race, to the lowlands of Canaan.

They were the descendants of Heth, son of Canaan (Genesis x. 15), and once settled in Karkhemish, where the chief temple to Atergatis was built (modern Jerabulus), extended their kingdom from the Bosphorus to the confines of Egypt, with whose Pharaohs they fought long and sanguinary battles.

Like all peoples in the East, even in the present day, they would appear to have been tribal in constitution, but their chief king was he of Karkhemish, with a lieutenant king at Kadesh in the south.

However, their might, long-lived as it was, fell before the onrush of the Assyrians, then but a young race, comparatively newly separated from the Chaldeans and Babylonians, and in 700 B.C. the last of the Hittite kings, who had been for some time tributary to Sargon, rebelled against his stronger neighbours, was defeated, and the last remnant of the Hittite empire, which had grown weak and dismembered, was destroyed and forgotten.

At Karkhemish, the capital through so many centuries of the Hittite empire, and chief city of the worship of Atergatis, there remains now but the great mound. War has again raged over the remains of greater combatants, for the Turks were defeated by the Egyptians there half a century ago.

Its interest to-day lies in the fact that the Bagdad railway is planned to cross the river just by the mound of Karkhemish, so we may look for bulky volumes in German some day, which will give us fuller particulars of this ancient city than we possess at present.

We left Membich very early next morning, and en route discovered that several other carriages had put up in the place during the night; for both behind and before were rumbling, swaying vehicles, two or three full of luggage, and the rest carrying passengers. From Membich the country—as barren as ever—began to get a little hilly, and in the far northern distance we could see the Kurdish mountains in the province of Mamurat ul Aziz, at this time of the year well capped with snow.

For a few hours we got along at a good pace among the low hills, till we received a sudden check from a very steep place going down, and as we turned the elbow of a hillock, the Euphrates appeared below us, an angry, rushing river of very considerable width. By devious and dangerous ways we arrived at a broad foreshore, to find half a dozen carriages already arrived, and by the time the contingent from Membich had been drawn up there were twelve all in a line, the horses unsaddled, waiting to be ferried across by a craft rather like a high-prowed longship cut in half at the waist. Upon the high stern a man wielded an enormously long steering-oar and two or three others with poles and oars supplied a propelling power. But it was not merely a question of rowing across; there were but two landing-places, one on either side, and the current was of such a force as to render it absolutely necessary to tow the craft about a mile above the proposed landing-place on the opposite bank. Then, shoving off, everybody exerted their utmost strength to get the clumsy craft across the river, and if they were sufficiently quick and strong, they would perhaps hit the spot where the waiting carriages stood. If they came to shore lower down, there was of course nothing to do but tow back again. Necessarily the transit of a couple of carriages and their horses (the utmost capacity of the ferry), counting from the time another party had landed on the opposite bank, took two or three hours.

Our large party of passengers, seeing that delay would inevitably occur, were disposed to come to an amicable arrangement regarding precedence. Unfortunately we discovered that half the vehicles were hired by the Chief of Police of Urfa to transport himself, his goods and womenfolk, and though he had—from what his fellow-travellers said—evinced no desire for speed so far, he now turned upon every one of us who talked of arranging an order of crossing, brandished his sword, and upbraided the company in general for proposing any such arrangement in his presence, which should be sufficient to give us the clue to all matters of precedence.

A EUPHRATES FORD

He would go first with all his goods and women, and whoever paid him would follow him in the order of the magnitude of their contribution. The Turkish and Armenian drivers seemed so effectually cowed by his disagreeable appearance and offensive manners, that most of them—ignoring his offer of precedence by payment—retired some distance and began to lunch, content to let him get clear away. Two cartloads of Christians of Urfa, however, intimidated by his continued attempts to extort money, paid and got away during the afternoon.

The remainder of us arranged who should go first, and, making the best of the hours we had to wait, composed ourselves to that which fills up so much of the idle time of the East—sleep.

It was nearly sunset before we finally got across, and found ourselves on the broad plain of the Euphrates valley. With all despatch we harnessed up and set out. Arriving at the caravanserai, we found it full of the effendi and his chattels, and the travellers who had followed him; so, making the best of a bad job, we went on, trusting to luck to find a place to sleep.

We had traversed the plain and were gradually ascending a pleasant hilly country by moonlight, when the driver descried a cluster of sugar-loaf roofs just off the road, and we stopped to interview the inhabitants.

A couple of finely built men came out, apparently Arabs, but they had not spoken half a dozen words to one another before we saw that they were Kurds. This resolved both the driver and myself to stay, for the Kurds, with all their bad reputation, are better hosts than Armenian, Turk, or Arab. Eventually, when a number of children and sheep had been dragged out from what appeared to be a cellar, they told me that the best room in the place was at my disposal. Descending three steps, and passing along a dark narrow corridor, I found myself in a circular chamber whose high sugar-loaf roof was invisible in the gloom undispersed by a tuft of burning brushwood.

The Kurds, with continual joking and merriment, tripping one another up, as they brought in the baggage, eventually deposited all my belongings in the room, and then installed themselves. The hamlet had a population of some fifteen men and women, and within five minutes these were all gathered around my strip of carpet. One of them knew Turkish, and tried it on me, taking me for a Turk; but when I replied in Kurdish, telling them I did not understand Turkish, they evinced considerable satisfaction, and hailed me as a brother Kurd, albeit of some other tribe (these were of the Milli), but nevertheless a fellow-countryman, and to be treated as a guest. And right well did these simple people act up to the fine old Kurdish law of hospitality. They possessed little enough of the world’s goods, but their best fowl was sacrificed to the occasion, eggs in numbers sufficient for ten men were produced. Every one of them except the headman, who sat by as host, busied himself about something. One made a fire in the centre of the room, making gloomier the gloom with pungent smoke; another fetched water for washing—they would not let me go outside in the keen wind, to the spring. One heated water for tea, while his companions killed and plucked and commenced cooking the fowl. Surplus eggs they hard-boiled and put up for my journey next day. I felt ashamed to be imposing thus upon these simple and genuine people, only I knew that utter incredulity would have met any attempt I might have made to undeceive them. What could they think of a man whose only means of communication not only with them, but with the whole world of Syria, was Kurdish? I found, however, that the appreciation they evinced for tea and good cigarettes, luxuries unknown to them except by name, quite outbalanced my qualms. The unfortunate driver, who was subject to fits of surliness, finding his protégé in such a state of independence, gave way to a period of disagreeableness which the jibes of the Kurds did nothing to dispel, and finally retired to sleep among his horses’ legs. As a race, Kurds are a witty and facetious people, great lovers of practical jokes; but I think these excelled any I ever met in this particular feature. The stance was one continual roar of laughter; despite their inquisitiveness, their personal remarks, their habit of fingering everything, the whole tone of their behaviour was too obviously ingenuous and well meant, possibly to offend any but Turks, whom they cursed and reviled, and made the subject of many unmentionable pleasantries. About ten o’clock the headman, a handsome fellow, doubly important in the possession of the village rifle, told everyone to clear out and let me sleep, and they retired, driven by the butt of the ancient fire-arm.

A KURDISH VILLAGE

I was composing myself to sleep when a young woman came in, and began quietly to sweep the room with a bunch of twigs. Not unnaturally I sat up and regarded her with some astonishment, not lessened when she produced from a recess some bedding, which she put down beside mine. I was hardly in a position to make a remark upon her obvious intention to share the room, but the situation was saved by the appearance of one of my friends of the earlier evening. He saw me sitting up, and asked why I did not sleep, as if the proceedings which had just taken place were too ordinary for remark, and I learned in reply to half-formed questions that he was the house-owner, his wife the sweeper, and that owing to the size of the village, which possessed but two rooms fit to sleep in, they were going to spend the night beside me. This method of procedure was propounded by him in such a matter-of-fact way, and was so apparently quite the thing to do, that I could not, nor did I wish, to make any remark upon what was a purely patriarchal custom. What I learned was, that had I been a Turk or Arab, they would have told me to sleep in the carriage; but being a Kurd, and a guest, I must excuse their presumption in occupying the room, which was my exclusive property. The poor man even seemed somewhat ashamed at having possibly broken some unwritten rule of hospitality, but I did my best to put him and his wife at ease, and we literally lay down together.

I was awakened by the wife early in the morning; her man yet slumbered. She herself carried out the small luggage to the carriage, and then two or three villagers turned out and loaded up the heavy things. Last of all the headman appeared, and, as we drove away, the sound of his rough hearty farewells rang in my ears. These were the first Kurds I met, the outposts of a great race, that covers 125,000 square miles of mountain in Turkey and Persia, and who, despite the fact that their outlying tribes are but fourteen days distant from London, are the least known of any Middle Eastern race; albeit they are one of the bravest, most independent, and intelligent of all, cursed only by the black mark of the blood-feud, and a terrible propensity to brigandage.

The way to our next station was across an undulating plain peopled by Armenians, and sedentary Kurds of the Milli tribes. For miles and miles we rolled along between ploughed lands, where the grain was just beginning to send its green spikes above earth. From the north a keen wind came at a temperature obviously lowered by the snow on the hills, about whose shoulders rags of cloud were beginning to collect, to drench the land and the travellers therein but a few days later. In fact, rain had already fallen by the afternoon—when we found ourselves upon a dreary and immense plain of mud, sticky, clayey soil, into which the wheels and the horses sank. Our station, Charmelik, was visible in the far distance, a distance we seemed never to be able to reduce, for the sticky prospect spread out on all sides, and our speed was about half a mile an hour. Sudden showers began to fly round the country. One could count them as they descended from the hills, and progressing swiftly—columns of dark rain descending from dense black cloud-centres—did the round of the soaked plains, and apparently returned to the mountains and the solid mass of cloud that hung about them.

CHARMELIK

However, we did arrive at Charmelik at sunset, and put up in a little room. The village is a Kurdish one, and talk among the inhabitants was mostly of Ibrahim Pasha, the famous robber chief who held this country in terror for so long.

So bad a character was he, this outlaw (who adopted his trade in revenge for the Turkish treachery that brought his father to a miserable end), that Kurd and Arab alike disclaimed him; Kurd asserting that he was Arab, and Arab calling him Kurd.

The body of ruffians and thieves that joined him were of every class—Turk, Armenian, Kurd, and Arab. All served under his standard, and by his disregard for the property of any tribe or people he drew upon himself the enmity of his own kinsmen, the Milli Kurds.

But like every astute robber and scoundrel in the Turkish dominions, he bought the Sultan’s favour, and could and did ridicule all the efforts of local government to catch him. For the most part he frequented the hills that border on the Mesopotamian plain to the north, but he was also a power in Viran Shahr and Harran to the south, where he kept everyone in a lively fear of him. Not until the Turks arranged themselves into a Constitution was this powerful brigand, by a ruse, caught and killed, and the heterogeneous collection of rascals dispersed.

The villagers of Charmelik related how his men would follow travellers into the village, instal themselves in the best room, order a meal, and having rested and smoked a pipe or two, stroll out, calmly load the traveller’s effects upon his own cart and take them away to their nearest camp. So much were their reprisals feared—for revenge upon a village was burning and extermination—that not a single person dared protest. Even Turkish officers and officials had to submit to this treatment, and, so the reminiscent throng round the fire assured me, suffer a good beating in the bargain for being of the detested race.

Altogether, Ibrahim Pasha’s was one of the most successful and best organised of the Kurdish raiding parties, and numerically the most powerful. The only other combination, formed solely for the purpose of brigandage and revenge, was that of the Hamavand, whose acquaintance I made later, in southern Kurdistan.

We left this village next morning in a freezing cold, and the sun coming up, found us gradually ascending through gullies and defiles into a considerable range of hills. In that much-abused country, Persia, I have travelled many hundreds of miles by carriage, but I must in justice say, that the worst tracks in that maligned and unhappy country are paved boulevards compared to the carriage-ways of Turkey. Here, within easy distance of the sea and of the influence of Constantinople, the track passes untouched by any of the French-speaking, liquor-loving effindis appointed to look after such things; whereas in Persia there are excellent roads built by the foreign enterprise that she sometimes welcomes and Turkey discourages; and where the European engineer has not made smooth the way, the Persian himself, with no other notion than to ease the pains of travellers, has done his best, by clearing stones and putting down causeways.

For hours we ascended ravines, and slid, banging, down hill-sides, boxes and chattels of all descriptions almost taking charge despite their substantial lashings. Do what one might, inconsequent paraphernalia, eatables, small articles, would leap out and roll away, and one had the greatest difficulty in exercising sufficient restraint upon the overwhelming inclination to follow head first. For miles both myself and the driver walked, helping the wheels over rocks, piloting the carriage round corners of rocky zigzags, or helping the horses in desperate efforts to haul up slopes.

Here and there was a little patch of cultivation among the stones, and a spring made green narrow places in almost every valley. As we neared Urfa, our next stopping-place, ancient cave-dwellings, now unoccupied, began to occur, and bits of carved stone here and there lay about. In one flat plain, some two miles across, were the remains of a large square building, of the style one associates with pre-Muhammadan times, when mud did not enjoy its present popularity with masons.

URFA

However, our troubles ceased suddenly, for turning a particularly bad corner we found ourselves upon a very well-made road that continued all the way into Urfa. This is, I believe, the only made road in Syria, and was the outcome of a project to construct a military and commercial route as far as Diarbekr. The effort expired a few miles north-east of Urfa. Once upon this, we saw what would have been our fate without it, and I quite believed the driver’s statement that, previous to its construction, the passes were not negotiable by wheeled vehicles.

On the way we met with a proof of the curious devotion that leads the Musulman from the remotest corners of Asia to Mecca. An old man, in garments that reminded me of Khorasan of Eastern Persia, overtook us, his stride taking him at a greater pace up the hill than our slow walk. I asked him, as a venture, in Persian where he came from, and learned that he was a pilgrim returning on foot from Mecca to Bokhara. His journey he estimated would have taken him nearly a year, from the time he started from his native town to the time he saw it again. He had the appearance of fifty or more years, but none of the feebleness that might be expected, and marched along—having that day done some twenty miles of mountain—as if he were just set out.

Beside the road, as we neared Urfa, there were, in bad repair, remains of an ancient causeway, the original road to the west from Edessa, as Urfa was known in pre-Christian days. Along the paved way of square blocks of stone the armies of the Roman and the Parthian had passed in the days when men worshipped Venus and Astarte.

Urfa, at the foot of this considerable range, stands upon some hillocks, and once the hideous dwelling of the Governor—built in imitation French style—is passed, the ancient nature of the town becomes evident. The peculiar blackness of the massive walls, whose ruins stand everywhere, the style of the bridges that span the ravine amid the city, the citadel mounds, topped with ruins of buildings all of that blackened stone, tell something of the history of Edessa. And in the hills above the light yellow cliffs that look down, are the innumerable cave-dwellings of the ancients, now occupied by nondescript families of sedentary Kurds.

We drew up at a large caravanserai at the edge of the ravine above mentioned, and I took one of a row of rooms upon its spacious roof, that afforded a promenade from which one could look up at the honeycombed hills, or view the clustered houses upon the hummock forming the Armenian quarter. Contrary to custom, the room, which opened upon the roof, and faced the courtyard, possessed glassless windows, looking down upon the street and a coffee-house. This is not enclosed, but is an extension of the actual coffee-room, the other side of the caravanserai. Along the moat edge, benches are arranged, and trees and matting shelters keep the sun off. Along the strip of road running between this café and the caravanserai walls the town auctioneers paraded every morning, selling every conceivable article, from a handful of cartridges to a horse.

Bids were made by the guests in the café as he passed and repassed singing out the last offer. In many cases his price not being reached, he would hand the horse, or whatever it might be, back to the owner and go on with something else, producing the under-priced animal next morning.

As in nearly all the towns of this empire, half the population of the streets and nine-tenths of all the café and corner loafers were effendis in uniform, who never by any chance appeared to have any kind of duties. In fact, Urfa, I was told, possessed a larger proportion than any other town of these undesirable fowl. Fortunately, they did not worry me: I was to learn their skill in annoyance later. Here the attractions of coffee and pipes apparently outweighed those of the possible piastre of the traveller. The population, apart from these signs of Turkish might, is composed of Kurds and Arabs, and an enormous number of Armenians. The Kurds come from the north, mostly out of the hills of Mamuret ul Aziz; the Arabs are from the plains of Mesopotamia, and probably have the claim to be considered the original inhabitants. The language is Kurdish and Arabic. Kurdish is understood by all, for it has forced itself upon the partially alien population as it does everywhere, displacing older established languages with its extraordinary virility and vitality.

EDESSA

The town is not a large one, but its bazaar is very busy, and its Government House always thronged with people. There is a square with a few trees, and the place is sprinkled with bits of old buildings, some adapted to modern use, and others built into new walls. Under the hills one is shown the Pool of Abraham, who is supposed to have performed various feats here. The water-supply is plentiful, the scenery around beautiful in its ruggedness and the fantastic nature of its hills, and I was told that there are very pretty gardens in the immediate vicinity. It is one of those places one sees so often in Asiatic Turkey, where life could be peaceful among beautiful surroundings and prosperity assured, were it not for the Turks and their misrule.

Urfa, or Edessa as the Romans called it, stood in Assyrian times upon the borders of Greater Assyria, and “the lands of Nairi,” the highlands immediately to the north, which are now known as the western end of Kurdistan, and its name does not appear as a city till the time of the Roman invasion, when we hear of it as the capital of the country of Osrhœne, whose kings were always called Abgarus, according to the Roman mutilation of the Semitic name. The people were Arabs; and Edessa, while capital, marked the most northerly point of the kingdom.

At the same time the kingdom was on the northern marches of Mesopotamia, and always being in a position of a frontier state between Roman and Parthian, Arab and mountaineer—either Armenian or Kurd, though it is not known if the Kurds had spread so far west—was subjected to the fury of all its neighbours in wars, and played traitor to each on many occasions.

After the break-up of the Empire of Alexander, about the third century B.C., Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the Seleucid princes, and as they weakened, the northern portion of their kingdom fell before the advancing Romans. It was with Pompey (65 B.C.) that the king of Edessa, Abgarus, king of the people of Osrhœne, made a treaty, and accepted actual if not formal vassalage.

Ten years later, Crassus, as already mentioned, made his expedition against the rising power of Parthia, and was deceived and deserted by Abgarus after being lured into a position of danger. Thereupon Edessa became allied to Parthia, and incidentally saved itself from the destruction consequent upon conquest.

A century later, and we see the Parthian Empire torn over a question of succession: Meherdates, a Parthian prince, at the suggestion of Rome, proceeds to win his kingdom by the sword from Godarz. En route he passes by Edessa, and now the Abgarus, with a ready facility for duplicity, after feasting him, sets him upon a road he knows will end in disaster. His theory was fully borne out by the defeat of the pretender at Erbil.

After the death of this versatile monarch, little is heard of Edessa till A.D. 115, when the Emperor Trajan established himself there, in preparation for an invasion of Parthia. Edessa was a convenient spot for such a step, being within easy reach of the Mediterranean via Aleppo, and commanding the road from Syria to the East.

Having prepared his army, he set out southwards; but while he subdued southern Mesopotamia, the reigning Abgarus, taking an advantage of Trajan’s absence, promptly rebelled, and ejected the Roman garrison installed in the citadel, whose ramparts and walls still stand on the southern side of the city.

Vengeance overtook this effort at independence, for during the next year (A.D. 116), Lucius Quietus, a Roman general, captured the place and burnt it.

Yet once more we hear of Edessa before it sinks into the temporary obscurity that followed the fall of the Roman power in Mesopotamia. In one of the last attempts of Rome finally to crush the Parthians (A.D. 197), Severus, who came from France to try and recover the territories (Edessa among them) recently conquered by Vologases V. of Parthia, found Edessa on his way to the East, and the reigning Abgarus, always ready to turn a complacent face to the man in power, submitted without a murmur, and handed over his sons to the Romans as hostages.

It was not perhaps remarkable that Edessa, after these centuries of strife between the great empires, that saw the ebbing and flowing tide of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Parthian, Roman and Arab, sweep by and over it, possessed a population of which the Roman and Greek element, particularly the latter, was an important section. When Christianity began to spread, the proximity of Edessa to Antioch made it easy for the bishops of those early days to travel there, and so we find as a result of the efforts of converts a college springing up in very early times.

Though there were doubtless many of the Greeks in this college, we are told that it was the Chaldeans who founded it, and made it famous for its erudition, and particularly its knowledge of the medical science. Doubtless Chaldean, Greek, and Arabic were all spoken there; the last certainly, for Arab pupils of the college, natives of the land towards Mecca and Medina, were relations of the early Muhammadan saints, notably Abu Bekr.

This famous school was dissolved by Zeno the Isaurian,[5] and the Chaldeans, with no loss of zeal, transferred it to Susa, in Khuzistan of south-west Persia, whence the now famous missionaries of the Chaldeans to China were despatched.

In 1124 A.D. it had become one of the western strongholds of the followers of Hasan Sabbah, the Ismailis or Assassins of Crusading fame, and when they were finally stamped out, a large number were slain in Edessa, or as it was then called, Urfa; and since then it has taken an ordinary place in the scheme of the general history of Mesopotamia, acquiring evil notoriety recently (1895) for the terrible massacres of Armenians under Turkish instigation.

At Urfa I made the acquaintance of three characters, samples of the curious results of the shattering of races and medley of their remnants which has taken place over western Asia. I had noticed two or three times on my way from Aleppo another carriage with three occupants, and at Urfa found them occupying the room next to mine. Their appearance was remarkable. The eldest and leader of the party was a sinister-looking man, with a big hooked nose, and a huge mouth which opened at one corner to display the only two teeth he possessed. Upon his head he wore a turban, and an old overcoat and Turkish trousers, extremely baggy in the leg and tight at the ankles, completed his visible attire.

The next in importance was a Kurdish-looking fellow, dark, but with a humorous twinkle in his little eyes. The headgear was Kurdish too, the style affected by the northern races. A felt basin cap wound round with a blue cloth is the head-dress of these people. He had adopted the peculiar form of head handkerchief usual among the mountain Chaldeans; that is, instead of making a regular turban, he rolled his cloth till it made a thick rope, and then twisted it round his felt cap three or four times. He wore also the hairy Kurdish zouave jacket and wide trousers. In fact, to the experienced eye he appeared a Kurd of the Erzeroum district. The third of this trinity was all that the others were not—absurdly fat, his hairless face formed a grinning moon under his tiny fez. As coat he wore a garment reaching a little below his waist, made of shot blue silk, and the bagginess of the upper end of his trousers exaggerated his already ample breadth to the point of ludicrousness.

These queer creatures, when in their carriage, spent a great part of their time chanting in Gregorian tones in a language neither I nor the coachman could make out. Now and then they would sing a Kurdish song or a little doggerel in Turkish. Their conversation was carried on in Arabic and Kurdish, which two of them spoke equally well; only the middle man, who appeared so Kurdish, confined himself to that language. At night, now, in the caravanserai, I had a chance of listening to the crew, and heard them talk in the Kurdish called Kermanji, in Arabic, in Turkish, and then in this dialect of theirs which contained a good many Kurdish words. This was distinctly tantalising, and next morning I made the acquaintance of the one I set down as pure Kurd. He was very hearty; we spoke in Kurdish, and I found that they had already ascertained from my driver that I was a southern Kurdish Haji. I now learned that they, too, were returning from Mecca, and were natives of Sert, a small town south of Lake Van. No sooner had I heard this than the secret of their dialect was out. I remembered tales the Chaldeans of Urumia and Dilman in Persia tell of the mysterious “Gavarnai,” who come from inaccessible passes among the Kurdish mountains, Gavarnai calling themselves Christian, but often fleeing from Gavarnai who were Musulman. The solution of the Gavarnai question is as follows:—

MYSTERIOUS COMPANIONS

The district of Sert and the Gavar (or rock) district of Kurdistan is one of the most inaccessible of the many sealed corners of this mountain country, and it was here that the descendants of the Chaldeans and Assyrians fled before the hordes of the Tatars in the early fifteenth century, finding an asylum among the Kurdish tribes.

Here in the beautiful valleys of Sert they settled, and many became Musulman among the Kurds. Others fled from Sert before the blood-feuds of their own kinsmen, who gradually learned from the Kurds a hardy recklessness and bravery unknown of their ancestors of the towns and plains, and pushed farther into the mountains.

In quite recent times the village of Khusrava, now a considerable town, was founded by a Chaldean fugitive or explorer from the Sert valleys, named Nicolai, about 1780.

This statement I put here upon the authority of a native of Khusrava, and leave it as it stands, not without remark, however, that the neighbouring town of Salmas was in pre-Muhammadan days a Chaldean bishopric, where there were undoubtedly a large number of Chaldeans among—but not intermarried—with the Armenians of that region.

The language of these Assyrians, sometimes called Neo-Syriac, or Aramaic, has remained and is spoken, though now known as a language of the Christians, by a great part of the sedentary Musulman population of the Sert plain, who, though calling themselves Kurds, are of Chaldean descent.

Such were two of my new acquaintances, the eldest and youngest. My particular friend, though he knew the dialect, came from a hill village, and besides proving his Kurdish origin also carried further proof in his appearance and manners. We became very good friends, and made many excursions about the bazaars of Urfa together, his tongue, always ready for badinage in any of four languages, assuring him a welcome everywhere.

At Urfa I renewed acquaintance with the Kurdish cigarette, which I suppose must be a unique pattern. The form has been evolved doubtless by necessity, for the tobacco produced in Kurdistan could never be rolled into an ordinary cigarette. Instead of pressing, keeping damp, and eventually cutting the leaf, the Kurds dry it, and pound it to a coarse powder, which to the uninitiated but intending smoker provided with cigarette papers would present an insurmountable difficulty. Consequently a special form of paper, affording employment in its manufacture to hundreds of women in Diarbekr and Mosul, has been invented.

The paper is thicker and coarser than an ordinary cigarette paper, and at least twice as long, and in the packets one buys they are already stuck together, forming slightly tapering tubes. A long slip of thick paper 1 inch broad is taken, and rolled into a plug which is inserted in the narrow end, its natural spring retaining it in place. Tobacco is then poured in from the top, and after sufficient coaxing and shaking down, the edges of the paper are turned in to retain the contents. The greatest disadvantage of this style of cigarette is that the tobacco being absolutely dry, and in tiny chips, does not hold together when smoked, the glowing head continually falling off.

DEPARTURE FROM URFA

Here in Urfa little else was smoked, and as I knew that eventually I must get used to them, I resolved to procure decent cigarettes as long as possible. So I hunted high and low for Turkish Regie productions, and at last found a dozen boxes, the purchase of which impressed my Kurdish friend immensely, for these are the one thing in Turkey of which the price is fixed and about which it is useless to haggle; also, compared to native cigarettes, they are terribly dear. These that I bought were twenty for threepence—still double and treble the price of Kurdish cigarettes. The purchase of these luxuries gained me the honorary title of effendi from my acquaintances, a title that never left me till I got buried in the frontier mountains of Persia.

We stayed two days at Urfa, and my new acquaintances of Sert were detained still longer. So, in departing, I bade them farewell till Diarbekr, where we should meet again.

From Urfa the road to Diarbekr keeps a mean way between ranges of mountains, the Karaja in the south-east and the high Kurdistan ranges to the north-west, called in ancient times Masius and Niphates respectively by the Romans. In many places the track brings one near the Euphrates, and traverses a number of ravines carrying down tributary streams. The general aspect of the country all the way is great rolling uplands, across which wind and rain come with express velocity and piercing cold. I believe the road from Severik to Diarbekr is impassable from December to February. Certainly when we passed in early April, snow was lying in patches not far away. The prospect is always immense, always dreary, for, though there is water to be got in any one of the innumerable gullies of these immense plains, and though the soil is fertile enough, the Turkish blight is upon the land. In the distance, more particularly to the north, are the sullen, frowning masses of the Kurdistan mountains, at this time of the year half hidden in black clouds, and before and behind apparently limitless plains rising gradually to the east, till at the highest point one looks down over the undulating desert with a curious feeling of being left out in the desolation of utter abandonment, unsheltered from wind, rain, and snow, and lost in the immensity of a silent death-like solitude of infinitely sinister aspect.

And these plains and mountains have from immemorial time been the boundaries, natural and political, of the south and north lands. The high dark range over north—Niphates we must call it, since to-day it has lost its general name—gives birth to the Tigris, the “Arrow.”[6] It was also the northern boundary of Assyria under the first great Assyrian monarch, Tiglath-Pileser I. (1100 B.C.). Behind its frowning walls lay the mysterious lands of the Nairi, whom the Assyrian monarchs, greater than any of their descendants, succeeded in subduing, or found necessary to keep chastised periodically. The proudest boast of the Assyrian monarchs was ever that they had penetrated the lands of Nairi and subdued their petty kings. And afterwards, the lands of Nairi were called “Gordyene,” which is “Kurdian” or Kurds, no more and no less, a fact which supports the Kurdish claim to possession of the land ever since the first Aryan in the birth of time came forth from central Asia to people the West.

Here Roman, Parthian, and Greek invader have turned back and set their faces once more to the merciless plains and downs. Those gloomy hill-sides have looked down upon the broken armies of all the greatest Eastern nations, Assyria only excepted, and watched them as they crawled away, to the south and west, relinquishing all hope of penetrating the dread country of the fierce Gordyene, forbear of the not less fierce Kurd of to-day. Strange it is that this sturdy nation, whose name has stood for rebellion, bravery, and untamable spirit, should never have taken rank among the more transitory peoples who never subdued it. Except that they were the Medes—or we imagine them to be—they have no claim to the historian’s enthusiasm—at any rate, these western Kurds have not. They remain as ever, indomitable, invincible, proud, unsubdued, broken only by their own quarrels, hating the Powers that nominally rule them. Secure in their defiles and mountains, and in their archaic language, they cede no jot of their exclusiveness, let the West press never so hard.

A TURKISH ROAD

This digression from narrative is permitted, I hope, by the lack of detail worth recording about the road from Urfa to Diarbekr. Except that for the first half, for two days, the fiendish genius of some Turkish engineer has induced him to scatter boulders and call it a road, and then lay down 3 feet of clay on marshy ground, and call that a road too, the track calls for no remark. There is but one station of any interest, Suverek.

Referring to notes, I find that two objects struck me as remarkable when approaching this squalid town upon the plain. One is a square white building, with rows of glass windows all round, a porched doorway in front, a Turkish flag on top. This is the Governor’s house, an example of mean European architecture, isolated, from the small surroundings that give it a spurious importance, looking cold, miserable, hollow, and infinitely shoddy, in that vast landscape of plain and distant hill. The other feature is the mound, like that of Aleppo, upon which are the remains of the Governor’s house that the rulers of twenty centuries ago put there, for whose might and whose right, and whose strong hand the country may sigh as it looks there upon the work of a mighty past, and here upon those of a little present.

Modern Suverek is a mean town of one-storeyed houses of black stone, inhabited by sedentary Kurds and Armenians, who are, I believe, permanently on bad terms, as these two races always are. There are no streets as we know them; the hovels are clustered together, leaving alleys of a particular filthiness between. The traveller perforce puts up in a ruinous caravanserai which is situated fortunately on the edge of the town, and looks out through its broken doorway to the desert. The people are peculiarly surly and ill-mannered, and despite the size of the place nothing seems to be purchasable. When we arrived it was quite within the nature of things to find all my sugar finished, and so, leaving my room in charge of an aged Arab woman I found cupping herself outside in the courtyard, I set out to explore. My first question to the Armenian who acted as doorkeeper, elicited the fact that there was a shop round the corner. So round the corner I waded through pestilential mire, and found the shop. It was an open booth—the shop of the East—and the stock-in-trade just required three glances to sum it up. There was a small boy playing with a greyhound. Behind, upon a sloping shelf, a bag of stones, called cheese in these parts, where last year’s cheese is a delicacy, and the fresh article scorned. Two bunches of onions and a few boxes of matches completed the emporium. So I took my trousers up one more turn, and set forth among the alleys, displacing Armenian infants from mud-baths, disputing the right of way with armed Kurds, and finally finding myself in a mosque courtyard, where I was promptly accosted by a priest, who asked my religion, and receiving the answer “Islam,” still doubtful, called upon me to repeat the creed, which done to his satisfaction I made use of him as a guide, and with his assistance found a shop similar to the first, where the owner was more enterprising and kept not only sugar—and sold at a fanciful price—but tea and cigarettes.

Bread, too, I found, but solely by the priest’s goodwill, for, taking compassion upon this strange Haji, he took me to someone’s house where bread was being cooked in an earth-oven, and procured for me ten flaps for twopence.

Fortunately good water was abundant in the courtyard of the serai, where a nozzle poured out a plentiful supply, filling a broken cistern and half the yard. Hither came all the Kurdish women to get their supplies, and I spent an hour sitting on my door-step watching for an ugly girl—and saw none. We had great difficulty in getting away next morning, for the Armenian keeper of the place demanded a mejidie (3s. 4d.) for horse provender from the coachman, and 1s. for my room, which had leaked upon me all night. An hour was wasted in the doorway disputing. Half a dozen Armenian loafers hung upon the horses’ heads while we endeavoured to quell the screams and expostulations of the keeper of the place. We were forced to pay in the end, or stay where we were, the only satisfaction being that we passed off a bad five-piastre piece upon them, and gave the trouble of changing a lira. And so we drove away, cursing Christians and pagans in general and Armenians in particular.

A PASSPORT DIFFICULTY

Next day we had crossed the high plains and got into the warm desert towards Diarbekr. As we approached, the black walls rose above the horizon, and occasionally the gully where the Tigris runs would be apparent, the yellow of the cliff face showing against the duller colour of the plain. Approaching from the west, Diarbekr is not beautiful nor remarkable. In the middle of a great desert, the river, too, hidden by its cliff banks, Diarbekr appears as a citadel of black stone without any green or vegetation. Nearer views revise the unfavourable first impression, for on the slopes and the lands by the river banks, there are splendid gardens, which in this month of April were dressed in all the delicate hues of blossom and new leaf. The fine bluff upon which the city stands, looking up and down the river, is, of course, invisible from the west, facing the rising sun as it does.

My driver told me to prepare my passport, for he assured me we should not be allowed to pass the gates through the walls without showing our credentials. So I produced my passport and got it ready—that traitorous document, proclaiming me English, British-born, and Christian!

I began to wonder how the “Kurdish Haji” would look if questions were asked of the driver, to whom by now I had employed so many pious Musulman expressions and ventilated such orthodox sentiments, besides conducting myself in the manner of any other travelling Asiatic, that I knew he would swear to my Islamism. Not only that, but the police would certainly never believe that I was a European, my style of travelling, the only language I knew well—Kurdish—being convincing arguments against such a possibility. So it was not that I was afraid of being found out, but that I regarded with some trepidation the possibility of being accused of having stolen another’s passport, a very heinous crime indeed. English passports and European correspondence would serve me little among people where Europeans are very rarely seen, in places where the Englishman seldom, if ever, travels, and never in such guise. The weather, too, had done its best to disguise me. I was darkened by wind and sun; nine days’ black beard scraped the chest left bare by a buttonless shirt. My trousers were muddy and torn, and I wore a long overcoat, very much like the robes of any of the myriads of Turkish subjects who affect a semi-European dress.

DIARBEKR

There was no alternative, however; one could not stop outside in the plain nor enter unperceived, so we drew up just outside the gate in the massive walls at a police post, and an official demanded my passport. I handed it to him, and held my breath. The coachman who had seen this done a thousand times, and took no interest fortunately, seized the opportunity to descend and buy some cigarettes at a shop near by. The effendi, unusually civil for his class, asked me where I came from, and by what route, and where I was going. Hearing that my destination was Mosul, he seemed to lose interest, but produced a pocket-book and prepared to note particulars of my passport, when I observed that he held it upside down and made illegible marks in his book, and I realised that no art of the Constantinople passport clerk could betray me, for he was utterly illiterate. He asked my name, and still fearing eventualities, I repeated my own name very indistinctly, which he aptly transliterated as Ali as-Sūn, after which all was plain sailing, for he presupposed that I was a Haji, which the coachman confirmed, and I let him know I was a British subject, the supplementary fact that I was Persian-born being supplied by the driver, and so with a polite good-day we passed on.

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER III:

[4] Ragozin, Assyria.

[5] Layard, Nineveh, vol. i., p. 249 n. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii., ch. 5.

[6] The name Tigris, which we adopted from Western historians, is the mutilated version of the Medic “tighra,” modern Persian and Kurdish “tir,” an arrow.

CHAPTER IV
DOWN THE TIGRIS TO MOSUL

Diarbekr at first sight strikes the stranger as a remarkably clean, bright, busy city, with streets unusually broad for the East, enormous bazaars, not roofed as in other Oriental cities, but merely rows of windowless shops lining the ways. Two main thoroughfares intersect the town at right angles, with gates at each end, and the whole is surrounded by the huge wall of basalt built in its present form by Justinian. The population seems for the most part Kurd, wild men of great stature, from the north and east, with high felt hats, like those of the ancient Persians of the Sasanian sculptures, their zouave jackets of sheepskin with the hair outside, the scarlet shoes forming parts of a distinctive costume. The fierce look that a Kurd invariably acquires, the thin bony face, the long stride, mark the hillman, who walks in these peaceable, if noisy, streets with a hand on his rifle and dagger.

We put up in a two-storeyed caravanserai, near the north gate, a place clean and roomy, boasting the luxury of glass to its windows, one or two of which contained a chair and table. These were not for Kurdish Hajis, however, and I humbly took my upper room, thankful that I had a window whence I could survey the lordly effendi as he crossed the yard to his “European” room. Upon the board floor (another luxury this, in a country whose floors are of mud) I spread my rag of carpet and threw my bedding, and, following the coachman, retired to a coffee-house outside for a cup of tea, and the ordeal of questions that pour upon the stranger.

A SCORPION DOCTOR

The coffee-house was a big barn-like place, black with the smoke of innumerable water-pipes, and furnished with broad benches, just too high to sit on and let one’s feet touch the ground. They are, of course, made to be squatted upon. The place was very full, and we had to squeeze in on one already occupied; and I found myself next a holy man, a yellow individual in the long cloak denoting a priest, and the green turban that is the sign of a Sayyid, or descendant of the Prophet. This sanctity of course called for greetings from us, the plebeians, the insignificant, and with humility we tendered our “Salamun ’alaikum,” receiving the “’Alaikum as salam” in sonorous tones before we sat down.

The first questions came quickly enough.

“Whence do you come? whither going? what nationality? why travelling?” which were answered by the responses I had resolved to adhere to.

“From Aleppo to Persian Kurdistan, a Shiah Musulman travelling back to my country.”

This I said in Kurdish, for the man was ignorant of Turkish, which became less known as we went farther east.

Himself he was an Arab, a native of Mosul. In the lands of Islam, where knowledge and religion are inseparable, it is the divinity student that becomes the doctor, the lawyer, the judge. This priest was by profession a petty lawyer, and gained a kind of livelihood by settling disputes. To this he added the profession of healer of scorpion bites, which he remedied by applying to the wound the oil extracted from the black scorpion. Conversing pleasantly of this science, he produced a cigarette box and played with the lid as one who waits to finish speaking before taking a smoke. He ceased his dissertation upon scorpions, and nonchalantly opened his box, to display two large scorpions writhing within and scraping their horny legs and claws against its tin sides. He lifted one out, disregarding its furious blows upon his fingers, let the reptile crawl up his arm, picked it off, replaced it in the box, smiled at me a toothless and sinister smile, slipped off his seat and left the café.

My coachman had watched the performance. He knew the man well, he said; he had practised his trades in Diarbekr for years, always a buyer of good black scorpions at fourpence each, and a seller of the oil at a mejidie for ten drops. His remarkable performance with the live scorpions was possible owing to his practice, when catching scorpions, of nipping off the sting of the tail with a pair of scissors.

There was a fresh briskness, a hearty feeling in the air of Diarbekr, that took the fancy. The new springtime exactly achieved that mean of temperature wherein man feels at his best in the Mesopotamian plains, that scorch the life out, and make the strongest languid during the long summer.

The place was crowded and busy; the Kurds, released from their snow-bound mountains, were coming in to buy summer clothing; the Armenians, who are the craftsmen of Diarbekr, were enjoying a period of immunity from the terror in which they often exist.

The broad street of the town, that lets in the breeze and the sun, gave it a cheerfulness in that season that many another town, whose winter mud is just beginning to congeal in dark alleys, lacks.

I took the earliest opportunity to get outside the north gate, which was but a few yards from the caravanserai door, to inspect the curious stones that are embedded in the walls, stones bearing images of birds and beasts, relics of a wall that perhaps encircled the city during pre-Christian times. Yet with all the evidence of importance, with its old church towers turned to minarets, where the bells that called to the worship of the Trinity are replaced by the call of them that cry to the Indivisible Unity, where Roman ruled later than in any other city of the East, and where the Christian was predominant till Islam, borne upon the shoulders of Arabs from the south, drove him out and subdued him: with all this, Diarbekr has figured less in the ancient annals than many a village and mound that to-day passes unnoticed.

DIARBEKR

All the nations that passed over the lands have fought for and owned it. Assyria knew it not by name, though if it existed then, it was an outpost of the empire. Armenians, Persians, Parthians, and Romans fought over it, but the chronicles tell us little. In Christian times the Persian leader Kawad (Sasanian) practically destroyed it; in A.D. 507 and in A.D. 1124 seven hundred persons of the Assassin or Ismailia sect were massacred. It fell into Turkish hands in A.D. 1056, when Tughril Bey of the early Seljuq dynasty captured it.

It was not on the main road from Syria to Babylon, nor Europe to Persia; the hosts of invaders and defeated passed too far to the south, and left Amid in her corner, where she trembled at the noise of the battle that sometimes ruined her. Tigran, one of the greater Parthic-Armenian kings, took the place when he subdued Gordyene, upon whose southern borders it still stands, and he built a capital a little north of it, ignoring its claims to importance.

The present city has, as already described, four gates in its massive walls, but the Turks have knocked out a wicket gate in the north wall, and called the Yengi Qapu, “The New Gate.” Also, a Turkish governor, offended at the sight of so substantial a monument of a race greater than his—and pagan—attempted to destroy the architecture neither he nor all his kind could ever emulate, and succeeded in defacing a portion of the north wall. Demolition of such a monument, however, proved too great a task for this mean vandal, and he desisted, and has gone his insignificant way. A few of the old churches still exist, which, in my character of Muhammadan, I was prevented from viewing.

The modern population, apart from the Kurds and Mosul Arabs, is composed of Christians, of whom there are more varieties than in other towns of Asiatic Turkey. The Armenians are in the majority, and form the whole of the large section engaged in the manufacture of copper vessels, for which Diarbekr is famous. There are Greeks, relics of the rule of Byzantium, divided into three or four sects, Syrians, or Christian Arabs as they prefer to call themselves, some belonging to the Syrian Church and others Catholics. There are Chaldeans, who glory in the assertion (never disproved) that they are lineal descendants of Nebuchadnezzar and the later Assyrians, speaking an ancient dialect which is nearer to the inscription-language than any other.

The Roman Catholics have been busy among all the sects, notably among Armenian and Chaldean here, and many of both own allegiance to the Pope. Every sect—and none can tell how many there are—is as certain of its own particular salvation as of the perdition of all the others, and a hatred reigns over this Christian “centre” among the various kinds of Christians that puts in the shade any length of the detestation for Islam.

It is unfortunate that the Asiatic Christian is, as a rule, a very undesirable creature, more bigoted than the most fanatical Muhammadan, of a craft and infidelity seldom witnessed in other lands, and of an attitude towards his co-religionists of different tenets that can be only described as traitorous. It may be reckoned a heretical statement to put forward, but the dweller in the East is bound to confess that among the greater part of the peoples of Western Asia, Islam produces a better man than Christianity. The temperament of the middle Eastern Semitic is ultra-utilitarian. The ideals that Christianity puts before him have too slender a hold upon a nature that craves for the substance, and the latitude allowed in daily life by the Western faith accords ill with the temperament that seeks set rule and law, that may govern the manner of his rising and sitting, of his eating and sleeping, and by the observance of which he may accumulate the merit that may secure to him the acquisition of ideals almost mundane. The high soul and spirit required by Christianity is too far above these material minds, and the hazy and ill-understood ideal cannot hold their endeavours as do the needs of life and the almost unconquerable cupidity of the Semitic nature. So we see the spiritual and intangible, the higher head and sign of their religion lost sight of, in the struggles that rage about leadership of their minor saints, and points of doctrine and dogma that tear asunder the Christian community. Islam is material, her ideals are powerful and simple, there is through all that unification of leader and led that all can appreciate. One God, one Prophet, one Book, each in its own rational relation to the other, a simple doctrine, powerful in its direct appeal to the unity, a leader, a prophet who lays down with the despotism understood of the ancient Semitic spirit, law and letter for all things; that is a creed that the Arab mind sees as tangible, if such an expression be permissible; a law for all and a reward attainable by the observance of its well-defined canons, demanding not too much of the man in his daily life, yet holding him—as all who know the East must know—with a mysterious and invincible power that calls upon his life when it wills, and finds it ever ready for the sacrifice.

THE NATIVE CHRISTIAN

Persecution has doubtless made the Christian crafty and distrustful, and is often quoted as an excuse for the many undesirable qualities he possesses which the Musulman does not share. Alone among these Christian sects stand the Chaldeans of the north, whose pride of race and tongue has done something to keep them above the Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks they despise, and to preserve alive in their breasts the sentiment of the ruling race from whom they profess to spring, and which saves them from many a littleness which is an integral part of the nature of the other Christians.

The persecution of the Christians—of which Diarbekr has too often been the theatre—excites the sympathy of all nations, and rightly too; for whatever be their quibbles, they hold fast to Christianity through all the massacres and terror that Turkish vindictiveness has incited and paid for. I say paid for, because it is, among the underworld of western Kurdistan and northern Mesopotamia, a common subject of talk in the cafés how much the Sultan and the Government paid the ruffians of the towns to do their dirty work, and how much the Kurdish Aghas presented to the authorities to be allowed to finish unhindered the blood-feuds that existed between themselves and Armenians sheltering in Diarbekr and the towns of Armenia. A very reign of terror overshadows the apparently peaceful and prosperous town.

None ever know when the Turks will permit the looser part of the Musulman population to slaughter, or call down from the hills those terrible Kurds that hold Christian and Musulman alike in fear.