LIFE IN EASTERN KURDISTAN

THE CRADLE OF MANKIND

AGENTS
America	The Macmillan Company
	64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Australasia	The Oxford University Press
	205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Canada	The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
	St. Martin’s House, 70 Bond Street, Toronto
India	Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
	Macmillan Building, Bombay
	309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
	Indian Bank Buildings, Madras

THE RIVER OF EDEN.

(The Zab entering the Tyari Gorges).
The view down stream from the mouth of the Ori valley, a little above Tal. The distant snow peak is Ghara Dagh on the southern side of Tkhuma.

No. 1

THE CRADLE OF
MANKIND

LIFE IN EASTERN KURDISTAN

BY
THE REV. W. A. WIGRAM. B.D. (Camb.) D.D. (Lambeth)
AUTHOR OF “THE HISTORY OF THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH”

AND

SIR EDGAR T. A. WIGRAM
AUTHOR OF “NORTHERN SPAIN”

ILLUSTRATED FROM SKETCHES AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY
SIR EDGAR T. A. WIGRAM

SECOND EDITION.



A. & C. BLACK, Ltd.,
4, 5 & 6, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1.
1922

First Edition published May, 1914.
Second Edition, with two additional Chapters,
published Autumn, 1922.

The truth is, that ye ken naething about our hill country, or Hielands as we ca’ them. They’re a kind of wild world by themselves, full of heights and howes, caverns, lochs, rivers and mountains, that it would tire the very deevil’s wings to flee to the tap of them. And the folk are clean anither set frae the likes of huz; there’s nae bailie-courts amang them—nae magistrates that dinna bear the sword in vain. Never another law hae they but the length of their dirks; the broad-sword’s pursuer, and the target is defender, and the stoutest head bears langest out.

Sir Walter Scott (“Rob Roy”)

NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

THE first sixteen chapters of this book were given to the public in the spring of the year 1914. Since that date the country has acquired an additional interest for Englishmen, owing to the British acceptance of a “mandate” for its supervision and also to the picturesque and heroic part played in the Great War by the “Assyrian” mountaineers.

While no attempt has been made to tell the full tale of “England in Irak,” it has been thought well to take the opportunity given by the appearance of a second edition, and to bring the story of the Assyrian nation up to the date of writing; and the facts which the two concluding chapters record have been collected and verified during a prolonged personal intercourse with the principal actors on the spot.
1922.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.

It requires at least four persons to compound a salad sauce, say the Spaniards. The requisite incompatibilities can never co-exist in one. A spendthrift should squander the oil, and a miser dole out the vinegar. A wise man should dispense the salt, and a madman should do the stirring.

Similarly, it has been stated that it takes two people at least to write a book of travel; a newcomer to give the first impressions and an old resident to reveal the true inwardness of things.
Though the quality of the ingredients must remain of more importance than the proportions, the authors of the present volume hope that at least the latter are correct. One of the writers has spent but three months in the country, the other has lived there for ten years. One was quite ignorant of the East, and spoke no word of any Oriental language; the other had become so intimate with the tribesmen of his own locality, that they had even begun to tell him of their superstitions—the last secret that they ever disclose.
And the country itself possesses most intense and varied interest. It contains some of the grandest scenery, and some of the most venerable monuments in the world. It is the very fons et origo of our Indo-European ancestors. Its traditions connect it with the Garden of Eden, with Noah, and with Abraham. Its folk-lore preserves the old Nature-worship which originated in the brains of the Ape-man. Its history records the very dawn of civilization, and the rise and fall of the earliest of the great empires. The every-day life of its present inhabitants is to this hour the life of the Patriarchs, the life of Europe in the Dark Ages, the life of the Highlands of Scotland in the days of Stewart Kings.
It is not an accessible country, even when judged by half-civilized standards. It is visited on sufferance only, even by its nominal rulers themselves. Fortune has given to the authors the opportunity of travelling through it, and of residing in it, and they have ventured to set down in these chapters the impressions it has left upon their minds.
The opportunity of residence in this country, it may be stated, came to one of the authors through his membership of the “Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission.” This Mission (which consists of five or six clergy of the Church of England) has been maintained in the district in question, by successive Archbishops, for a period of about twenty-five years. It exists at the request of the Patriarch and other authorities of the “Nestorian” or “Assyrian” Church, and it works with the object of educating the clergy and laity of that body, without disturbing them in their membership of their own ancient and interesting communion.

CONTENTS

CHAP.		PAGE
I.	BEYOND THE PALE OF THE RAILWAY	1
	(Aleppo and Urfa)
II.	A LAND OF DUST AND ASHES	24
	(Diarbekr and Mardin)
III.	THE MARCHES OF ANCIENT ROME	47
	(Dara and Nisibin)
IV.	THE BURDEN OF NEWER NINEVEH	69
	(Mosul)
V.	THE TEMPLE OF THE DEVIL	87
	(Sheikh Adi)
VI.	THE SKIRTS OF THE MOUNTAINS	111
	(Rabban Hormizd, Bavian, and Akra)
VII.	AN ORIENTAL VICH IAN VOHR	134
	(The Sheikh of Barzan)
VIII.	A MASTER OF MISRULE	158
	(Neri and Jilu)
IX.	THE DEBATABLE LAND	176
	(Gawar, Mergawar, and Tergawar)
X.	TWIGS OF A WITHERED EMPIRE	196
	(URMI)
XI.	A LAND OF TROUBLE AND ANGUISH	221
	(Urmi to Van)
XII.	A SLOUGH OF DISCONTENT	235
	(Van)
XIII.	THE LAND OF PRESTER JOHN	262
	(Qudshanis)
XIV.	THE GREAT CAÑONS	284
	(Tyari and Tkhuma)
XV.	INTRUDERS IN A PANDEMONIUM	311
	(Amadia and Bohtan)
XVI.	GRAVES OF DEAD EMPIRES	339
	(Mosul to Baghdad)
XVII.	OUR SMALLEST ALLY	359
XVIII.	DEAD SEA FRUIT	392
	GLOSSARY	417
	INDEX	421

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PRINTED SEPARATELY
1.	The River of Eden	Frontispiece Facing page
2.	Mosul	33
3.	Sheikh Adi	48
4.	The “Picture Rocks” Of Bavian	81
5.	Akra	96
6.	Oramar	129
7.	The Heriki Valley	144
8.	The Mountains of Tkhuma and Jilu	176
9.	The Citadel Rock, Van	209
10.	The Qudshanis Mountains	224
11.	Church of Mar Shalitha, Qudshanis	257
12.	A Mountain Bridge	272
13.	The Gorge of the Zab, Tyari	305
14.	Travelling in Lower Tkhuma	320
15.	Chal	353
16.	Entrance to Amadia	368
IN THE TEXT
17.	The Mountains of Diz and Tal, from the Pass above Qudshanis	366
18.	A Bit of the Road between Tal and Julamerk	372
PLANS IN THE TEXT
Great Granary of Daras		51
Church of St. James at Nisibis		59
The Yezidi Temple at Sheikh Adi		95
Church of Mar B’ishu		185
Qudshanis: Church of Mar Shalitha		273
Temple of Ishtar’i Babylon		355
MAP of EASTERN KURDISTAN with inset of mesopotamia

{page 1}

THE CRADLE OF MANKIND

CHAPTER I

BEYOND THE PALE OF THE RAILWAY (ALEPPO AND URFA)

THE belated Jinn who emerged out of Suleiman’s Brass Bottle into twentieth-century London found there, amid much that was strange to him, some beings of his own kin. These were the railway locomotives, obviously Jann like himself, but yet more oppressively treated; bound by spells of appalling potency to labours more arduous and wearisome than Suleiman had ever conceived.

And truly his blunder was plausible: for if Jann be extinct nowadays (which one doubts after visiting Asia), then assuredly cylinders and boilers are charged with the might of the Jann. They are set to work regularly now instead of rarely and spasmodically; and though they raise less dust and clamour their net output is considerably more. The slaves of the Lamp and the Ring developed intense explosive energy, but their effective radius was limited. They could rear Aladdin’s palace in a night, or transport him to Africa in a twinkling; but these more domesticated Titans are capable of transmogrifying whole communities, and advancing the clock of progress five hundred years at a span.
And now the modern Magrabis, the busy Western magicians, have let slip these formidable Efrits against the City of Al Raschid himself: and one fine morning his descendants will awake from the slumber of centuries to find themselves environed by a new heaven and a new earth.
The Baghdad railway has started. It has penetrated inland to Aleppo. “That great river, the river Euphrates,” is bitted with its girders and caissons. One more stride{2} will carry it to Mosul across a country so open and even that it needs but the bedding of the sleepers; and a journey which now takes a fortnight will be accomplished in a ten-hour run. What is now a mere stagnant backwater will thus be suddenly scoured out by one of the main channels of the world’s commerce; and who can venture to calculate the changes which will follow? Western reform will not convert the East any more than Alexander’s conquests converted it; but it may evolve unintentionally some new sort of Frankenstein’s Man.
But meanwhile the East waits unconscious. It takes no thought for the morrow. The shadow of coming events is perceived indeed, but not understood. As it was in the days of Noë, so in most things, it still continues: and the traveller of this generation may still find east of Aleppo those manners and customs unaltered, which the next may find clean swept away. Thus it is possible that some interest may attach to a desultory description of life as it is for the moment still enjoyed, or endured, in those regions; and which better ordered communities may perhaps find rather bizarre.
Aleppo, the present railhead, is a large Oriental city, lying pooled in a shallow depression round the great castle which dominates its roofs. It is beginning to show signs of Westernization; and the quarter nearest the railway station is blossoming with boulevards and hotels. But it is the returning, and not the outgoing, traveller who will be most struck by these symptoms. The latter will only be consumed with wonder that such a crude and guileless imitation should be thought to pass muster as the real thing. Outwardly the place is being refurbished, and the new “Frank” houses flaunt themselves as bravely as their compeers around the Soko at Tangier; but within they are full of all Oriental uncleanness and discomfort, for the Turk is quite satisfied as soon as he gets veneered.
The major part of the town consists of narrow crooked and ill-paved streets, overhung on each side by toppling wooden oriels, which almost engage with each other like cogs across the road; and amid this maze of grimy alleys{3} lurk the mosques, the only noteworthy buildings, whose minarets show up prominently from a distance, but afford little guidance near at hand.
The great castle which dominates Aleppo occupies the flat summit of an immense mound, not much smaller than that of Corfe Castle, which is piled conspicuously upon a gentle eminence just within the confines of the city. The core of this mound may be natural, but the bulk of it is artificial; for it was originally one of the great High Places of that Baal worship which flourished pre-eminently in Northern Syria, and which has left us similar monuments of its dominion in the neighbouring mounds at Homs and Baalbek. The base of this mound is encircled by a deep dry moat, and its sloping sides are revetted with masonry; while its crest is crowned by the towers and walls which form the enceinte of the citadel, and access is provided at one end only through a most magnificent gate. The citadel owes its present form to Saladin, who is said to have employed as his workmen the captive Crusaders whom he had taken at the battle of Tiberias. There are some Western features in the building which give colour to this supposition; but the place was a notable stronghold long previous to Saladin’s day.
Aleppo was one of the few fortresses that made a respectable defence against the Moslems at the time of their first irruption. None of the great frontier towns to the eastward,—Edessa, Amida and Dara—so much as stood a real siege. Such was the bitterness of party strife, both civil and religious, within the Byzantine Empire at that period, that the Arab invaders were welcomed rather than resisted in these lands.
The citadel of Aleppo, however, was defended by a certain Youkinna, till even the redoubtable Caled, “the Sword of Allah,” began to despair of success. Only the direct command of the Khalif Omar had induced him to persevere with the leaguer when a valiant slave named Dames volunteered to attempt a coup de main. Caled approved his design; and to favour its execution withdrew his forces to a distance. Thus Youkinna, rather too readily, assumed{4} that the siege was raised. The sentinels relaxed their vigilance, and the garrison had taken to carousing, when Dames with thirty companions crept up in the darkness to the walls. With the stalwart slave as their base they built up a human ladder, each man in succession clambering on to the shoulders of those below. The man on the seventh tier gripped the battlements, and scrambled over them, and then, letting down his turban, hauled up his associates one by one. Cutting down the few guards they encountered the Moslems then made for the gateway, and succeeded in gaining possession of it ere the garrison was fully aroused. Here they maintained themselves till daybreak when Caled arrived to relieve them, and Youkinna thereupon surrendered, seeing that further resistance was vain.
Aleppo accepted its fate and has since remained Mohammedan. The Byzantines did indeed temporarily recover it little more than three hundred years later, when the waning power of the Abbasside Khalifs enabled Nicephorus and Zimisces to push their armies almost to Baghdad. But this was a transitory conquest; a plundering raid rather than an occupation. The Greeks and Romans had always been alien intruders, and now their Asiatic provinces had reverted to Asia for good.
Another equally transitory raid left a more enduring impression—not indeed upon Aleppo in particular, but upon Mesopotamia at large. For in the year 1400 the country was visited by that most destructive of all conquerors, the terrible Timour the Tartar. He signalized his capture of Aleppo, as usual, by the erection of a gigantic pyramid of human heads; and (as was not unusual) he solaced himself while the pile was being reared by discussing theological problems with the learned doctors of the town. Poor wretches! they must have felt rather like a regiment of philosophers paraded for an interview with the Theban Sphinx; especially when their dangerous questioner opened proceedings with the bland inquiry, “Which are the true martyrs,—those who die fighting for me, or for my foes?” But fortunately they had an Oedipus among them who parried the thrust by quoting the words{5} of the Prophet, “All who die fighting for conscience’ sake are martyrs, no matter under what ensign they fall.”
The conquests of Timour may be regarded as closing the history of Mesopotamia; that first and most striking chapter in the history of the civilization of the world. Here mankind had first emerged from barbarism, and constructed the city of Babylon. Here had arisen the successive great empires that had their seats at Carchemish, at Nineveh, at Persepolis, at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and at Antioch; and here after aeons of conquest and re-conquest there could yet arise the splendours of Baghdad. Invincibly fertile and populous the land still seemed able to revive after each successive devastation; but at last its power of recuperation was exhausted; and after Timour’s day there is no more left to tell. Other conquerors had destroyed and rebuilt; but the Tartars were only destroyers. They razed the cities to the dust; they massacred every living creature; they demolished even the irrigation works that gave fertility to the fields. And the desert which spreads to this day over all the plains to the eastward is, far more truly than his mausoleum at Samarcand, the monument of Timour the Lame.
Yet Aleppo itself was near enough to the sea to recover even from this disaster; and within 150 years of Timour’s conquest it was once more one of the chief marts of the East. Hither came the London Turkey merchants, among them the “Master of the Tiger.” Hither, with the Venetians, came Othello, to have his memorable encounter with the “heathen Turk.” John Verney was trading here in the middle of the seventeenth century, and describes it as “the most famous city in all the Grand Seignior’s dominions for the confluence of merchants of all nations.” Among the commodities dealt with he enumerates the “oak galls for dyers” which are still a valuable harvest in the Kurdistan mountains; but he makes no mention of the liquorice, which is now the most important of all.
Aleppo owes its prosperity chiefly to the Arabs; for though, under the name of Berea, it was well known both to the Greeks and Romans, it never appears in their days{6} to have been a particularly important place. No doubt it profited by the decline of Antioch, which had been the second city in the Byzantine Empire. The new direct railway line to Iskanderun harbour will henceforth augment its importance; and when the completion of the Baghdad railway links it up with Constantinople and India it may even attain the position once held by Antioch itself.
Our own business at Aleppo was confined to the hire of a carriage to convey us and our baggage and our fortunes across the desert to Mosul. This was a subject which involved us in some three days’ delicate diplomacy; and eventually we closed with a contractor who offered to take us through at the price of nine pounds for a nominal fortnight’s journey,[1] with two mejidies (about seven shillings) extra for every day that we chose to call a halt.
The carriage in which we proposed to achieve our hegira consisted of a sort of four-wheeled coster’s barrow, endowed with flea-like agility by a perfect cat’s-cradle of springs. It had a seat in front for the driver, and a shelf behind on which our baggage could be corded; but there were no seats for the passengers, and accordingly we spread our sleeping bags upon a thick litter of straw. Most of the springs and many of the spokes had been broken and the fractures had been swathed in string. This required great quantities of string. Finally the tarpaulin tilt which enclosed the body of the vehicle (and which was ostensibly designed for shelter) proved useful for fielding the cargo whenever it got skied by the jolts. Such a carriage is known as “an araba,” or alternatively as an yaili—a name which is probably onomatopœic, for it is about the “slithiest” thing that runs on wheels.[2]
This equipage was drawn by four scraggy ponies; not that it weighed anything worth mentioning, but because the roads were bad. Two of the beasts were harnessed to the pole, and two tacked on by traces outside, like the{7} team of a Homeric chariot. They could seldom be induced to trot, and generally our rate of progress fell even below the minimum that is ordinarily expected of “hollow jades of Asia”; for we cannot have averaged more than twenty miles a day. Our driver was a lank, dank, hook-nosed creature who reminded us irresistibly of Ikey Moses in the old Ally Sloper cartoons, and who looked as if he had been shipwrecked on a desert island a great many times and always in the same suit. He grumbled much at the amount of our baggage, and a great deal more because we insisted that he should carry a good supply of fodder; but we think that he—or at all events his horses—must eventually have felt grateful to us for not having given way.
The road, as it issues from Aleppo, rises gradually on to a heathy upland somewhat similar to Salisbury Plain. Here it soon becomes a mere wheel track—a good enough path to lead to a moorland farmstead, but a poor sort of thing to confide in for a journey of 200 miles. At every two or three leagues its stages are marked off by villages; generally forlorn little groups of one-storied flat-roofed stone hovels, but sometimes a more pretentious affair where the houses rise to two stories and which (on the strength of such superiority) feels justified in calling itself a town. Often even the meanest of these were formerly towns indeed, and instead of being called El Bab or Membij, were known by such high-sounding names as Bambyce and Hierapolis.[3] The hummocks and hollows which mark the foundations of their ancient edifices form a wide margin all around the outskirts, and the surface is strewn for acre on acre with dislocated fragments of columns and great squared blocks of stone. At one point where we made a short halt, we were able to decipher a few tags of Latin inscriptions;—cos, divi, cæsar and a few other similar words. They were deeply, but rudely incised, as though cut in sheer idleness{8} by some unoccupied soldier. A householder who saw us examining them led us to the door of his hut where he showed us another inscription. In this case the lettering was Arabic, and we could read no more than the name of Allah:—a fact which caused great consternation to our householder, for he had been using it as a threshold.
We halted each night at some village khan, the Turkish synonym for the better known Persian word caravanserai, which forms the common house of entertainment both for man and beast. A typical khan consists of a great square courtyard full of foul dust in dry weather and of fouler mud in wet. Often have we felt inclined to bless the hard frost at night in winter time, which has enabled us next morning to walk to our carriage on the top of the mud instead of wading through. The courtyard is enclosed by a range of miserable hovels—the sort of shanties which might perhaps pass muster as tool sheds in allotment gardens, those “lodges in gardens of cucumbers,” which Isaiah considered the nadir of dilapidation. Some of these take rank as stables and others as guest chambers. In point of comfort and cleanliness there is little to choose between them; but occasionally the guest chambers are on an upper story, and then the humans are somewhat better off than the brutes. Let us assume, not to be too sanguine, that our room will be on the ground floor; and, not to be too despondent, that we shall get a room to ourselves.
Such a room will be about 9 feet square, and will boast a ramshackle door and (perhaps) a shuttered window. Its floor will be about six inches below the level of the yard—we mean the mud. It will be furnished, like the Prophet’s chamber, with “a bed, a stool, and a candlestick;” videlicet—with a rush mat or a rough plank bedstead, a small table (this only occasionally), and a paraffin lamp upon the wall. For a small additional fee the Khanji[4] will bring us a charcoal brazier; but (not wishing to be asphyxiated) we must leave this to burn outside until the blue flames subside.{9} Here we are at liberty to make our own beds, and to cook and eat such provisions as we may have brought with us. The room is never swept, and prudent travellers will often take the precaution of bringing their own carpet with them. The regular charge for such an apartment is five piastres (10d.) a night.
Our fellow guests are mostly Kurds or Arabs, with Syrians and Armenians rather more sparsely intermixed. They may be told apart by their languages, or less certainly by their dress; for the Arabs are the only folk hereabouts who adhere very scrupulously to their own distinctive costume. This consists of a gown, generally of some striped or plain soft-coloured material, reaching almost to the feet, and girt about the waist with a bright coloured sash. A V-shaped opening from neck to waist shows an embroidered shirt-front under, and over all is worn an abba or Arab cloak. The abba is generally of woollen fabric, either dark brown, or boldly striped with black and white or brown and white in broad and narrow stripes arranged alternately. For winter wear it is often made of sheepskin, worn woolly side out during wet weather, and woolly side in during dry. On their heads they wear a bright coloured head cloth, either of silk or cotton, which is kept in position by a double coil of soft black rope forming a sort of wreath. They usually wear their hair long.
The Kurds also in the plain villages often wear an Arab type of costume; but the muleteers and other travellers are clad in a nondescript garb which seems based upon a Turkish original. The typical Turkish trousers are made from a piece of stuff whose width is equal to the length of the leg from waist to ankle. This is folded to form a square, sewn up the sides, and furnished with a cord run round the top to gird in at the waist. A couple of holes for the feet are cut at the two bottom corners, and the garment is then complete. This of course leaves an immense amount of slack between the legs, and superior tailors get rid of this to some extent by a certain amount of shaping; but a very sufficient surplus is always allowed to remain. Above this is worn a waistcoat, with a coloured sash and a kind{10} of zouave jacket. The waistcoat, the lappets of the jacket, and the pockets of the trousers are often adorned with braiding; and the rough frieze of which the dress is composed is generally blue, black or brown. Sheepskin jackets are often worn in winter time.
On their heads they wear sometimes an Arab head cloth, sometimes a Turkish fez, sometimes the conical felt cap of the Kurds and Syrians, either with or without a turban. In cold weather they swathe the ends of their turbans about their faces, muffling themselves up to the eyes and making themselves look even more complete ruffians than they did before.
The officials and well-to-do classes wear what they consider to be European costume, but always top it off with a fez.
One of the first impressions which besets a traveller in these parts is the reality of the curse of Babel. For a curse it is most emphatically, though some of our home-bred cranks would appear to regard it as a blessing; and it is devoutly to be wished that all those crack-brained politicians who are seeking to promote the revival of Erse and Gælic and Cymric might be awarded some practical experience of the realization of their dreams. The Swiss boasted that he had three native languages; but the inhabitants of Asiatic Turkey are provided with at least six. Arabic is dominant on the plains; Syriac and Kurdish in the mountains; Armenian on the plateaus to the northward; and Greek in western Asia Minor. Turkish, except in Anatolia, is only the official language; but we suppose it deserves recognition along with the other five. Naturally each of these main stems branches off into dialects by the score; and if these are to be reckoned separately the Turkish Empire is still as polyglot as that of Nebuchadnezzar himself.
No one of course speaks all the languages; but no one can get on at all comfortably without speaking a minimum of two. That number will probably enable him at least to find an interpreter in most of the villages which favour the four remaining tongues.{11}
The nationalities are as diverse as the languages, and are interwoven together in the most bewildering entanglement; not by separate districts dovetailed into one another like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, but by tiny fragmentary communities dispersed like different grains shaken up vigorously in a bag. The village is the largest unit; and where one village is Syrian, the next may be Kurdish, the next Armenian, the next Yezidi; all out of sympathy with each other and all resolutely refusing to mix. Here and there in the medley one may find occasionally a specimen which has no affinity whatever with any neighbouring nationality. Membij, for example, is a village of Circassians, fugitives from the Russian occupation who were given an asylum here by the Sultan Abdul Hamid. We have sometimes wondered whether this extraordinary mixture may not be the fruit of the policy adopted by the ancient Assyrians, who were wont to disperse their captive nations through all the length and breadth of their domain; but the same thing is seen in the European provinces of Turkey where Assyrians and Persians never penetrated, and where Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks and Roumanians form an equally tangled skein.
English critics talk glibly enough of Turkey being an Asiatic Power, and being capable of regenerating herself by concentrating her energies in Asia. They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place.
The problem of Asiatic Turkey, like the problem of Thrace and Macedonia, is simply that none of the component races can be trusted to govern the rest, and that all are so inextricably intermingled that it is impossible to parcel them out into distinct homogeneous States. We must own some{12} sympathy with the Turks, the old conquering race, who once fully vindicated their hegemony. But their day is now past: their natural force abated. And though they still hold the tiller (thanks to the dissensions among their crew) they have no longer the strength to keep the ship under control. Their empire is too great for their shrunken numbers to govern, and they find themselves choked by the subject races with whom they have failed to assimilate.
On the third day after leaving Aleppo we reached the banks of the Euphrates; here a broad and rapid river, divided into three or four channels by a string of flat sandy islets. The right bank, from which we descended, is formed by a range of chalky hills breaking off into cliffs here and there; but the left bank is lower and flatter with an edging of conglomerate rock; and under each bank is a wide foreshore of greyish sand, which is of course all covered whenever the river is high. Its waters must have been singularly shrunken when Xenophon forded it at Thapsacus, a hundred miles lower down, and found it no more than breast deep; for here it is quite unfordable and can only be crossed by ferries.
The ferry boats are big spoon-shaped craft with low square bows and high pointed sterns. They are built of very rough planking, which looks as if it could not possibly be watertight, and some very vigorous caulking must have been employed to attain that end. They are steered by a huge flimsy paddle, formed of two or three poles roughly lashed together and pivoted upon the stern post; and what motive power is required is supplied by an iron-shod punt-pole. A crew of two men, one to steer and one to punt, work these unwieldy arks from a small half-deck at the stern.
Our carriage was backed into one of the boats over the bows, to the accompaniment of an infinity of yelling, and sundry mules and camels were disposed as packing round the sides. Then away we drifted, broadside on, down the rapid stream; wriggled into a back eddy under the lee of one of the islands; and eventually stranded safely about half a mile down upon the further shore. The boats had to{13} be towed up stream a mile or more before they were able to recross; and we were lucky to have found them on the right bank, for the process of getting them over might well have meant an hour’s delay.
The point where we crossed the river is unmarked by any village, but a considerable town named Birijik lies about thirty miles up stream.
A lordlier city once dominated these solitary reaches; for fifteen miles nearer lies the little village of Jerablus, and all around Jerablus lie the mighty mounds which cover the ruins of Carchemish, and among which the gangs of workmen employed by the British Museum are now engaged in recovering the long hidden secrets of the ancient Hittite kings. Carchemish was the capital of the Hittites, that most ancient and most mysterious of all the great nations which once held dominion over northern Syria. Their history is still a sealed book to us; for though we have recovered many of their inscriptions, we have as yet found no key to their decipherment. All that we know of them at present has been gleaned from the records of Egypt and Assyria. We are still awaiting the day when another Rosetta Stone shall unlock for us the secrets of a people, whose capital was already a dead city when Nebuchadnezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho under its walls 600 years before Christ.
But though the Hittites have vanished utterly for so many thousand years, we may still trace their influence in the handiwork of the natives to this day. The villages which border the Euphrates—and a few others nearer Aleppo—are entirely distinct in character from all those in the districts around. The houses are not square and flat-roofed like those in ordinary villages; but circular conical buildings, of a shape between a beehive and a sugar-loaf, built of sun-dried mud, and packed tightly together within a walled enclosure, looking exactly like the haycocks in a crowded rick-yard in England. Houses of precisely this shape are represented on the Egyptian bas-reliefs recording the conquest of the Khati by the Pharaoh Rameses II; and there can be little doubt that the type{14} has persisted continuously down to the present time. It may even perhaps be argued with a certain amount of plausibility that the men who build such villages are remotely of Hittite blood!
The villages in Asiatic Turkey are ordinarily the property of some landowner; and the system of tenure is worth mentioning, for it must date from Patriarchal times. The Government claims as revenue an eighth of all the produce;[5] and the remaining seven-eighths is divided equally between the village owner and the cultivators. The villagers have also to pay to the Government an eighth of the value of the fodder computed to have been consumed by their flocks and herds; and have further to deliver the Government eighth free of charge at the tax-farmers’ storehouses. By law this obligation is restricted to one hour’s journey—i.e. there is supposed to be a storehouse in every village—but in practice they have often to carry it three or four times as far. They have also to pay a land tax of about 5 per cent. They keep all the straw as their perquisite; and it is the landlord’s duty to provide them with the seed grain.
This sounds as if the landlord got the lion’s share of the profits. And if he be miserly he does; but most of them interpret their signoral duties in a more liberal spirit. The landlord is expected to keep a guest house in his village, and a man in charge of it. Here anyone, be he villager or traveller, can get a free meal and free lodging. One big man in this district is reputed to expend food to the value of £1000 annually in such hospitality, including corn to the value of £400 in bread alone. Moreover, the landlord acts as a sort of savings bank to his villagers. If any of them is in distress and applies to him, he will relieve him. He will never think of sparing as long as his barns hold anything. He lives simply, as they do; and he holds that “Allah will provide.”
All payments should be considered as being made in kind, not in money; for coin is scarce in Turkey, and not{15} very generally used.[6] Even if it were more plentiful it is but a fluctuating security; for the coins in common use are the silver ones, and these are never current at their face value.[7] The gold £1 Turkish, nominally worth 100 piastres, fetched at the time of our visit from 102 piastres at Mosul to 114 at Aleppo; and the value of Mejidies (nominally 20 piastres), and of 5 piastre-pieces, varied also in different degrees. This is not all the fault of the Government; for while home trade and industry must be sorely hampered by such eccentricities, the Constantinople banks (which are run by European syndicates) are not altogether displeased. They can make a profit on the deal, for they hold most of the bullion: and when any particular coin has much appreciated anywhere, they can unload their stock of it at that particular place.
Eastward from the Euphrates our track leads over rather lower country, an open undulating heathland which melts gradually into alluvial plain. Here and there, dispersed about the surface, are wide patches of stony ground; and where the track chances to skirt them it is usually found that many of the stones have been piled up into little pillars, five or six one upon the other making a column about two feet high. Each patch will contain twenty or thirty of these little pillars. They are set up by casual wayfarers as a sort of votive memorial, just as the Patriarch Jacob set up his pillar at Bethel.
A similar habit prevails in the mountain districts; but there it is more customary to insert the votive stone in the forked branch of a tree. Cairns also are frequently seen at the sides of the paths in the mountains; but these are generally erected to mark the site of some murder, and it is usual for each passer-by to add his stone to the pile. If you were a friend of the victim you deposit your offering{16} gently; if you were his enemy you hurl it on vindictively. Thus the pile grows apace any way, and it is to be presumed that his manes are appeased.
Near the village of Seruj we reach the outskirts of the great plain of Mesopotamia. Its levels stretch away southward as far as the eye can see. But our track edges still to the left and presently enters the hill country, the first and lowest undulations of the great mountain range towards the north.
It must have been on some of these spurs that the wrecks of Crassus’ army found refuge after their great defeat by the Parthians in the year 53 B.C. Carrhae, which gave its name to the battle, lay in the midst of the plains some twenty-five miles to the southward, and the actual scene of the fighting was some distance further south still: but the beaten troops made for the mountains, their only asylum from their pursuers; and here the last cohorts were surrounded and forced to lay down their arms.
Carrhae was a place of ill-omen for the Romans, for only 300 years later another similar disaster befell them upon the same ground. Here in the year 260 the Emperor Valerian was defeated and captured by Sapor I, the King of the Sassanid Persians, who had by this time inherited the Arascid Parthians’ domains. Roman accounts assert that the hapless Emperor was flayed alive; but the Persians more credibly relate that he was kept a prisoner, and employed in building the great bridge across the Karun river at Shushter.[8] Both accounts agree that after his death his skin was stuffed, and preserved as a grim trophy in the Palace at Seleucia Ctesiphon.
A short distance within the hills our track struck the great metalled road that runs from Birijik to Urfa. It is a road which, as far as it goes, might be called good in any country: but only the Urfa half of it is completed; it comes to an untimely end not far from the point where we struck at, which was somewhere about a third of the way to Birijik. The remaining section, however, served us admirably, and{17} we trundled along it in fine style for the last three hours of our day’s journey, threading a winding rocky valley which debouched at the back of the town.
Oriental cities as a rule are rather a disappointment to sightseers. Picturesque they are indeed, but in such a squalid fashion that much of their charm is blighted. They are a mere agglomeration of hovels, with a few fine features here and there. We have even heard it said of Constantinople itself that, having seen the approach to the Golden Horn, the traveller had better take his departure; for that every nearer inspection brings a fresh disillusionment in its train. Urfa, however, may rank as one of the exceptions. It is beyond question the most picturesque city in Mesopotamia. And, being built chiefly of stone, it has some dignity in its dilapidation, and wears its tattered finery with an aristocratic air.
Urfa lies just at the foot of the hills, half enclosed by two bold limestone promontories. The upper part of the town is pooled in the bay between them, and the lower and larger portion is split out into the plain. It is almost surrounded by its ancient walls, which are largely of Roman workmanship; and its mosques and minarets and all its prominent buildings are constructed almost entirely of a rich golden-brown stone. The streets are of course mere alleys, narrow and tortuous; but retain here and there many traces of architectural ornamentation; and among and around the houses grow cypresses and other trees. The principal mosque, once a Christian cathedral, is an old Byzantine basilica, and above it rises conspicuously a noble octagonal tower. The present Armenian church is also of great antiquity, though hardly of the First Century, which is what the Armenians claim.[9]
The promontory to the west of the town is crowned by the ancient citadel; now a mere shell, but imposing from{18} its situation, and surmounted by two lofty Roman columns formerly a portion of a temple portico.[10] Towards the town the hill is precipitous, but on the further side the slope is gradual; and accordingly the whole of this face, together with the two return ends, is defended by one of the most magnificent dry moats that exists anywhere in the world. It is hewn out of solid rock, with sides that are absolutely vertical; and may measure even now about thirty feet deep and not less than thirty feet wide. Formerly it could be crossed at two or three places by narrow wooden drawbridges; and the posterns to which they gave access can still be seen in the walls. At what epoch this moat was constructed we did not feel competent to determine. The walls are partly Saracenic, partly Roman, and partly Sassanian; they are now extremely ruinous and of no very formidable height.[11]
Urfa in classical days was known by the name of Edessa, and was the capital city of that king Abgarus of Osroëne, whose Epistle to our Lord is included among the Apocryphal Gospels. This tale is something more than a legend, for it dates from the beginning of the fourth century; and is related by the historians Eusebius and Moses of Khorene, who both profess to have derived their authority from contemporary documents which they had themselves inspected among the royal archives at Edessa. They tell us how the king was afflicted with leprosy, and how he sought in vain to be cured by the physicians and sorcerers of his own land. How at length he heard report of the miracles that were being wrought in Judaea by Jesus the{19} Prophet of Galilee; and how he dispatched ambassadors to Him, entreating Him to come and heal his disease and to instruct his people, offering Him at the same time a secure asylum from the hatred of the unbelieving Jews. These ambassadors were the “certain Greeks”[12] who are mentioned in St. John’s Gospel as having been introduced to our Lord by Philip on the day of His triumphant entry into Jerusalem; and they brought back to Abgarus a verbal message (or some say an actual letter dictated by our Lord to Thomas) promising that one of His Apostles should be sent to Edessa in due time.
Accordingly soon after the Ascension the Apostle Thaddeus was sent by Thomas to preach the Word in Osroëne. He came and healed Abgarus of his leprosy; and the king and all his people thereupon embraced the Faith.[13] Thaddeus himself passed onwards to Armenia and Eastern Mesopotamia, where he founded the Parthian or Assyrian, now called the “Nestorian,” Church.
We may at least say of this legend that it is nearly as well authenticated as that which attributes the foundation of the Church of Rome to Peter; and far better than those which claim Spain for James the Great, or Britain for Joseph of Arimathea. The stories have this much in their favour—that at all events they are not mutually contradictory. Peter and James are conceded to the West; while Eastern tradition contents itself with Thomas and Thaddeus and Bartholomew. One would expect only the illustrious names in any mere fabricated tales.
At least it is historically certain that the Gospel was brought to Edessa almost within the Apostolic ages; and that Edessa formed the main distributing centre for the preachers who evangelized the East.
Osroëne in Abgarus’ days formed a sort of buffer state{20} between the Parthian and Roman Empires; and a little later it experienced the usual fate of buffer states, and was absorbed by the Empire of Rome. Under its new suzerains Edessa took rank as an important frontier fortress, and stood many a siege in the long-drawn wars between the kings of the Sassanid Persians and the Emperors of Byzantine Rome. Moreover it was a great educational centre, the seat of a famous university, which was eventually suppressed by the Byzantine Emperor Zeno in the year 489 on the ground that it was tainted by the heresy of Nestorianism.
But Edessa has acquired one peculiar interest in the eyes of Western historians from the fact that it was the easternmost conquest that was ever achieved by the Crusades. When Godfrey de Bouillon reached Antioch in the year 1097 his brother Baldwin was in command of one of the divisional armies that sallied forth to raid the country round about. Many of the Crusading chieftains won themselves little principalities in the course of these plundering expeditions; but Baldwin had better luck than any, though it does not appear that it was any better deserved. He penetrated eastward to Edessa; and found that city governed by a petty Christian kinglet, who welcomed the Crusaders effusively and adopted Baldwin as his successor. How far such welcome and adoption were voluntary we have no means of ascertaining. Probably the poor Christian Emir felt that he could not help himself. At any rate, he was killed soon after in an insurrection (not without suspicion of Baldwin’s connivance), and the latter reigned in his room.
Upon Godfrey’s death in 1100, Baldwin became King of Jerusalem, and made over his principality to his cousin Baldwin du Bourg. He, too, succeeded to Jerusalem in his turn in 1118; and the next Count of Edessa was Jocelyn, a fine old fighter, whose exploits made his name a terror to every Paynim in the land. Neither Baldwin II nor Jocelyn were altogether in luck’s way. Both were taken captive near Edessa by Balak the Prince of Aleppo, and confined together in the strong castle of Khortbert. Jocelyn succeeded{21} in escaping, and presently had the satisfaction of slaying Balak in battle with his own hand: but Baldwin remained a prisoner for a period of seven years.
Jocelyn died in 1132, leaving his feeble-spirited son to succeed him,[14] and thereafter the fortunes of the Crusaders began very rapidly to wane. Their first invasion had been happily timed; for the last great Seljuk Sultan, Malek Shah, had died two or three years previously, and had left his empire to be disputed among his four sons. Thus for a time there had been no single great ruler to unite the Moslems against the Christians. But now a new power was being built up by Zanghi the Atabek at Mosul; and under him, and his successors Noureddin and Saladin, it grew more formidable every year. Zanghi—Sanguin, as the Crusaders called him—laid siege to Edessa in 1144, and Milicent the queen regent of Jerusalem found herself powerless to send aid. Zanghi breached the walls by undermining one of the towers; the stormers overtook the flying garrison before they could enter the citadel; and an indiscriminate massacre brought the Christian dominion to an end.
There are still a good number of Christians both Armenian and Syrian at Urfa, and the Syrian Monastery of Rabban Ephrem stands conspicuously at the head of the bay. Rabban Ephrem was a handsome young monk, a refugee from Nisibis when that city was ceded to Persia. He came to Urfa in search of an eligible hermitage, and encountered there (so says the legend) a damsel with roguish eyes.
“Oh damsel, why dost thou look upon me?” demanded the scandalized solitary. “Man should keep his eyes fixed on the ground; for it is written that out of it he was taken.”
“Verily it is as thou sayest;” responded the damsel demurely. “Wherefore woman may look upon man freely, for it is written that woman was taken out of man.”
“Lo! here is wisdom indeed,” exclaimed the anchorite in amazement. “If the women of Urfa are so wise, how{22} wise must the men be! Of a surety I will make my abode here, and gather wisdom at the fountain head.”
So Rabban Ephrem settled down at Urfa, probably in one of the rock-cut cells in the hill fronting the castle. But as he was misguided enough to exclude all the women from his monastery, we fear it is only too probable that he did not get as much wisdom as he hoped.
But the real patron saint of Urfa is no other than the Patriarch Abraham; for the Moslems all believe implicitly that Urfa is Ur of the Chaldees.[15] They have here Abraham’s cradle, and his tomb (which they never allow Christians to look upon); and they have the Pool of Abraham also, which is the principal sight in all their town.
Abraham’s Pool is a great stone tank which is fed by a never-failing spring. Along one side rise the domes and minarets of Abraham’s Mosque (which is also inviolable by Christians) and the steps by which pious Moslems descend into the Pool to bathe. In the pool live Abraham’s carp. The water is positively thick with them. No one is permitted to catch them so long as they remain in their Sanctuary; but they venture at their own proper peril into the stream which flows out from one end. It is considered a pious act to feed them; and the great fat gluttons follow us as we walk along the margin, with their heads bobbing out of the water, begging for handfuls of boiled maize. When we throw them largesse there is such a rush for it that many of them got hoisted bodily out of their element on their fellows’ backs; and it must be regretfully added that they often gorge themselves so immoderately that they float{23} away gasping, belly uppermost, as though they were in an apoplectic fit.
Abraham’s interest in the pool is explained by a delicious legend. He had refused to worship fire when ordered to do so by Nimrod; and the mighty conqueror was so exasperated that he hurled him with his own hands from the summit of the citadel rock into a burning fiery furnace which he had kindled for his reception at the bottom. The Patriarch dropped unhurt, though it was a long cast even for Nimrod; and the fountain sprang up at the touch of his feet and extinguished the fiery furnace.
If this explanation should appear to be not quite sufficiently coherent, we can only admit that primitive Paganism tells a much more plausible tale. The pool belonged of old to Derceto (Dagon, Atergatis), the ancient Syrian fish-goddess. They are lineal descendants of her carp that inhabit its waters to this day.{24}

CHAPTER II

A LAND OF DUST AND ASHES

(DIARBEKR AND MARDIN)

DUE east and west, from the Gulf of Iskanderun almost to the heel of the Caspian, there stretches a range of lofty mountains—a sort of natural bulwark, fencing off the high rugged plateau of Asia Minor on the north from the low level plain of Mesopotamia on the south. At its western extremity this range is known as the Taurus, but further east it appears now to possess no generic name; yet it well deserves so much distinction, for it is here that the peaks attain their highest altitude, and hold in their wild recesses some of the grandest scenery in the world.

The hills which we entered near Urfa are the first outposts of these mountains, but at this point of their line the outposts are very far advanced. We must push on for two or three days across a broad undulating upland before we find ourselves approaching the foot of the main chain itself. On the whole it is a dull enough journey; for though the snow summits rise nobly on the horizon ahead of us, the heathlands immediately round us are as barren as land can be. There are a few sordid Kurdish villages at four or five hours intervals, but apart from these there is nothing for the eye to rest on; and our own little party, crawling slowly across the landscape, seem to be the only living creatures except the ubiquitous hooded crows.
During the second day, however, we became aware of another feature, which, if it adds no beauty, at least lends interest to the scene. A layer of higher ground is thrust across the plateau. It radiates out into long flat tongues; and its steep escarpments are littered all over with the big{25} black boulders that have fallen from the bristly fringe along the upper edge. These boulders are covered with a grey-green lichen, and mottled with patches of moss of a warmer and richer green; but no other kind of vegetation seems able to flourish among them, and the prevailing tone of the landscape is a gloomy bilious grey. To those who have seen it before such a picture needs no commentary. A vast outpouring of volcanic scoriæ has covered the whole countryside.
As we pursue our way further the signs become yet more pronounced. The Acropolis of the little town of Severek is perched, like Bamborough Castle, on a platform of basalt rock. Not far off at the village of Kainak is an isolated cone—once doubtless a miniature crater: and we remember that Diarbekr is built of basalt also—Diarbekr, two days’ journey away. Whence came this prodigious outflow of seventy miles in diameter, and of four thousand square miles in area—as large as the county of York?
A full day’s journey ahead of us, all along the eastern horizon, lies a huge squat bun-shaped mountain, just over 6000 feet high. This is Karaja Dagh, the great extinct volcano, the outermost of that group of volcanoes which lie to the north of Mesopotamia, in Armenia and eastern Kurdistan. This region must have been the scene, at some remote geological epoch, of some of the greatest eruptions that have ever occurred on this globe. The five huge craters which produced them (not to mention a host of smaller ones)[16] are ranged diagonally athwart the country in a line some 300 miles long. At the north-eastern end is Alageuz, 150 miles south of the Caucasus. Then come Ararat, Sipan, and Nimrud; with Karaja at the south-western end. The biggest of all perhaps was Nimrud, a mountain but little higher than Karaja, but possessing the third largest crater that is known to exist in the world. Karaja would seem to consist of a group of associated{26} craters; something like the Puy de Dome mountains, but infinitely grander in scale.
It is held by many commentators that the site of the Garden of Eden was near modern Van and Bitlis, round about the head waters of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Araxes, and the Zab. If so, then the Garden of Eden now lies buried beneath the lava of these volcanoes; and where could we find fitter antitypes of the Cherubim with the flaming swords?
Karaja juts out towards the plains like a huge cape, isolated from the mountains; and our road slowly heaves itself upward to find a way over its tail. As a road it is incredibly villainous, for it takes the basalt boulders au naturel, and hardly an attempt has been made anywhereto form a surface at all.[17] Round our left sweep the desolate fields of broken and disintegrating lava. On our right they rise, terrace on terrace, toward the mountain from which they flowed. And as we leave the mountain behind, and continue our way to the eastward, the aspect of the country changes little: it is still lava that surrounds us on every side.
At length, two full days beyond Severek, we descry a city ahead of us. A city notable for its size, and yet more for its menacing aspect:—a grim black row of massive towers and curtains, with the slender stems of a dozen minarets shooting up into the sky behind the ramparts like reeds behind a dyke of stone. The snow peaks on our left stretch beyond it, and fade off gradually into the distance; and as we draw nearer we perceive that on our right the town is guarded by the deep ravine of the Tigris. Such is Diarbekr—Black Amida; whose classical name is not yet disused entirely, and which owes its inseparable epithet to the basalt of which it is built.
The city crowns a bold rocky bluff overhanging the gorge of the Tigris, which flows some 300 feet beneath it in a broad and sandy bed. The river is here wide and deep, and its{27} modern name—Shat, the Arrow—testifies the rapidity of its current; but a little below the city its course is checked by a bridge and a weir. In the severe winter of 1910-11 it was frozen over so hard at this point that the caravans of camels were able to cross it on the ice. The river covers the eastern face of the city; and the ground falls fairly steeply along the southern face also. But toward the remaining two faces the approaches are over level ground.
We possess many cities in Europe which are still entirely encircled by Roman or mediæval ramparts. Such are Carcassonne, Aigues Mortes, Avila, Lugo, and Rothenburg; and we may add Constantinople, though in this case the circuit is incomplete. But, having seen all these examples, we feel bound to put it on record that the basalt walls of Diarbekr are distinctly the finest of all. The walls are some forty feet high and about five miles in circuit, and are strengthened at frequent intervals by eighty massive towers. Most of these are semicircular, but some are semioctagonal. They are spaced about three and a half diameters apart, and project boldly from the curtain walls between. The line traced by the walls is irregular, skirting the edges of the hollows; and at each salient angle is a huge circular bastion. The gateways are somewhat insignificant, being mere holes in the walls flanked by a tower on either side: and this is characteristic of most Roman fortifications, the gateways of Lugo (for instance) being very similar in design.[18]
The curtain walls are from ten to fifteen feet thick; thinner along the river front, where the precipitous basalt cliffs rendered assault almost impracticable; and thicker along the other three sides. These sides are further protected by a moat cut in the solid rock, but neither so deep nor so wide as the giant moat at Urfa. Along the inner edge of this moat, some paces from the base of the ramparts, is a low breastwork of masonry as at Constantinople and Carcassonne. A loopholed and vaulted gallery is carried{28} along the top of the ramparts, and above this were the battlements, so that the defenders had a double banquette.[19] The towers are vaulted internally, and have double banquettes also; and the garrison could reach their stations by a double staircase at every tower. The citadel is at the north east corner overhanging the gorge of the river, and in the midst of it is a huge mass of masonry, once the mount of the demolished keep.
The walls are beyond all doubt, in the main, of Roman construction; though some Saracenic additions have since been incorporated in the work. They are built of squared black basalt, which has weathered externally to a dull yellow tone owing to the lichen which has overspread the surface. Possibly this process was assisted by the fact that some twenty years ago it was deemed a good idea to whitewash them, in order to give a distinguished welcome to a specially prominent Pasha! But fortunately the traces of this sacrilege are almost obliterated now.
The houses in the town for the most part are a set of squalid hovels, intersected in all directions by a maze of narrow crooked streets. Our carriage fairly stuck in one of these alleys as we were attempting to pass through it; and for some minutes it seemed problematical whether we should be able to wriggle free. Yet not all the houses are mean; and in the quarter near the citadel, the residence of the chief officials, a very considerable number are solidly constructed of stone. Some few of these are genuinely old, and possess a good deal of interest. They are often built in two colours, with alternate horizontal bands of black basalt and yellow marble, resembling not a little the black and white marble buildings of Pistoia. It is curious how this taste for coloured ornamentation seems inherent in the dwellers in volcanic districts, where materials of different colours are always readily available. The same trait is very conspicuous in the volcanic districts of Auvergne. The most notable example at Diarbekr is a big mansion in{29} the main thoroughfare. A house very similar in type to the old palaces of Spain and Italy; bare, square and prison-like outside, and entered by a single great doorway; but with graceful arcaded porticoes surrounding the patio within. Once, no doubt, it was indeed a palace, the abode of some prominent magnate: but now it is only a khan; and a khan so notoriously filthy that even our Arabaji shrank from an encounter with its fleas.
The principal Mosque is also of peculiar interest, and presents an architectural problem which has never been quite fully solved. Two sides of its courtyard are formed by the façades of an ancient palace—a palace of regal dimensions, and constructed in a style that is admittedly unique. One of these façades is in two stories, with a pointed arcade below and square-headed windows over; the other has now but one story which consists of a pointed arcade.[20] These are not quite Romanesque in style, but more Romanesque than Oriental. They are rather like primitive versions of the Otto Heinrichs Bau at Heidelberg Schloss. But the building to which they are nearest akin is Diocletian’s famous palace at Spalatro; albeit they are far less massive, and far more fantastically ornate. The theory most generally adopted concerning them is that they formed part of the palace of the Armenian king, Tiridates; and this theory is strongly supported by their resemblance to the palace at Spalatro, for Diocletian and Tiridates were contemporaries and close allies.
Amida was one of the great fortresses that guarded the southern frontier of the Roman Empire. Northward, in Asia Minor, Pax Romana had a fairly long innings; but Parthia and Persia to the southward were at no time definitely subdued. The hold of the Romans on Mesopotamia was indeed in some sort analogous to the hold of the Austrians on Italy previous to 1860. They regarded it as within their “Sphere of Influence,” and sometimes they judged it expedient to “assert their interests” by invading it. But generally they found that enterprise was a bit{30} beyond their capacity; their real “Scientific Frontier” lay along the mountains in the north. And here they, too, maintained their four great fortresses; not ranged in a square like the famous Austrian Quadrilateral, but en échelon one behind the other along the southern slopes of the hills. Nisibis and Daras were in the forefront; Amida and Edessa withheld in reserve behind them. And though thus in the second rank, Amida got its full share of fighting when the kings of resuscitated Persia began to make invasions in their turn.
Amida’s defences were perfected, and its arsenal formed, by Constantius; and it was Constantius’ great opponent Sapor II who undertook its first memorable siege. The great Sassanid Shah invaded the Roman territory with a huge army of 100,000 men in the year 360. He had at first intended to ignore the fortresses and to scour the hinterland for plunder; but as he rode past the walls of Amida an arrow struck his helmet, and he turned upon the place like an angry bull. His summons was answered by a volley from the balistæ which slew the only son of his chief auxiliary, Grumbates the king of the Chionites; and Sapor swore to the bereaved father that he would not rest till he had taken the city in revenge.
For seventy-three days he pressed his assaults with the utmost fury and persistence. He brought up battering rams and huge wooden towers constructed for him by Roman deserters; and on one occasion he succeeded in surprising one of the towers upon the river frontage, but the seventy picked archers who occupied it were overwhelmed by the garrison and slain. At last he breached the walls; and though some of the garrison (including the historian Ammianus) cut their way through his lines on the further side, and thus succeeded in escaping, the rest, with all the inhabitants, were massacred in the ensuing storm.
Yet Amida had at least performed the duty which is ordinarily expected of a fortress. It had held back the tide of invasion for the period of a whole campaign. Sapor had lost a third of his army; and the season was too far{31} advanced for any further operations. He retreated again into Persia, and abandoned the city that he had won.
An even more notable siege occurred in the year 502. King Kobad, the father of the yet mightier Chosroes I. invested the city that autumn; assailing it from the western side (as Sapor had done before him), and employing similar siege engines to those of his predecessor’s days.[21] The garrison caught the blows of his rams on reed mattresses lowered from the ramparts, and greased the drawbridges of his wooden towers so effectively that the stormers could not cross. Also they employed “winged words” of such singular virulence and pungency as to scandalize even their own historian.[22] He felt obliged to draw the line at “Lime-house,” though boiling oil and firebrands were fair. “If the bishop had still been alive he would never have permitted it;” and indeed when the women took to stripping themselves on the ramparts, and taunting the besiegers with their inability to sack the place, we may grant that any bishop would have had good cause to protest!
Kobad next “cast a mount” against the walls in the manner of Sargon and Sennacherib; a huge incline of earth and brushwood to give his men access to the parapet. The besieged breached their own wall under it, and secretly drew away the core; propping the cavity with balks of timber, and then filling it with combustibles. When the assault began they fired their mine; and an hour or two later the mound collapsed beneath the feet of the attacking columns, precipitating the luckless stormers into the blazing furnace below.[23]
{32}
Three months had passed in vain assaults, and Kobad had made no progress. His thinly clad Persians were suffering terribly from the winter cold; and the Great King swallowed his dignity and offered to raise the siege for half a crown! But success had made the defenders more insolent than ever, and they scorned even this show of homage. They retaliated by sending him a bill for the vegetables which his army had consumed out of their gardens. This was too much for Kobad, and he resolved to fight to a finish. Three days later the laugh was on his side.
One night a party of Persians were pursuing a certain Kutrigo who had sallied from a privy postern to make a raid on their camp. As they neared the walls they received no challenge, and not an arrow was shot at them. That particular tower was manned by the “Sleepless” monks of Anzetene; and it chanced that “a certain man” (in the most friendly spirit) had given them a good supper and wine to drink, so that they were all in deep slumber. The Persians seized their opportunity and made themselves masters of the tower. The garrison were aroused and hurried up to expel them, endeavouring to cut away the vaulted floor under their feet. The Persians planted their scaling ladders and swarmed to the help of their comrades; and for thirty-six hours continuously the fight raged furiously on the wall. Peter of Amkhoro, a man of gigantic stature and clad in complete armour, held the banquette on one side against the utmost efforts of the Persians: but in the opposite direction they pushed on from tower to tower till at last they gained one of the gateways. The army poured in irresistibly, and the massacre began.
Kobad allowed his army three full days to sack the city, and at the end of that time 80,000 corpses were carried out through the north gate that the king might enter at the south. Even so the Persians’ vengeance was not sated, and they demanded leave from their king to execute one tenth of the survivors to appease the manes of their own dead comrades.[24] They bore these wretched victims{33} outside the city walls, and killed them “in all sorts of ways.”

MOSUL.

View from the bridge, looking up stream. The Tomb of Cassim is one of the more distant buildings near the water-side.

Kobad pillaged the city thoroughly, sending his booty away on rafts down the Tigris to Ctesiphon; and when he himself departed, he left a certain Glon to hold the fortress with a garrison of 3000 men. This seems a small enough force to man such an extent of rampart: yet at first it proved amply sufficient; and when the Roman general Patricius attempted to regain the city he was repulsed completely and ignominiously, though the Romans were much more skilled than the Persians in the conduct of a siege. But Amida was not yet at the end of its agony: and what all the emperor’s horses and all the emperor’s men had so conspicuously failed to accomplish was reserved for the grim persistence of an irregular partisan.
Farzman was an active local Sheikh who had espoused the cause of the Romans, and who had made his name a terror to the Persians by a multitude of daring deeds. He was only in command of 500 horse; and any attempt to form a regular siege of such a first-class fortress would of course have been ridiculous. But an adroitly handled cavalry force can do a good deal in the way of “containing” an Oriental city. In the winter of 1911 Shuja ed Dowleh, the Agha of Maragha, nearly reduced Tabriz, with all its 300,000 inhabitants, with an equally puny band.
Farzman knew full well that the Persians in Amida could not have had time to replenish their magazines. He quietly cut off communication with the surrounding villages, and suppressed the daily market that was held without the walls. Glon very naturally grew restive; and listened greedily to a certain Gadono, a prominent local sportsman, who told him that he had located Farzman’s camp in the course of his hunting excursions, and would enable him to take it by surprise. Accordingly Glon sallied out with all his available cavalry. But the wily Gadono had been in communication with Farzman. The “surprise” had been all arranged beforehand; and Glon and his party were wiped out.
This signal miscarriage of their “aggressive defence”{34} profoundly disconcerted the Persians. Glon’s son, now in chief command, kept breathing out threatenings and slaughter; but he no longer had any cavalry, and his infantry was barely sufficient to man the ramparts and overawe the citizens within. He shut up all the able-bodied inhabitants, to the number of 10,000, in the Stadium; and calculated by this measure to free his own hands for the defence. But, struggle as he might, he could not snap the line which held him:—Farzman had hooked a salmon with a trout rod, but he played it in masterly style.
Then came days of horror unutterable. The prisoners in the Stadium were left without any food whatever. They ate their boots, and their belts, and finally preyed on each other; and when the wretched survivors were let loose as no longer worth guarding, they crawled out of their prison “like men risen from the dead.” By this time the city itself was almost in equal extremity. Many of the living skeletons from the Stadium were enticed into the houses by the starving women and there killed and devoured. The garrison were so reduced by hunger that they could scarcely carry their weapons; and the Persian commandant sent to Farzman to say that he was willing to capitulate.
Farzman granted easy terms. They might go off on rafts down the Tigris, taking all their property with them, as many as elected to go. And he himself, on their departure, took possession of that ghastly charnel house; and assisted by the new bishop, Thomas (the same who was later to build Daras), set to work to import new inhabitants, and nurse the dead city back to life.
Diarbekr in 1895 was one of the centres of the Armenian massacres, and as many as 2500 perished in this place alone. Little enough was heard about it at the time in England, where attention was almost monopolized by yet more monstrous holocausts; but what passed then as a mere local incident wears a very different aspect when we visit the actual spot where it was enacted—when we see the doors still splintered and patched in the houses which were stormed by the rioters, the photographs of the luckless victims still treasured in the albums of their surviving friends and{35} relatives, and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day.
The massacre was undoubtedly prompted by the Government of Constantinople; but their agents were the fanatical Kurds who swarm in the slums of Diarbekr, and who flocked in eagerly from the surrounding villages to take a hand in the work of slaughter and to share in the plunder which followed. That the massacre was political and not religious was proved by the fact that the Syrian Christians (who are also numerous in Diarbekr) did not suffer to anything like the same extent as their Armenian co-religionists. The crowd of refugees who sought sanctuary in the Jacobite cathedral were not molested, and only isolated individuals fell victims to the fury of the mob. That the outbreak wore a mask of fanaticism was a thing inevitable in the Orient. The perpetrators were the Kurdish riff-raff; and on this point Mohammedan badmashes are alike all over the world. Only religious zeal can excite their passions dangerously; and when their passions are dangerously excited they always find expression in religious zeal.[25] But the very fact that a distinction was made between Armenians and Syrians, is alone sufficient to indicate that in this instance the mob was under some sort of control.
The hatred of the Turks for the Armenians is due to the fact that the Armenians are the only one of their subject nations of whom the Turks are afraid. The Arabs and Kurds are their co-religionists, and have no national cohesion. The Nestorian and Jacobite Syrians are either too few to be dangerous, or too thoroughly tamed by long subjection to have any desire to rebel. But the Armenians are numerous and imbued with national aspirations; and though the majority of them are inoffensive cultivators,{36} they include a considerable number of intelligent and capable men. A small percentage too are active political propagandists, who continue to work persistently to overthrow the present régime. Under equal political conditions the Armenians would soon secure dominance: and this would be a subversal which the Turks could never endure. So when the Armenians grow restive the Turks resolve to “take precautions.” They cannot cope with them in cleverness, but in physical force they can.
Will there be further massacres? It is an ever-present danger. The Turks do not wish it—it makes trouble with the European Embassies; and, after all, slaughtering the Armenians is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Kurdish chiefs do not wish it either, for they too stand to lose pecuniarily: but beneath them seethes the fanatical mob, easily roused by hot-headed agitators, a sort of open powder magazine which any stray firebrand may ignite. “I will give you full warning if I can,” said a friendly Vali to a gentleman of our acquaintance; “but I can only tell you that I see no danger just now. There is talk of course—there is always talk; and so long as the talk reaches our ears it is not likely to go further. When you see little groups whispering together outside the mosques, and breaking up whenever a Christian passes within earshot—that is the real danger-signal, and you can see that as well as I.”
There was plenty of “talk” at Diarbekr; and we frequently heard the children (no doubt in imitation of their elders) invoking curses on us as we passed along the streets. The tension must have become greater since: for the Moslems will have been touched in the raw at the result of the Balkan fighting, and are prone to avenge their discomfiture on any Christian who is ready to hand. Moreover the Constitution had not altogether improved matters: for it was inaugurated by a general amnesty whereby all exiles and prisoners had been released. Some were certainly innocent sufferers, but a large number would have been much better kept in durance; and Diarbekr was consequently growing anxious at the intrigues of Abdul Reshek Agha, grandson and heir to Bedr Khan Beg of Massacre{37} memory,[26] who had just got reinstated in his ancestral stronghold in Bohtan. He was credited with an ambition to establish himself under the ægis of the Russians, as Shah of United Kurdistan: and though a “United Kurdistan” is a sufficiently Utopian conception, such an attempt might well begin with an Armenian massacre, and bring Russian intervention in its train.
The old régime used to deal with such dangers tactfully, if not altogether discreetly, according to our insular ideas. And this may be exemplified by the case of another Bedr Khan Beg, a scion of the same family—a tale which, if not vero, is so ben trovato that we cannot refrain from quoting it; and which at least shows the sort of methods with which the Government was credited, and in which its liege subjects were quite disposed to acquiesce.
The Sultan, in an expansive mood, had recalled Bedr Khan Beg from exile, and proposed to re-invest him with part of his ancestral domain. That gratified gentleman blossomed out luxuriantly under such sympathetic usage, and began asking for all sorts of powers and privileges, and reviving a whole host of dormant claims. The Government grew rather uneasy, but showed no signs of displeasure. It granted each demand in turn; escorted him with high distinction on board a warship; and dispatched him to Trebizond en route for his satrapy.
Two days later the ship was back at its anchorage. Perhaps it had forgotten something. Perhaps it needed some repairs to its engines. But it seemed in no hurry to start again; and it presently transpired that Bedr Khan Beg was no longer on board. He had not been seen to land; and the ship could have touched at no harbour. There is often some apparent inconsequence in the movements of Government ships. “Et quaesitum est a Toad-in-the-hole ubi est ille Bedr Khan Beg?” “Non est inventus.”
The Young Turks have adopted a self-denying ordinance{38} with regard to such expedients; but they have hardly attempted to touch that cancer of Ottoman rule—the chronic corruption of the Administration. Turkey enjoys an admirable code of laws, and a revenue system which should be the envy of our own fiscal extremists; but it has also evolved along with them that other modern panacea, a multiplicity of jobs. Every single official, be he Old Turk or Young Turk, Arnaut or Armenian, is frankly “on the make.” His post entitles him nominally to a starvation salary: yet he pays for it with a bribe, and he knows it is well worth paying for, since the incidental pickings will enable him to “make his pile.”
The present officials did not reprobate their predecessors’ conduct in this: they only envied their opportunities. If they had been allowed a chance of getting a look in themselves, they would have been quite content with things as they were. But the Old Gang had packed the Government so artfully that nothing but a revolution could oust them; and so in due course the inevitable revolution happened. But the methods of administration remain essentially the same.
Internal development of the empire is hardly ever attempted. The standing instructions appear to be “Thou shalt do nothing at all.” The central Government is quite content if open revolt is avoided; and if the taxes are gathered regularly enough to pay the officials’ salaries, and to maintain the standing army. Abdul Hamid even attempted to dispense with paying the army; and this ill-judged bit of economy was the primary cause of his overthrow. An army is an institution which cannot be prudently starved.
Of course all this systematized corruption involves huge losses to the Government. The officials, for a consideration, will always allow their friends to “make a bit;” and will often undervalue their property for assessment by as much as 90 per cent. The Kurds are favoured at the expense of the Christians because their support has to be courted, although in the development of the country they are much the least valuable asset. Yet even the Kurds are not{39} reconciled by such means to the paying of their taxes. Not so much because the taxes are heavy as because they are unremunerative. They see no return for their money: no roads, no education, no irrigation works. They are paying not taxes but tribute, like the old vassal kings under Assyria; and consequently they are always ripe for revolt, if they see any prospect of obtaining external aid to enable them to revolt successfully; again like the vassal kings under Assyria, who knew well that they would get flayed alive if they failed.
The best one can say of the administration of justice is that it probably is not quite as corrupt as it appears to be. The judge takes bribes from both sides with a view to remaining unbiased; and, if he is scrupulous, restores his bribe to the loser. In criminal cases, however, one must make allowance for a further principle. Among ourselves criminal acts are regarded as an offence against the State, and it is the State’s duty to exact the penalty. But the Turks are inclined to regard such acts merely as an offence against the individual. The State does no more than recognize the right of the injured party (or his representative) to take his own revenge—if he can.[27] It will only itself occasionally condescend to act as his representative, if he chances to be an influential person, or if some influential outsider (say the British Consul) may be thereby obliged. Such a point of view is very primitive, and inevitably leads to much injustice; but we cannot hope to see this remedied until the Turk has digested our own Western principles, and he has not made digestion easier by electing to swallow them whole.
With regard to the Kurds[28] we desire to speak as charitably as we are able; and we may find warrant for this in the words of Mar Ephrem, the Syrian Bishop of Urmi, who,{40} writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, could say no worse of them than that they were wakshi folk. Wakshi means merely “uneducated;” but it is only fair to add that it is a term of much greater opprobrium than seems quite reasonable in a country where not one man in a hundred is able to read or write.
The lack of education which the bishop laments is akin to that “weakness in arithmetic” which caused the Irishman to be hanged. They are apt to have more sheep in their villages than they can legitimately account for. They are a pastoral race, leaving agriculture almost exclusively to the Syrians and Yezidis; but we fear that their “pastoral” ideals are hardly those of Corydon or Meliboeus. Rather are they the modern representatives of those Elliots and Maxwells and Johnstones who used to practise “the faithful herdman’s art” upon our own border; and it might well be said to them (as was said to the chief of another great family whose enormities have since culminated in the acquisition of a dukedom)—

Had everye honeste man his awin kye, A right puir clan thy name wad be!

Such doings are hardly criminal according to their own code of morals; and if they confined themselves to cattle raiding, or even to an occasional clean murder, we should be able to think of them more kindly. But we fear that yet darker deeds must sometimes be reckoned against them; deeds like those of Edom o’ Gordon, or Black Adam of Cheviot, or like that which drew Hepburn’s vengeance on Bertram of Mitford tower. It is highly interesting, no doubt, to find Donald Bean Lean in the flesh still practising his old avocations in the highlands of Asia Minor; but if we could also find there “the kindly gallows of Crieff,” we do not hesitate to avow that our state would be the more gracious.
There is a British Vice-Consulate at Diarbekr, but at the date of our visit it was vacant. It is one of those posts which our Government is apt to suppress whenever retrenchment seems advisable. Certainly the Vice-Consul{41} must lead a dull enough life; and the British trade, which is the ostensible cause of his appointment, is a very nebulous entity. Yet the mere presence of a European constitutes a very real protection of the subject races in such an environment; and we owe at least this much recognition of our treaty obligations towards them.[29]
Our national prestige in the East rests chiefly on our dominance in India; and this is reflected in the fact that our Indian consulates in the south are much better maintained than those in the north, which are controlled from Europe. Our prestige too is a waning quantity. We are living, as it were, on the capital accumulated for us by such men as Stratford Canning; and it must be confessed that latterly our policy has not been that of a Great Power. We seem content to preserve barbarism in Mesopotamia in order to make our position in India easier; and to discourage the Baghdad railway because it will make our frontier harder to defend. That our military men should take this view is excusable. They know our present unpreparedness; and some day it might even be their duty to destroy that railway, because forces at their disposal will not otherwise be adequate for defence. But from a national standpoint such a dog-in-the-manger policy must eventually bring its own punishment. Our most straightforward, and in the end our wisest, course would be to promote all developments, and to shoulder manfully the obligations which they entail.
We resumed our journey from Diarbekr across a lava-covered country by perhaps the bumpiest bit of road between Aleppo and Mosul. We and all our possessions were kept bouncing about in our araba like so many dry peas in a pod. The springs of a second carriage that was{42} travelling with us burst, and had to be spliced with string. Presently our own pole broke off short at the socket, and had to be lashed up with string likewise. By some miraculous dispensation the splice held out to Mardin.
These accidents and repairs delayed us, and nightfall caught us still on the moorland. Our driver went astray off the almost invisible pathway, and after a while was reduced to hunting for it with matches. We fished out a portable candle-lamp, which gave somewhat more illumination; but which scarcely seemed adequate for the next undertaking that awaited us—the fording of a fairly wide river, running strongly, about axle deep. Good luck, however, attended us, and we at length got safely to our khan.
Next morning we were clear of the volcanic district and pursued our way up a winding and fertile valley, which was threaded (for a marvel) by a very presentable road. But over the col at the head there was no road whatever, and our horses had to scramble up a mountain side, rugged with earth-fast boulders and the roots of stunted trees. But this was the last of our obstacles. The road now revived intermittently; and though but half finished and hilly, it held on to the end of our stage. Towards evening we climbed the long zigzag ascent to the top of a 3000 feet mountain, and, crossing the ridge, wheeled immediately into the streets of the city of Mardin.
Mardin occupies a superb situation at the summit of one of the eminences which are ranged like a wall along the northern border of the Mesopotamian plain. All trace of an intervening plateau has here been completely eliminated; and from the foot of the declivity the ground stretches away to the southward in one illimitable level. The furthest identified landmark, a huge tel rising conspicuously in the far distance, was pointed out to us as Tel Kokab nearly eighty miles away.
These mountains are the Jebel Tur, the Mount Athos of the extreme east. They are a wild and barren district, containing very few villages, but thickly studded with ancient Christian monasteries; some of which date back to the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and most of{43} which are still occupied by small companies of Syrian monks.[30] Mardin is situated at the western extremity of this region; and the northern and eastern boundaries are formed by a loop of the Tigris, which flows behind the upland from Diarbekr to Jezire ibn Omar and issues there on to Mosul plain.
The hill on which the city stands is of a form which is not uncommon among the Kurdistan highlands, It rises from the plain in a single steep slope, unbroken almost from base to summit; but it culminates in a cresting of precipitous rock, so even and vertical that it looks like an artificial wall. Immediately behind the city this cresting forms an isolated knoll, cut off at the back and ends as abruptly as along the front, and thus forming an immense table with a perfectly level top. Many of the hills adjoining are of similar conformation; and another, almost a replica of it, may be seen in the mountains further eastward, forming the site of the town of Amadia.
Amadia is built entirely on the level top, and the encircling line of precipice serves it instead of a rampart: but at Mardin the space on the summit is only sufficient for the citadel, and the town lies just at the foot of the precipice, sprawling down the southern slope of the hill. The houses look forth across the plain, each over the roof of its neighbour; and as even the lowest rank must be fully 1500 feet above plain level, they form a conspicuous assemblage visible for scores of miles away.
The town is some two miles in length and perhaps half a mile in width, and is reputed to contain about 80,000 inhabitants. It is built of a warm-coloured stone similar to that employed at Urfa; and, like Urfa, is largely composed of good substantial buildings, which can sustain a certain amount of dilapidation without lapsing altogether into squalor. The streets are narrow and tortuous, and run for the most part longitudinally; thus it is evident that the cliff which overhangs them cannot (like the Amadia cliff) be in the habit of dropping fragments down the slope{44} beneath it; otherwise the lanes would run vertically, and be a good deal wider than they are! Some of the principal mosques possess considerable architectural pretensions, with Arabesque stalactite corbelling inserted in the coves over the doorways, and a certain amount of good carving introduced here and there on the facades. They are generally covered with fluted domes—a rather unusual feature, but one which is very conducive to the general effectiveness of the design.
Mardin is a walled city, but its walls were never very formidable and are now mostly ruinous. They consist but of broken fragments even on the citadel rock. The place was no Roman fortalice like Urfa or Diarbekr, and the part that it played in history was not of any great note. For some time it was the capital city of a petty dynasty of little independent Sultans; and the tomb of one of the most powerful of these forms a graceful adjunct to one of the chief mosques. One unique distinction, however, belongs to its rock-perched citadel. This is said to have held out successfully against the invincible Timour himself.
Mardin is in these days best known to us as the residence of the Patriarch of the Jacobites—Mar Ignatius, the modern inheritor of the throne of Antioch, that earliest of all Metropolitan sees. He resides at Deir el Za’aferan, the “Monastery of the Yellow Rocks,” which is situated about five miles eastward upon the southern slope of the mountains, in a position very similar to that of the town itself but on a separate hill. Deir el Za’aferan is a very ancient foundation dating from the fifth or sixth century; and certain fragments of its original structure still survive to this day, incorporated in the existing buildings. They are of pronouncedly classical character, and display a strong similarity to the admittedly Roman work in the Church of St. James at Nisibin: but the major part of the monastery is of much more modern construction; for it has been almost constantly occupied ever since the date of its erection, and subjected to many vicissitudes, being frequently ruined and rebuilt.
The Syrian “Jacobite” Christians are a poor remnant{45} now, but they were once the dominant Church in that group of old Roman provinces that we style loosely, “Syria and Palestine,” but which Romans called “The Orient,” Praefactura Orientalis.
Syriac (i.e. Aramaic) was the vernacular of these lands, whose capital for both ecclesiastical and political matters was Antioch. Their use of a separate language gave a national tinge to their Christianity; and they resented the Greek uniformity which the Emperor of Constantinople for political reasons sought to impose upon them. They fought this battle on the doctrinal field, refusing to accept the “Constantinopolitan” council of Chalcedon, and finding in that refusal a rallying-point for their own desire for independence.
For some time, it seemed probable that the emperor would seek to reconcile the discontented provinces by abandoning the council to which they objected; this policy, however, was rejected by Justinian (527-565), with the result that these “Monophysite”[31] malcontents organized themselves on a footing of separation from the Greek Church, but they remained in fellowship with the Churches of Armenia and Egypt; and the bulk of the Christian population of these provinces was in sympathy with them.
Thus, when the Mohammedan invasions of the seventh century commenced, the Arabs found that the bulk of the provincials were disposed to receive them as deliverers rather than as foes. In return, they recognized these Monophysites as the dominant Christian millet of these provinces, and so they remained for centuries.
Their nickname of “Jacobite” has nothing whatever to do with the “White Rose Society,” but was given them during the sixth century. Justinian attempted to force them into “Orthodoxy” by imprisoning their bishops, so as to prevent the ordination of any clergy but those of whom he approved. While in prison, the bishops consecrated a certain monk Jacobus Baradaeus, to the{46} episcopate, and gave him a “roving commission.” For thirty-five years he wandered from place to place in a beggar’s horse-cloth (bara’da), and reorganized the whole separatist hierarchy.
Their Patriarch claims to be a true representative of the original Patriarchate of Antioch. In the days of their oppression, he was naturally not permitted to reside there, and shifted his quarters from monastery to monastery, till he settled at last at Deir el Za’aferan. The Greeks have of course a Patriarch of the see, though they have to admit the existence of gaps in his line of ancestry, and a Latin claimant of the same was established in the time of the Crusades. These reside now at Damascus and Beyrout respectively.
The Jacobite Church comprises about a quarter of a million adherents in Asiatic Turkey with—we believe—twelve bishops; and there are about the same number under British rule in Malabar.
Neither they nor their eastern neighbours the “Nestorians” hold now (if they ever did) the peculiar heresies which their names suggest, and which their enemies credited them with teaching. Each has now come to teach, and perhaps has always taught, all the doctrine that their Orthodox opponents sought to guard at the councils which these Separatists nevertheless continue to repudiate. The old division continues; but more as a matter of convenience than of principle, and the more intelligent bishops on both sides admit that all real differences have disappeared.
Yet no fusion is likely at present, for the rank and file are unreconciled, and fortify their mutual suspicion with all sorts of groundless ideas. “Is it really true,” asked an old Jebel Tur monk in all simplicity, “that the Nestorians wash their altar with asses’ blood before they celebrate the Eucharist?”
The Nestorian deacon who attended us, and who heard this amazing aspersion, could hardly be restrained from falling on the inquirer there and then!{47}

CHAPTER III

THE MARCHES OF ANCIENT ROME

(DARA AND NISIBIN)

FROM the eastern gate of Mardin the road decants itself plainwards in a skein of curves and zigzags—a vertical descent of 2000 feet, spinning out its gradients to a length of five or six miles. It is not at all a bad road. One could easily bicycle down it—and perhaps even bicycle up it if in specially strenuous mood. But it is, as it were, the swan-song of the modern Ottoman Telfords, and as soon as it reaches the level it reverts into a sheaf of footpaths. Henceforth to the end of our journey we saw no more metalled roads.

We had now, too, a further reminder of the fact that we were quitting civilization, for a couple of zaptiehs rode with us to escort us over the stage to Nisibin. Hitherto such protection had been deemed needless: but in these remoter districts the Government prefers to have some tangible assurance of a European traveller’s safety, seeing that it is liable to be held responsible if he is unfortunate enough to come to grief. Thus that modest intruder finds himself passed on from city to city with all the pomp and circumstance of an armed cavalry escort; and afflicted at every stage with the consciousness that he is passing current at a face value vastly in excess of his intrinsic worth.
The zaptiehs are a sort of military police, analogous to the Spanish Civil Guard or the Royal Irish Constabulary; though we fear that these two corps d’elite would not be likely to feel gratified at a suggestion that such deplorable ragamuffins should “march through Coventry” with them.{48} Personally, for the most part, they are good-humoured and obliging fellows; accepting rough weather and hard lodging with the utmost philosophy. Also they rather welcome the chance of a little escort duty. It is a pleasant change from the monotony of garrison life; and there is a tip to look forward to finally, though this must be “under the rose.” “You have not mentioned that you’ve given us a present?” said one of our fellows with engaging naïveté when we asked him to carry back a letter—“Because it isn’t allowed!”
But though Western civilization extends thus far no longer, there is not wanting tangible evidence to prove that it was here long ago. In the midst of one of the first plain villages there rises, like a lofty aiguille, the angle of a Roman watch tower. It seems impossible that such a slender fragment should be able to withstand wind and weather much longer; but hitherto the huge square blocks have stood firm though all support has fallen away. A Roman church (or more probably a Roman house converted into a church) stands in another village; and at the end of a short day’s journey we turned aside to visit some yet more striking remains.
The mountains at this point ravel out on to the plain in a line of gently sloping spurs, and from between two of these issues a broad and shallow but never-failing stream. The spurs immediately westward of it are conspicuously gashed across with wide deep transverse trenches; and as we draw nearer we perceive that the ridge on each side of the river is crested with a ruined rampart, and that the hollow enclosed between them is a regular sugar bowl of huge disjointed stones. Here and there out of the chaos rises the fragment of a mighty tower or a massive skeleton archway, and presently we can descry a few wretched Kurdish hovels half hidden among the débris of the great devastated city.
Such is now the fortress of Daras, once the Metz or Belfort of its age.

SHEIKH ADI.

The upper end of the buildings showing the forecourt and entrance gateway: and (apparently) “the Proprietor,” seated on the wall above.

In the year 503, after the disastrous campaign which witnessed the fall of Amida and the failure to recapture{49} Nisibis, the Emperor Anastasius took his generals severely to task “for that they did not prosper nor succeed in the war according to his will under the Lord.” The unfortunate generals protested that they could not reasonably expect to defeat a potentate who was manifestly commissioned by Providence to chastise the backsliding Romans—especially when he had such a large army. But they closed their jeremiads with one eminently practical suggestion viz.—that it was quite hopeless to attack Nisibis unless they had a strong base of operations close by. This notion appealed to Anastasius—a great believer in fortification, and the builder of the famous “Long Walls,” the Byzantine Lines of Tchatalja. After some consideration he fixed upon Daras as the site of his new fortress; and (as it was church property) he bought it honestly, and commissioned Thomas, the Bishop of Amida, to undertake the contemplated work. The commander of the covering army was one Felicissimus, of whom it is significantly chronicled that “he was not at all covetous;” but all the engineering work seems to have been supervised by the bishop. Anastasius supplied him with money freely, and engaged that neither he nor his successors should demand any accounts of the expenditure—which seems rather an extreme test even of a bishop’s integrity. He specially stipulated, however, that none of the workmen should be defrauded of their wages, having ascertained (no doubt by a system of trial and error) that “cities (on the frontier) got built quicker that way.” It is worthy of remark that a day’s wage at that time was 4 keratin (2d.)[32] and that the services of an ass were rated as precisely equivalent to a man’s. Upon these principles the work progressed rapidly, and the city was finished in three years; Kobad being engaged upon his eastern frontier, and quite unaware of what was going on.
“Is she not fair, my daughter of a year?” cried Cœur de Lion proudly as he gazed on Chateau Gaillard: and to build Chateau Gaillard in one year was certainly a fine{50} achievement, yet it was as nothing in comparison to the building of Daras in three. It gives us a great idea of the resources of the Byzantine Empire that Anastasius, an undistinguished, albeit a conscientious, ruler should have been able to bequeath to us so superb a monument of his power. Dara is very similar in site, as it is accidentally similar in name, to another Roman foundation, the town of Daroca in Aragon. It lies pooled in a cup-like depression between the two rims of high ground which are crested with its formidable ramparts; and through the midst of it flows the little river, which cannot be diverted anywhere and thus ensures a constant water-supply. At either end of the depression the ramparts stoop from their opposing heights and join hands with each other across the stream. At these points the water is admitted and discharged through cunningly contrived water-gates consisting of several small arches, once defended by metal grilles the mortices for which may still be seen. Formerly no doubt these arches could be closed by sluices. Thus a wide and deep inundation could be formed without the walls at the upper gate, which would provide additional protection; and a similar reservoir could be collected within the walls at the lower gate, and discharged to overwhelm any battering engines that might be advanced against the city from the plain.
The walls which crown the flanking heights are of singularly massive construction, and defended by a deep wide moat cut out of the solid rock. As at Diarbekr and Urfa (and in Spain at Lugo and Astorga) they are strengthened at frequent intervals by solid projecting round towers.
Within the city itself are some even more notable monuments. The builders of the fortress did not rely exclusively on the river for their water-supply, but provided a huge underground cistern, fed by a rock-hewn conduit and capable of storing nearly five million gallons at need. This cistern consists of ten parallel vaulted tunnels, each about 150 feet long and 13 to 14 feet wide, with an internal height of 40 feet from the floor to the crown of the vault. The division walls of this structure are thickly encrusted with{51} lime deposit, thus proving conclusively the purpose for which it was designed.

CROSS SECTION

GREAT GRANARY OF DARAS

A little distance away is a sort of square platform of masonry, rising a few feet above the general level of the ground. We penetrated into it by a dark and narrow passage, and groping our way gingerly down a steep descent by the light of a couple of candles we found ourselves at last in a titanic cellar, 60 feet long and 50 wide, divided by a massive arcade into two naves, and roofed by a double barrel vault 50 feet above the level of the floor. This is{52} doubtless the Great Granary mentioned by Zachariah of Mitylene; but (being underground) it is of course now deemed to have been a dungeon, and is known locally as “the Big Oubliette.” The prodigious size of the stones employed in building it, and the extreme solidity of the masonry, made us think of the famous cisterns at Constantinople as very inferior structures indeed.[33]
The use of such very large stones is a notable feature of Dara and gives a more grandiose character to ruins magnificent in themselves. Two average sized blocks on the ramparts, which still lay conveniently in situ, afforded ample area for the accommodation of a camp bed; and each of the two taken separately must have weighed not much short of a ton. Even the houses appear to have been built of stones as large as those used in the fortifications. It would seem that they were employed in sheer bravado, as was undoubtedly the case with the yet bigger stones of Baalbec. Now all lie scattered at random over the whole area of the city, and it puzzles us not a little to conceive how such singularly solid buildings can have been so utterly overthrown. Earthquakes or battering rams might have demolished them; but then one would expect to find the débris lying in heaps as it fell. The stones might have been removed to construct new houses and enclosures; but then they would be disposed in some sort of regular lines. Did some Timour deliberately give order that no stone should be left upon another? Even he might have been daunted at such an undertaking, when the removal of each several block could employ a file of men for a day.
It is ever a futile task to prop a falling empire by the construction of prodigious defences; but at least Daras filled the gap long enough to witness the dawn of a more prosperous day. In the year 529—twenty-five years after the building of the city—Belisarius faced the Persian army on the flat ground just outside the lower water-gate. Perozes, the Persian commander, led a host of 40,000 soldiers; and{53} the young Roman general had but 25,000, a motley agglomeration of Goths, Huns, and Heruls—for at this period it was the Romans’ custom to impress their Gothic captives to fight against the Persians, and their Persian captives to fight against the Goths. Belisarius distrusted his army; and with very sufficient reason. So great had been the decay of Roman “virtue” that over a generation had elapsed since last they had won a victory in the field! He drew up his troops behind a strong line of entrenchments, so close under the walls of the city that they constituted rather an outwork of the permanent fortifications than regular field works of the orthodox type. Indeed, but that he had some scope for counter attack, he seemed rather preparing for a siege than for a battle. Remarkably timid tactics for a general who was soon to prove himself the most dashing commander of his age!
The Persians must have been pretty confident to venture upon attacking such a position. But Perozes felt no doubt of the issue, and sent in an arrogant message to the city ordering the baths to be made ready for his use that night. His troops attacked the Roman left so strongly as actually to force the trenches; but, disordered by their success, they offered an opening to the Herul cavalry, and a furious charge drove them back in complete disarray. Thus, freed from anxiety for his left, Belisarius was able to employ his whole reserve in a decisive charge on the flank of the Persian left who were endeavouring to envelop his right. This wing, the flower of the Persian army, was cut off and annihilated; but Belisarius, true to his prudent tactics, would not trust his raw troops in a prolonged pursuit. Perozes was thus enabled to carry off most of his wounded; cunningly inviting the citizens of Nisibis to come for the plunder of Daras, and thus obtaining the use of enough wagons to convey his maimed soldiers away.
We outspanned our caravan for the night on the very site of Belisarius’ entrenchments just outside the lower water-gate; for the city enclosure itself is so cumbered with its own ruins that it is actually impossible to take wheeled vehicles inside. We might have carried our baggage in;{54} and the Armenian priest of the village (for there are about fifteen Armenian families living there) offered us the use of his house most pressingly, representing that our so honouring him would “increase his name” among the Kurds. But on this occasion we judged it better to keep all our possessions together, and stay ourselves to watch over their safety; and so (as already hinted) we spread our beds on the ramparts, just high enough up to avoid the mists which might be expected to rise from the stream. It proved rather a draughty lodging, but this fact did not trouble us greatly; and we slept undisturbed until the morning star was high enough to give warning of the coming of the sun.
There is a side-show attached to Dara which is scarcely less interesting than itself; and as soon as we found ourselves in full possession of breakfast and daylight (two events which were practically contemporaneous) we decided that, before continuing our journey, we would turn back a mile or so westward to visit the tombs and caves. These make those conspicuous scars which had already attracted our attention as we approached the city—the wide deep transverse gashes which are scored across the neighbouring hill sides.
The rock-cut moat of the city could supply but a small part of the material required for all the buildings, and accordingly shoulder after shoulder of the hills to the westward has been pierced with quarries for more stone. When the masons had finished their job these quarries were promptly appropriated by a flourishing colony of hermits,[34] who honeycombed all the exposed faces with hundreds of cells and tombs. The cells are mostly cut into the vertical faces; the standard pattern having a round-arched recess{55} for a porch, with a seat on either side of it, and a small square-headed doorway in the middle admitting to a cell about eight feet square. One of the seats in the porch is often hollowed out to form a grave for the occupant of the hermitage or sometimes this niche has been cut out in the floor or wall of his cell. Other graves are above the quarries, sunk vertically into the horizontal surfaces. These have an oblong opening, and widen out below beehive-wise so as to form two or more tombs. The opening was covered in with a gable-shaped sarcophagus lid, and many of these are lying about though none are actually in position. No doubt they have been removed by searchers after buried treasure.
The biggest of all the caves must have served as the anchorites’ church. It has an elaborately carved doorway with bas-relief panels over it representing apparently the Nativity and the Descent into Hades. The interior is irregularly quadrilateral, and must measure about thirty-five feet across. It has a flat ceiling, and is partly surrounded by a gallery, about eight feet wide and eight feet below the ceiling, supported on a range of rock-cut corbelled arches. There is nothing to indicate the position of the altar, and the eastern side is occupied by the doorway; but the altar may have stood in the centre of the floor. The level of the floor itself is also a matter for conjecture, as at present it is deeply covered with débris. The place is now used as a sheep shelter, and is known as the khan or “Inn.” It is lit by a single small window immediately over the door.
There is interest enough at Dara to occupy an archæologist for weeks together—for months if he sees fit to excavate—but we had to resume our journey, and we knew that if we wanted more archæologizing we should have no difficulty whatever in finding opportunity on the road. About three hours eastward of Dara stands another Roman fortalice—a big square castle standing in lonely grandeur amid the desolate plain. The walls are now sadly shattered, excepting the great round bastion which is planted at one of the angles; and within the ruined enclosure is hutted a squalid community of miserable half-naked Kurds. This{56} is doubtless the castle between Nisibis and Daras which Justinian ordered to be built in the first year of his reign. It was not auspiciously founded, for Kobad’s army descended upon the builders before the work was completed, and the Romans were crushingly defeated, leaving most of their commanders[35] on the field. The future course of the war was, however, more favourably influenced by the fact that a certain junior general, of the name of Belisarius, escaped.
Another three hours of slow progress, and we find ourselves approaching another township. The first indication of its neighbourhood is the apparition of a cobble-paved causeway, which gradually consolidates itself out of the dust of the desert, and holds its course steadily onward in a straight undeviating line. Probably it too is Roman, and if so the Romans were the last people who troubled to repair it; for it is so appallingly bumpy, and so frequently intersected by irrigation ditches, that the vehicles tactfully ignore it and keep to the unpaved ground. It leads us at length to a village which is somewhat larger than Dara, but which lacks all Dara’s evidences of bygone wealth and grandeur. This place boasts a khan and a market, and is the seat of a local governor. But if it has not fallen so low as its neighbour, it has fallen infinitely farther: for this wretched hamlet is Nisibis, once the impregnable fortress which marked the furthest limit of the power of Imperial Rome.
Nisibis was won for Rome by the conquering arm of Lucullus. It was known then as Antioch in Mygdonia, because its fertile fields and shady groves irresistibly reminded the Graecian colonists of their lovely Antioch of Daphne. What a satire on Plutarch’s explanation are the grim wastes which now environ it, and the barren hummocks of drift sand which have covered its ruins like a shroud! The Romans fortified the city with a triple rampart and a deep moat, and esteemed it (as it often proved itself) the principal bulwark of the east. They maintained a strong garrison in it; and the inhabitants,{57} living in a state of constant warfare with the Parthians and Sassanid Persians, made almost as reliable soldiers as the regular legionaries themselves.
When Sapor II made war on Constantius it was Nisibis that checked his invasions. Between the years 338 and 350 it sustained no fewer than three sieges, and on each of those three occasions it repulsed the invader from its walls. The last siege was also the greatest. Sapor advanced to the attack at the head of an enormous army drawn from all parts of Persia and India, and pressed his assaults most vehemently for a period of over three months. The garrison was ably commanded by Count Lucilianus, but the soul of the defence was the celebrated bishop St. James of Nisibis; and Sapor, finding that he could make no impression by ordinary methods, conceived the idea of raising an enormous dam to obstruct the Jag-jag river (the ancient Mygdonius) and so flooding the place out. As the city lies in a slight depression this Gargantuan scheme was just feasible; and Sapor did actually contrive to create such an inundation that he could launch a fleet upon it and assail the defenders of the walls on level terms. The combined effect of the flood and the floating batteries opened a breach 150 feet wide, and the Great King ordered an immediate assault: but the attacking columns were bogged in the deep mud, and environed by invisible pot-holes; and to cap all, the elephants stampeded and trampled them underfoot by scores. At nightfall the Persians drew off, and the breach was repaired before morning. Sapor had lost 20,000 soldiers and broke up the siege in despair. Legend asserts that his retreat was much expedited by a prodigious plague of flies which descended on the Persian camp in response to the sainted bishop’s orisons: but a sceptic might argue that when you have an Oriental army, with its usual disregard of every possible sanitary precaution, encamping in a marsh for three months during the height of a Mesopotamian summer, it needs no miraculous interference to account for something phenomenal in the way of flies!
Alas! all these efforts were wasted. Thirteen years{58} later the Emperor Julian was killed in his famous expedition against Ctesiphon. Jovian, in order to extricate the army, was compelled to sign an ignominious treaty; and one of the chief conditions that Sapor insisted upon was that Nisibis should be ceded into his hands. The inhabitants implored the emperor’s pity. Let him but give them leave to defend themselves, they would ask for no external aid. But Jovian was cowed by defeat, and afraid of offending the conqueror: and the townsfolk, well aware that they could expect no mercy from a potentate whom they had thrice discomfited, withdrew with all their possessions and left an empty city in the Persians’ hands.
Nisibis under its new masters proved as impregnable a fortress as ever; but it won a new title to fame while under Sassanian rule. In the year 489 the Monophysite Emperor Zeno suppressed the great College of Edessa on the ground that it was tainted with Nestorianism. The Christian bishop of Nisibis was at that time a certain Bar Soma; a prelate of the type which asserted itself more prominently in the Middle Ages, in such men as Henry Despenser the martial bishop of Norwich, or Carillo the turbulent primate of Toledo. Bar Soma was a personage of some consequence at the Persian Court, and in fact seems to have held a position somewhat akin to Warden of the Marches. He had himself been a scholar at Edessa, and had remained on intimate terms with most of the professors; and he conceived the idea of re-establishing the college in his own cathedral town.
The college thus refounded prospered exceedingly, and remained for many generations the most important educational centre in the East. It boasted about 1000 students (for Oriental students pack close), and though its course was primarily theological, yet it did much to keep alive profane knowledge as well. Thus it forms a not unimportant link between ancient and modern learning. The wisdom of the Greeks, which it received from Edessa, it handed on in its turn to Baghdad and Cordova and Salamanca; and perhaps even Oxford and Cambridge and Paris and Padua may owe to the college of Nisibis more than they are quite aware.{59}
There may well be good booty at Nisibin for an archæologist with a turn for excavation, for the mounds and hillocks which encircle it are manifestly piled on ancient walls. But there is little enough above ground—a bridge which is so badly battered that the carts prefer fording the river; a fragment or two of old walling; and a group of five monolithic columns, about two-fifths buried in débris, which are known as the columns of weighing, and which probably formed part of the peristyle of the forum. There remains, however, one special monument of even more interest to the ecclesiologist than to the antiquarian—the Church of St. James of Nisibis, one of the oldest Christian edifices in the world.

CHURCH OF SAINT JAMES AT NISIBIS

Few indeed are the Christian churches of earlier date than the fifth century. Even the famous basilicas at Ravenna and Parenzo were only erected in the sixth. With{60} the possible exception of Sta. Pudentiana at Rome there is no fourth-century church remaining in Europe, and even in Asia and Africa the examples may be counted on the fingers of the hand. But the date of St. James’ church at Nisibis cannot possibly be later than the year 363, when the city was ceded to the Persians; and as it was built to receive the tomb of the saint (who died shortly after 350), it may be not improbably regarded as the citizens’ thank-offering for their deliverance from the great siege.
The church was originally triple, dedicated no doubt to the Holy Trinity, and consisting of three square cellæ placed side by side. Each cella measured about twenty-five feet in width, and had a small semicircular recess in the centre of the eastern wall. A pair of arched openings, each about four feet wide, gave access from cella to cella; and a wider archway in each of the western walls opened into a triple narthex, furnished with three double doorways which opened into a courtyard.
The central cella is almost perfect as high as the cornice; but is roofed with a modern dome and pendentives, and has nothing to indicate conclusively the form of the original roof. The northern cella has been more damaged and restored; but still retains the narthex doorways (now blocked) which the central narthex has lost. The southern cella, with its narthex, has been entirely destroyed.
The side openings are spanned by heavy stone lintels, as also are the doorways in the narthex; but the western arches, and these over the apses, are open. Around them all internally runs a bold and richly carved architrave, which is also continued intermediately as a string along the walls. The foliage and mouldings throughout are thoroughly classical in feeling, and the work has all been executed in very finished style.
The tomb of St. James is in a tiny crypt under the altar in the centre of the central cella. It consists of a stone sarcophagus covered with a heavy ridged lid; and it is highly probable that his bones have never been disturbed.
The central cella is still used for Christian worship, and{61} has probably been so used continuously ever since the church was built. The northern cella, however, is not at present used. The Christians who live at Nisibin are Jacobites, and their Qasha inhabits a sort of little prophet’s chamber built up against the northern wall of the church.
A change had to be made in our personnel for the ensuing section of the journey. The zaptiehs who had accompanied us from Mardin had reached the end of their beat, and we had to apply for a fresh escort to carry us on to Mosul. One of our two new protectors had travelled with “Rabbi Mr. Wigram” before and “knew him to be virtuous and generous,” so relations promised to be harmonious. They were instructed to call for us at the khan at daybreak, “as soon as there was light enough to distinguish between a black thread and a white.” They turned up fairly punctually; but it then transpired that two of our horses needed shoeing, and that the drivers (of course) had not considered it necessary to attend to the matter until it was time to start. Thus the day was quite two hours old when we forded the Jag-jag river, and bumped off along the causeway which leads from the end of the bridge.
Eastward from Nisibin to Mosul—a distance of 120 miles as the crow flies—lies a stretch of unmitigated desert which is known by the expressive name of the Chôl. For a journey of four or five days (according to the conditions of travelling) you pass no permanent human habitation, and the same monotonous level lies before you at every stage. You must carry your own provisions with you, your own shelter for your nightly bivouacs, and (if you are prudent) your own furnace for boiling the water. Even that water itself is only found at rare intervals in stagnant muddy puddles or intermittent and starveling streams.
The Chôl is no sandy desert like the Obi or the Sahara. It is rather what the Spaniards would call a dehesa or despoblada—a waste which might be made fertile by the expenditure of a little pains. It is covered with sparse grass and stunted shrubs, and thistles which are by no means stunted; and a little desultory cultivation which is carried on along the outskirts proves that, with the{62} re-establishment of irrigation, it might again be converted into one of the granaries of the world. Once it supported an immense population, for it was the home of the ancient Assyrians; and though the nucleus of that nation was concentrated at Nineveh and the adjacent townships, yet there must have been thousands of surrounding villages to supply food for the crowded cities and recruits for the mighty armies which dominated the whole Eastern world.
They have left some trace of their handiwork, for the whole extent of the desert is studded with gigantic tels spaced six or seven miles apart—huge mounds of earth as big as Silbury Hill. What purpose these can have originally served is a matter of much conjecture. Possibly they were sepulchral tumuli, possibly the mounts of village castles, possibly high places for the performance of sacrificial rites; but in any case it is evident that they cannot have been erected without a vast amount of human labour, and that the whole of the present population would not suffice to raise one. Now they serve chiefly as landmarks by which the faintly marked road can steer its course towards the horizon; and in several instances they still form burial places, possibly from some vague feeling that they must have been sacred long ago.
The more direct southerly road from the Euphrates ferry to Mosul traverses this desolate region for a journey of fully ten days; but the three or four days extra entailed by the divergence through Diarbekr bring with them their own compensation in the shape of greater interest on the way. Moreover the Chôl has its dangers. In summer it is a veritable furnace, and tall awe-inspiring dust devils stalk about it like wandering Jann. But the chief terror of travellers is the “Poison Wind” or Sâm, a faint invisible eddy of scorching air, which will pick out a single man or beast from the midst of a caravan and strike him down instantly senseless, sometimes even killing him on the spot.
At the other end of the scale the district is not exempt from blizzards. In the extraordinarily severe winter of 1910-1911 the northern part of the Chôl was visited by a prodigious snowstorm—a most unusual phenomenon—and{63} many parties of Arabs were positively snowed under in their encampments and perished of cold and hunger before they were able to extricate themselves.[36] A wandering Kurd related to us how he had stumbled on such a camp after the visitation was over. His suspicion that something was amiss was first aroused by the fact that he encountered no challenge either from man or dog. When he came to the tents he found them full of dead bodies. The only living creatures among them were one old woman and a mare. Feeling sure that the old woman must die in any case he only brought the mare away with him; “but she died too,” he said plaintively, “before I could get her to my camp.”
More than one carriage load of travellers perished on the road in that catastrophe; but our only discomfort on this occasion was a steady downpour of rain. We were told that we ought to feel grateful for it—that at least it would ensure us against any shortage of water. But no one can be expected to feel very grateful for five successive rainy bivouacs: and even our zaptiehs grumbled a little—three wet days they were prepared for, but no one ever expected to get more! Our horses were the principal sufferers, for the wheels bit deep into the sodden ground and picked up huge dollops of loam which festooned themselves around the felloes. We walked many miles to relieve them; but it was like walking over wet plough-land in England, and we were obliged to pause every few paces in order to disburden ourselves of the lumps which had balled on our feet. Stiff European boots are not nearly so good for such work as the flexible brogues of the natives; and the spongy pads of the camels are apparently the best things of all.
Some of the wild life of the desert showed itself in a herd of gazelle, which cantered across our pathway a mile or so ahead. We roused, too, a flock of herons, several sheldrake,{64} a wild goose or two, and an occasional covey of larks. After dark we became aware of the jackals, which began whining dolefully around us; and on one occasion at nightfall, loping along the skyline just over our bivouac, we espied a solitary wolf. Human beings were a very great rarity, despite the fact that we were following a recognized highway, and for two consecutive days the only sign of their neighbourhood was a solitary black Arab tent which we spied some four miles to the right. Twice, however, we encountered a caravan of camels—about seventy strong in one instance, and about thirty in the other. Camels are preferred to mules on the plains as they carry much heavier burdens. Moreover one man (with a donkey) can look after seven or eight camels, whereas a caravan of mules requires about a man apiece.
Our choice of camping-grounds was dictated each night by the presence of water; for despite the steady downpour very little remained upon the surface, and the rain apparently soaks through immediately into the underlying strata, as on the Causses of Auvergne. The water was always muddy and sometimes bitter; but as we invariably boiled it, and kept the beasts away from it till we had filled our kettles, we believe that we swallowed nothing worse than sterilized mud. We used to spread our beds on the lee edge of our waterproof ground sheets, and draw the outer edge over us as an additional protection. But the rain sometimes penetrated everything, and in the morning we would find great pockets of water between the double thicknesses of the waterproof sheets. Decidedly camping-out is an amusement to be practised in the summer when the nights are short, for nights in the open are very tedious. You turn in about seven-thirty, and awake (thinking it nearly dawn) to find that it is eleven. You wake again about two; and then at gradually diminishing intervals, till at last you are rejoiced to find it five-thirty—breakfast time. Once in the middle of the night we were disturbed by one of the horses breaking picket; and the owner arose and gave chase, with frequent ejaculations of Mashallah! (Praise God!)—hardly the sort of comment that one would expect from a British dragoon!{65}
In the afternoon of the fourth day the zaptiehs began to hold out hopes to us of lodging that night under shelter; for a big semi-permanent Arab encampment was generally to be found at this stage. And sure enough a little later we were able to make out some eight or nine big black tents, grouped around the remains of a ruined village with the wreck of a castle on its tel. Several such ruined villages are found here and there about the desert, but the inhabitants have long since been badgered out of them by Turkish tax-collectors and Arab raiders. The Arabs, though delightful hosts and most romantic features in a landscape, are not desirable neighbours. They submit to no control whatever; and, only a few months before, they had pillaged a Government caravan, which was conveying a big pumping engine to Mosul, and carried off all the gun-metal bearings under the delusion that they were gold![37]
We dispatched a zaptieh ahead of us to announce our approach and to bespeak hospitality; but dusk had already fallen before we ourselves arrived. The jaded horses had heavy work to drag the carriages forward; and we walking on in front of them, reached the outskirts of the camp a considerable distance ahead. Here, however, we were met by our returning zaptieh, who would not hear of our proceeding further. The Sheikh Birader Effendi (Milord Brother Esquire) had already caused him great scandal by walking so much and so needlessly when he had hired a carriage to ride in; and now he insisted that we should fatally compromise our dignity if we did not drive up like gentlemen to our entertainer’s tent door.
We drove the last 200 yards accordingly, and dismounted at one of the largest tents; where we were courteously welcomed by Sheikh Ahmed Agha, a fine-looking elderly Arab of medium height and active build, with a pointed grizzled beard and a nose like the beak of an eagle. He shook hands with us à la Franga, and led us into his tent,{66} where he made us sit down opposite to him on mattresses spread on the ground.
The tent was some forty yards long and twelve yards wide; about twelve feet high at the ridge and three to four feet at the eaves. It was supported upon a row of seven central poles, and the guy ropes were exceedingly long, the pegs being three dozen yards beyond the overhang of the eaves. The space between the eaves and the ground was filled up partly by hanging cloths, and partly by piles of dried thistles, which come in useful as fuel. The tent cloth was of black goats’ hair, very loosely woven like coarse English sacking. We could see daylight through it everywhere; particularly at the (horizontal) seams, where it gaped like an old umbrella. The smoke oozed freely through it; and next morning every tent in the camp was veiled in a sort of blue nimbus, the combined effect of smoke and evaporation. Such a texture can afford but indifferent protection against rain, but is needed chiefly as a shelter from the sun.
At the further end of the tent were about a dozen shackled camels, which we could hardly see in the darkness, but heard grunting and gurgling all night. Next the camels were four or five mares tethered to a manger. White mares and flea-bitten greys are most in demand in this country, as they are considered to feel the heat less than bays or browns. Black horses are reputed unlucky, and may consequently often be bought cheap.
Next, in the centre of the tent, sat the Sheikh; with his back against one of the poles, and the fire burning on the ground before him: and opposite him, with our backs against the next pole, sat we. Behind us was a reed partition shutting off the women’s quarters, and with them (to judge by the sounds) lived the poultry and the sheep. A sort of enclosed yard, hedged in with piles of dried thistles, had been formed for their special benefit outside their end of the tent.
There was no light except the fire and our own imported candle. When the inmates wanted a blaze they threw on an armful of thistles; but their principal fuel consisted of{67} cakes of dried camels’ dung which an old fire tender built up in the form of a hollow cone. Our zaptiehs and several of the Sheikh’s tribesmen sat with us; and two small boys, his grandsons, cuddled themselves up against his knees. The Sheikh of course spoke only Arabic, and we had to converse through an interpreter; but one of the zaptiehs was a great chatterbox, so the conversation did not flag. The women naturally did not show, but (like Sarah, Abraham’s wife) they were by no means inattentive listeners; and the Sheikh got frequently prompted by a shrill “Ask him so and so!” from behind the screen.
From time to time we were served with tiny cups of black coffee containing about a tablespoonful each; and our supper consisted of a dish of fried eggs and dates. We have been told by a travelled Syrian (though we will not vouch for his authority), that an uninvited guest should be cautious when he is offered coffee by an Arab chief. He may accept the first two cups—that is just conventional politeness—but the offer of a third is a hint that he had better be going, and if he is too obtuse to take it, the next hint may be given with a gun! We, however, drank several cups and experienced no resentment; and our night in the black tents of Kedar was one of the pleasantest on the road.
We made a late start the next morning, for it would have been discourteous to hurry; and apparently Arabs, when camping, are not particularly early birds. Our host bade us farewell at his tent door, and accepted with great amiability the trifling present which we offered to him in recognition of his hospitality. Any suggestion of payment would of course have been an insult; but a present is often expected, and always well received.
It was a brighter morning; and the zaptiehs hazarded an opinion that “Allah would be merciful.” Far to the north we could see once more the mountains of Kurdistan, with gleams of sun sparkling on their snow-fields; and nearer to us on the southward lay the long barren ridges of the Sinjar. But this promise of better things was of very short duration, and before mid-day the rain had recommenced.{68}
At nightfall we reached our last camping-ground, overlooking the river Tigris; and here we underwent our last drenching—the longest and heaviest of all. We lay dozing under our waterproofs listening to the patter of the raindrops, and fondly hoping that the dawn might bring us just five minutes respite to enable us to pack up and stow away in the dry. But at last we started up desperately—bundled our beds on to the carriages—and dashed away dripping and reckless without even waiting for food. We knew that just twelve miles ahead we should find real houses with roofs to them—that an hour would bring us to cultivated fields again, and two hours within sight of Mosul. We passed through the city gate with as much relief as the snail and the tortoise must have felt when they entered Noah’s Ark at the tail of the procession; and descended joyfully from that weary araba in which we had been cooped up like Bajazets for a journey of seventeen days.{69}

CHAPTER IV

THE BURDEN OF NEWER NINEVEH

(MOSUL)

THERE are more pleasant places in the world than the city of Mosul. Hot, white, and dusty, it lies on a rather “hummocky” site along the right (or western) bank of the Tigris, looking across to where the mounds of Nebi Yunus and Koyunjik mark the site of Nineveh.

It boasts a population of about eighty thousand souls, of whom perhaps a fourth are Christians, and five thousand Jews: and the whole is surrounded by a wall and moat which enclose rather more than a square mile of ground—an area about equal to the city of London.
The wall may follow old lines, but is itself no more than a century old. It is rapidly splitting to pieces owing to the poorness of its construction, a process much assisted both by private citizens and by the Government, both of whom wish to make use of its stones. Probably, the foundations are shaky, for the whole town suffers from that failing; and every minaret in the place has a conspicuous kink in it, except the principal one, which has two.
The town does not now fill up its walls, a large quarter at the northern end having been so devastated by plague about three hundred years ago that it was abandoned. This area now remains empty, and there is in consequence a certain amount of “overflow” beyond the walls at the southern end of the town, where stands the Government serai with the barracks of the troops in its neighbourhood.
Mosul is not a seaport, though the Government of his Britannic Majesty would seem to be invincibly ignorant {70}on this point. When the Consulate was re-established here a few years ago, the gentleman appointed asked for a grant for the furnishing of his reception-room, but was refused, on the ground that his only guests would be “a few old sea captains”; to this day his successors are required to make an annual return of the British shipping that has discharged cargo here, though nothing except a “keleg” (the local type of raft, of which we shall hear more) ever comes within three hundred miles of the place!
Mosul boasts one vice that is at least unusual in the land, for it is a smoky town. A pall hangs over much of the city, from the kilns where the local marble is burnt into lime. Nearly the whole city is built in what is known as jess construction. This is a primitive type of building, the walls of all houses being formed with rough blocks of stone, “balled” in lime cement, and so put together. The roof is domed in the same way, but to save material the spandrils are usually filled in with large earthenware pots, which may or may not stand the weight put upon them. As a style, it is deceptive, for it looks solid, enduring, and weather-proof, and yet is none of the three: a house built in it seldom stands for eighty years, the thrust of the dome normally bringing the walls down by the end of that period.
The construction, which cracks freely, has a way of absorbing much of the rain that falls upon it, so that a house is seldom really dry in winter; and the cement has a delightful trick (which is appreciated during a Mosul summer) of storing up heat during the day and gradually releasing it during the night.
The town is composed, like most Oriental cities, of a maze of winding featureless lanes, all of the same white cement, and rarely of a width that forbids a cat to jump across from one roof to the opposite; they are innocent of lamps, or rather were so till the late Nazim Pasha (then Vali of Baghdad, and superintendent of this province also) visited the place; when paraffin lamps were put up in his honour, and now stand unlighted on their brackets. The pavement is of large cobble-stones, worn smooth by many generations of slippers and bare feet; and the whole town is, of course, innocent of drains. Hence, in the rainy season{71} it is well to put a portable bridge across the street if you propose to visit your neighbour, or to wear wooden pattens some six inches in height.
Only the doorways break the blank walls in the street fronts of the houses, but the courtyards within are undeniably picturesque, and are of a plan that is at least ancient, for it is identical with that found in the cities of ancient Assyria, unearthed by the German excavator of to-day. An entry, carefully constructed so as to prevent the passer-by from seeing within even when the door is open, conducts into a courtyard, surrounded by a two-storied cloister, carried on monolithic pillars of the local grey alabaster. The court is usually paved, and the house-front often cased, with the same material. A deep open recess at one side provides a summer lounge. A water conduit usually runs through the court itself, and the central part is often used as a garden.
The house of a rich man invariably has its serdab, or underground summer-parlour, where you may get any coolness that is going in the fierce summer heats. The thermometer then goes up regularly to 120°, and seldom sinks below 95° by night or day—a fact attested by a certain British Consul, who tried the experiment of hatching out a sitting of eggs, left uncovered in a disused (and perhaps rather specially hot) room of his Consulate.
Resident Europeans say that the serdab may be cool, but that, unless very well seasoned, you are apt to pay for the use of it by a dose of the country fever.
Hot winds blow in from the desert which comes up to the very walls, and the dust from the kilns and pounding-yards (where mules drag rude rollers over the lime to grind it to powder) flies on their wings all over the city; so that, from this cause, and from the glare of the white walls ophthalmia is even more prevalent here than in most Oriental cities, and lung disease of various kinds abounds. Another local plague is the famous “button,” which is found from Aleppo to Baghdad, and is believed to go back to the days of Job. This is sometimes called “the date,” from its appearance, and is no more than a{72} painless, but very unsightly, boil; which refuses to heal for twelve months and leaves a permanent scar behind. The infection is believed to be carried by flies, and the disease certainly manifests itself, as a rule, on the face or hands, while those who shave are particularly liable to it. Local scandal tells of a certain German Consul who despised all precautions and slept on the roof of his house without curtains, and (the night being hot) without pyjamas also; an imprudence for which he paid the penalty in thirty fine “buttons” scattered all over his consular person!
Thermantidotes, ice supplies, and all other luxuries of English life in India are unknown in Mosul, though an enterprising Christian resident in the town did once introduce an ice-machine. This was certainly welcomed by the Vali, as the only sign of the new régime that he had found in Mosul (it was shortly after the revolution), and as the only token of progress of any sort that he could note as a result of the fifty years that had elapsed since he had formerly been in the place as a very junior civil officer.
There was strong conservative opposition to the introduction even of such a mild instalment of progress; though perhaps it might have been mollified, had the pioneer been a little more liberal with his distribution of bakhshish! As it was weird accusations circulated against the new engine; it smelt so abominable that the whole neighbourhood of the factory was unhealthy (as though one stink more or less could make any difference in Mosul); it turned out its ice red-hot, and materially increased the heat that it was proposing to alleviate; and it was an impious interference with the decrees and arrangements of Allah. The ice-merchant, however, had not been born in Mosul, and bred in America, without learning a thing or two; and he craftily put the general commanding the garrison on the free-list for ice. He calculated that, after the first week or so, a gentleman, who did not keep the law about total abstinence too strictly, would not tolerate any interference with the coolness of his drinks. That expedient worked admirably, and all interference was summarily squashed, for so long as the machine continued to work at all. That, however,{73} was not many weeks, for no machinery that is not absolutely and completely “fool-proof” can stand the handling it gets from an Arab, and in Mosul the simplest repair may necessitate months of delay. There will be no market for machinery in the interior of Turkey, until good repair shops can be provided as well.
As capital of the province Mosul is the residence of a Vali, but the town is administered under him by an “administrative council of reputable citizens,” who are popularly believed to be the most corrupt gang of the sort in all Turkey. And we devoutly hope that the imputation is true, for any clique which is more corrupt than they are must be black indeed. Their leader is one Haji Ahmed, “son of the soap-seller,” ibn Sabonji; a large landed proprietor who has accumulated his estate by the simple process of ordering any unhappy Naboth whose land bordered on his own to sell to him at any price that his big neighbour cared to name. If the small man consented, well and good; if not, then an accusation against him, accompanied with a trifle of bakhshish to the investigating judge, secured that the imprudent Naboth should live untried in the town prison till such time as he should see reason.
This worthy has had ups and downs in his life, and once fell very foul of a Vali, who was seized with natural zeal to check the plundering of the public purse when he found that Sabonji Pasha had laid hands on certain funds that he had intended to appropriate himself! Thus that distinguished member of the town council was pilloried; i.e. was put on a donkey with his face blackened and turned to the tail, and so led round the town; being thereafter put into the cesspool of the Government “Serai” to pass the night. “Iyba” (shame) such as this would end the career of most men, but Sabonji has some unusual gifts, and intrigue and bribery soon brought him into power again.
The fact that one of the finest and largest houses in the town was built by one of the smaller legal officials, nominally out of fifteen months’ saving of a salary which, when paid, amounted to sixty pounds per annum, may perhaps be evidence of what “pickings” amount to in the trade of{74} law; and the story of a recent episode (occurring in the year of grace 1910) in the career of a prominent and highly respected citizen of the town will speak more clearly than long descriptions.
Seyyid Ullah was the principal burglar of Mosul, having inherited a practice in that profession from his father, as naturally as son may follow sire in the medical business in England. Housebreaking was what he specialized in, and the usual mode of procedure was to dig through the wall of a house with pickaxes from the street; it having been found, by experience, that this was less laborious than breaking down an iron-bound door. Of course, arrangements had to be made that the police should be well away on the other side of the town (if they were not engaged, as sometimes happened, in securing the ends of the street against any interruption), but there was seldom any difficulty about that. It was an understood thing, seemingly, that you must not interfere with the trade by which a man earned his bread; and Seyyid Ullah was only held to have over-stepped his legitimate rights once—when he cut off a woman’s hands! Even then, it was admitted in extenuation that there really was no other way of getting her gold bangles.
Having, acquired a competence in his profession, Seyyid Ullah retired as he grew older; but, like other energetic gentlemen, found that he really needed something to do. For this reason, he took to smuggling tobacco, a profitable occupation, but one that brought him into collision with the Government in a way that mere burglary had never done—for tobacco is a Government monopoly. So one night a caravan of mules on their way to his house were attacked by the guards of the “Regie,” and not only were the loads lost, but there was a dead policeman to explain. He had died of a Mannlicher bullet; and there was only one rifle of that type in Mosul—the property of Seyyid Ullah; who notoriously allowed nobody else to handle it. Moreover the bullet had apparently come from a roof where that poor man was standing at the time.
Some unscrupulous enemy put all these coincidences before the Government, with the result that Seyyid Ullah{75} was arrested, and even ordered into gaol. Not that he entered it, for gaol is not for such as he; he merely sat in the coffee-shop outside, and when that enemy who had given the information went past on his way to market, he was mobbed and hustled by the Seyyid’s followers, till a formal petition had to be sent in to the Vali that he should be requested to go inside. Of course they gave him the best room, with a window looking over the street; and the governor of the prison used to give him his company to dinner and pass the time over a backgammon board; but he complained that the damp was bad for his rheumatism.
At last the worthy man was tried; and acquitted without a stain upon his character. The court held (so far as foreign residents could understand) that the policeman had been guilty of contributory negligence, in that he got in the way of a bullet that was travelling about on its lawful occasions; and that all facts about the make of the rifle, and so on, were irrelevant details.
A free man again, Seyyid Ullah came at once to call upon the British Consul, to explain that he quite understood that his release from the machinations of his enemies was due solely to the influence of his Excellency the Bey; and that he was more than ready to undertake any job the Consul desired, in the way of removing any objectionable person, for he must own that the expenses incidental to his acquittal had made a sad hole in his savings!
Some time previous to this, there had been great complaining among the merchants of Mosul over the depredations of a certain gang of thieves, all of whom were well known to the police, and who were plundering peaceful citizens apparently at their own sweet will.
Authority, though most unwilling, was prodded into some sort of activity, and that particular gang was arrested and stowed in gaol. The robberies, however, did not diminish a whit; and after a while the governor of the prison pointed out this fact to the Vali. Evidently “those poor men” had been wrongly arrested after all, and ought in fairness to be released—seeing that they had never been{76} tried. This seemed reasonable, but there was the usual delay before doing anything, and in those few days the true explanation came to light. The honourable the governor of the prison was in the habit of letting the gang in question out of the gaol every night, “to go and sleep at their own houses.” They returned again before dawn, thus getting the most satisfactory alibi any man could desire; while, in consideration of his complacency, the governor was taking half their plunder! It is true that this official was dismissed from his post in consequence, but apparently he received no further penalty of any sort.
This may, perhaps, sound a “tough yarn”; yet we may find a fairly recent parallel for it in England. The memoirs of William Hickey record an even worse scandal of one of the London bailiffs in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Our boasted superiority to this sort of thing is of very recent date, and perhaps will not be of very long duration.
The Governor-General or Vali, who ruled this city of confusion and corruption, was perhaps as good a man as could have been selected for a job where his powerlessness to effect any real improvement would have broken the heart of anyone who still had any enthusiasms or delusions left.
Tahir Pasha was an Albanian by blood, though he had grown grey in the Sultan’s service, and had certainly never seen his own mountains since boyhood. Still, “once an Arnaut, always an Arnaut,” and, as a general rule, men of that very striking race are the best possible Ottoman officials; particularly in places where their duty is (or is supposed to be) the preservation of an even balance between the various Christian and Mussulman races.
It is impossible for an Arnaut to despise all Christians just because of their religion; for a large proportion of his own race are of that creed, and it is an axiom that every Arnaut is congenitally superior to every other specimen of manhood. That being so, he may despise all his subjects equally (and very probably does so), but at least he does not despise any one set specially, and there is always a chance of his doing some justice among them.{77}
And this Tahir Pasha did, to the limits of his not very extensive power. He had no great belief in Reform, or for that matter in anything else (except the straightness of certain English gentlemen whom he knew, and in the genius of his favourite hero, Admiral Nelson): and he held shrewdly that “you cannot build very high, when your bricks are made of wet mud”—and of Mosul slime at that he might have added, though he did not say so in words. Still, under his rule nobody’s lot was intolerable if it was impossible for anybody to be really comfortable; and he had absolutely nothing to learn in the art of keeping a simmering province from boiling over, when the Government had no force to back its orders, and did not wish to have any open row. He was an elderly man, tall and portly; with a “short” face, framed in a close-cropped, white beard, and a shrewd and humorous expression. Nature had given him a most attractive manner; and by virtue of it he had survived two revolutions in the country, being the only man of his rank to do so. When things went amiss, “he sat on the stile and continued to smile,” and almost always found that the method softened the heart of the most furious of cows.
Further, he was singularly cleanhanded, as Ottoman officials go. Even those who declared that he took bribes in his youth admitted that he refused them in his old age—“unless they were very big,” they added. Well, for the bribes, what is an official to do, whose salary, is in the first place, wholly inadequate; and in the second, not paid? When he did not need them, he ceased to take them. “How otherwise? I liked him, I confess,” as Browning put it, of a character that much resembled the old Albanian; whose name (by the way) is, being interpreted, “Innocent,” and who had the reputation throughout his province of never sending a petitioner away dissatisfied, and yet of never making a promise that it was inconvenient to keep.
Moreover, there were times when Tahir Pasha could insist on justice; and the fact is rare in Turkey. In 1910 a particularly dastardly murder was committed in Mosul, the murderer being a Christian by race, a member of the “Chaldaean” or “Uniat Nestorian” Church; while{78} the victim was of the older and independent Nestorian body.[38] The murderer was, most deservedly, sentenced to death; but that does not at all necessarily imply execution in Turkey. To begin with, Ottoman law lays it down that in a murder case the next of kin of the victim has the right to require the remission of the death sentence if he desires it. This is no doubt a relic of the days when every man could avenge or forgo his own quarrels as he chose; but in practice, it works out very inconveniently for the man in question, who, in addition to losing his own nearest relative, has to undergo a lot of “peaceable persuasion” from the murderer’s relations, till he chooses to exercise the right. In this case, however, the next of kin, also a Nestorian, stood firm, and claimed his legal revenge.
On this the murderer showed the real depth of his Christianity by sending word to Tahir Pasha that if his life were spared he would turn Moslem. Whether the Mollahs were desirous of obtaining so doubtful a convert does not appear, but at least the Pasha was not eager.
“Of course, I am bound to be glad that he proposes to turn Moslem,” he said grimly. “It may even be better for him in the next world. Still, his head has got to come off in this.”
But now a third difficulty arose, from the fact that the lawful executioner refused to act. Like Koko in “The Mikado,” this Monsieur de Strasbourg declared that he “had never cut off a gentleman’s head in his life, and did not know how it was done.” Under these circumstances, there was nothing for it but to call for a volunteer; and another relative of the murdered man generously offered to do his best, if they would lend him a sabre. “You had better do your best,” said some official, “for if you fetch the head off with one chop you shall have thirty pounds, but if it takes a second blow you go to prison for five years!” Under this stimulus the amateur executioner did his part to admiration, and took the head off finely.
Even so there was an afterpiece to the play, for many folk made the conduct of this murderer a ground for a most{79} unfair attack on the Patriarch of the Chaldaean Church, saying, “Now we see what sort of Christian Mar Immanuel trains.” The retort that his Grace made, if not exactly scrupulous, was at least effective. Ignoring the offer to turn Moslem altogether, he declared, “Pupil of mine? He certainly was, and I am proud of him. He is a Christian martyr, for he would not have been executed if it had not been for that wicked Nestorian heretic!” And he cited in proof of his saintliness the “miraculous” light above the grave.
The light was there certainly, a form of phosphorescence that is seen at times above a fresh grave in that dry air, and which is usually taken as a proof of the sanctity of the occupant. We suppose that we may be thankful that this rather doubtful character was not enrolled among the saints.
It will be inferred from the foregoing incident that religion in Mosul is of a somewhat militant type. It is in fact one of the most fanatical towns in the empire; and was surely the only place where men wept openly in the streets on hearing of the deposition of Abdul Hamid, and exclaimed, “Now is the pillar of Islam fallen.”
The establishment of a British Consulate there, after a long interregnum, was either the cause or excuse for an outbreak. Certain Dervishes fastened on the fact that the flagstaff on the Consulate was higher than the crescent on the dome of a certain tomb, called the tomb of Cassim, where a descendant of the Prophet was interred. It was, of course, intolerable that the accursed red-cross flag should flaunt itself above the crescent, and a mob assembled at the Consul’s gates, shouting under the leadership of a Dervish of some fame, “O Fatima, Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, will you not avenge the shame of your descendant?”
Rather strangely it had never occurred to them to resent the fact that a Christian Church had been standing higher than the tomb for centuries; yet the Consulate was in fact an empty monastery, rented from the authorities of the “Jacobite” Church by its present occupier.{80}
Of course, the British official respects the monastic churches, which number two; and they are used for service on certain festal days.
As for the tomb which caused the emeute; if Fatima, or somebody else, does not see to it soon, it will disappear into the Tigris, on the bank of which river it stands. The current is eating into the bank under its foundations, and the whole fabric is leaning over dangerously. Its fall would be a loss, for it is a fine specimen of Arab architecture; and besides, the British Consul would be blamed. Obviously, the cause of the disaster will be Cassim’s desire to be rid of such bad company.
As a city Mosul is singularly well be-bishoped. No fewer than three Roman Catholic prelates exercise jurisdiction in it over their various flocks; and there is, in addition, at least one “Jacobite” bishop; one Nestorian (who is at present in exile on the charge that his presence is a cause of disturbance to other people), and sundry Armenian, Greek, and Anglican Christians who render obedience to none of the resident bishops at all. The facts will bear a word of explanation; particularly as the existence of more than one Roman Catholic bishop in one diocese seems strangely contradictory to the discipline of that Church elsewhere.
In the days of the Byzantine Empire the attempt to enforce Greek uniformity on all nations resulted in various national stocks (Syrian, Armenian, and Egyptian, for instance) adopting any “heresy” that chanced to be on the tapis, as a protest against what they regarded as “Greek dictation.” While the dispute, both doctrinal and national, was still being fought out, the great Mussulman invasions began; and the nationalities in question cheerfully accepted the Mohammedan rule, which gave to them a religious freedom which the Greek Christian Empire had denied. The Arab, and the Turk who followed him, were perfectly willing to see their Christian subjects divided as much as they liked; and recognized the Armenian, Syrian, Chaldaean, and Coptic nations as “millets” in their empire; a “millet” being the technical term for a subject nation of Christians,{81} organized (as they always were) in a church, under their own hierarchy of Patriarch, bishops, and clergy. Thus these various national churches, all called heretical by both Greeks and Latins, continued to exist under Turkish rule.



//////////////////
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44417/44417-h/44417-h.htm
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////