Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram

“ 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.” ”

“ There are far finer Assyrian sculptures in the Louvre and the British Museum than the grim, gaunt, battered sentinels that keep watch over the Gomel vale. But ranged along a Bloomsbury corridor they are obviously mere graven images; while enthroned amid the solitudes of their own eerie mountains they seem to be the very gods themselves.
There are several similar bas-reliefs scattered here and there about the mountains—some fairly well preserved like those at Malthaiyah between Dohuk and Alkosh, some now almost obliterated like that by the gate of Amadia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But at last the absurdity of the impasse forced even the Tashnakists to be a little more reasonable.
“We work for those who come a hundred and fifty years hence,” said Aram proudly to the Vali.
“Leave that to Allah,” said the more practically minded Turk, “and help us Turks to work for to-morrow.”
“Well you see, I do not believe in Allah,” said the Armenian; who, like most of these Fedais, had been so highly educated that it was impossible for him to believe that any power could have made so supreme a chef d’œuvre as his magnificent self. ”

“ We were rising on to the top of the precipice which had overshadowed our morning’s march. The last pitch was the steepest of any; but here the ground was less rugged, and a few sketchy outlines of terraces tried to pose as cultivated fields. At last we emerged on a tiny plateau, a sprocket on the slope of the mountain, and beheld the dozen rough stone cabins which compose the village of Erdil.
Erdil is not the remotest spot on earth; for beyond it we could descry another and yet remoter Kurdish village some five hours further up the vale. ”

“ A man who can stand at Akra, and think that the rugged ridge behind that town is the only obstacle between him and Gawar Plain, has the strangest ideas of the land he is sending his subordinates into!
No doubt Petros was to blame. An Assyrian who wants to get to a place will tell you that the road is easy, with the gayest defiance of facts; and men who will go off with a small raiding party, with no equipment save rifles and the clothes they wear, have not the least notion that “an army cannot charge in and out again like a troop of hussars.” ”

“ Armenians were very convenient underlings in all the work of governing. “We Turks do not know how to make money, we only know how to take it;” and a Turk does not know to this day, and probably never will learn, how really to govern a country. His sole conception is to occupy the land, and take as much money from his subjects as his needs require. His instincts are really those of the nomad; the rayats are his sheep and cows,—there to be milked. He does not want to kill them, for he is a kindly fellow; and besides, who ever kills his own cattle{240} wantonly? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our day’s stage ended at Akra; a considerable mountain township and the seat of a Turkish kaimakam, a departmental governor, subordinate in the present instance to the Vali of the province of Mosul. Akra displays itself most imposingly to a traveller approaching from the westward, and indeed forms a striking spectacle from whatever point it is viewed. Behind it a group of steep-pitched ridges are gabled out from the main mountain chain like a range of gigantic dormers, and drop down in rugged hipped ends to the level plain far below. ”

“ Howbeit that householder had a wife, and she was a fair woman and a wise; and when she saw her husband sorrowing, she said unto him, “What aileth thee, O my lord, that thou eatest nothing and art sad?” And he answered, “Because of Haji Kas the Seyyid; for he seeketh to take from me my garden, and hath brought false accusation against me; and moreover the kadi hath eaten bribes at his hand.” And the woman laughed, and said, “Truly, thou doest ill to fret thyself for such a matter. Leave Haji Kas to me. I will give thee vengeance on Haji Kas.” ”

“ The breastwork range of the mountains rears itself up like a wall above the minor inequalities of the plateau, and the heights stretch away right and left continuously as though they were toeing a line. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain is the land which is nearest in sympathy with the Orient; and the sudden uplift of the Cantabrian mountains above the basin of the Duero is an excellent reproduction of the rise of the Kurdistan ranges above the plain of Mosul. ”

“ We have sketched the horrors endured by one small sister community—a community whose position was admittedly much more defensible, and whose stout-hearted resistance enabled them to avert the worst. Multiply those horrors twenty fold to allow for the greater numbers of the Armenians. Double them again for the helplessness that robbed them of self-defence. And our minds are incapable of grasping the scope of a butchery more hideous and widespread than any that has horrified Asia since the ravages of the Tartar hordes. ”

“ The city has been used as a brick-quarry for centuries, Baghdad and various other towns being built almost entirely from this material; and it is a rather melancholy reflection that, when the Germans have finished their work, it is most probable that every brick they have uncovered will follow the others in the course of a few years. No matter how deep they bury them, they will be dug up, for good burnt building material commands its price in a city like Baghdad. One must get what consolation one can from the fact that at least good and accurate plans of the whole will be available. ”

“ Perhaps our most remarkable patient, however, was a poor fellow who was brought in by a deputation of the men of his village, with a request that we would cure him of the evil eye! If he looked at a crock of milk, it upset; if at a sheep, the wolf got it; if at a child, it was likely enough to tumble into the fire. They were quite fair about the matter, fully recognizing that it was the poor fellow’s misfortune, not his fault. Still, he was such a nuisance to all the neighbours, that it was to be hoped that English knowledge would cure him. ”

“ As the heads are shaven it is true that a light blow will draw blood, and that therefore the ceremony can be made a matter of display and little more. As a fact, however, there is no sham about it, for the feast scarcely ever passes without one man at any rate actually dying from his self-inflicted wounds; at least this was certainly the case before the Russian occupation.
Practically Urmi is a Russian town now; and every good Shiah must feel that Mohurram, with infidel bayonets to keep the streets clean and orderly, has been robbed of its soul if not of its outward pomp. ”

“ But their enemies swarmed on their tracks like wolves upon a drove of cattle. Even before they cleared the city the bazaar ruffians under Mejid es Sultaneh freed from the fear of their recent masters, were cutting the throats of the stragglers as they emerged from their houses; and hampered by hosts of non-combatants—dispirited and without cohesion—that long, slow, straggling convoy formed a fatally vulnerable prey. The mountaineers, indeed, suffered less than the townsfolk as being more accustomed than they to conditions of trek and battle. ”

“ Will the great scheme that an English engineer has put forward make the land a garden once more? It can, of course—on the condition that it is properly managed. For nothing can take away the marvellous fertility of the soil; and there will be water for irrigation as long as the snow falls on Hakkiari and Ararat to feed the Tigris and the Euphrates.
If the work is managed, when finished, by the men who designed and executed it, it will do as much for the delta of Mesopotamia as the “Barrage” of the Nile has done for its delta, or the dam of Assouan for upper Egypt. ”

“ The Yezidis form one of the recognized millets, or subject religious sects, existing in the Turkish Empire. But recognition in their case by no means implies toleration. They are universally abhorred as outcasts—almost as “untouchables”—like the cagots of the Pyrenees, or the lowest pariahs of Hindustan. A Christian is a “dog” to a Moslem, and a Jew ranks many octaves lower; but there is no room on the chromatic scale to show the position of a Yezidi: he is the sort of human being that is less regarded than a beast.
A Yezidi crossed our path some five or six miles from Mosul. ”

“ Some are as far west as Aleppo; some as far north as Tiflis (where all the town scavengers are Yezidis) ; some as far east as Teheran. Their nucleus is in the Sinjar mountains, in the desert south-west of Mosul; where they are secured from invasion by the barricades of rock, and the waterless wastes which environ them. But the central shrine of their faith, the Jerusalem of their vows and offerings, is the cryptic Temple of Sheikh Adi, hidden just within the fringe of the northern mountains which overlook the great Mosul plain. ”

“ Yet kept going it must be; and the only men who had the requisite knowledge were just that clique of unspeakably corrupt officials whom it would have been the first duty of any good Government to clear away. Further, while the great mass of the subjects of the Sultan, of whatever creed; are easily governed folk enough, and obey any order that the Hukumet gives, within certain limits; yet everywhere in each one of the varied nations there was a small, noisy and irreconcilable minority—sets of men who could work neither with the Government nor with one another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ WE enter a new world as we come up from the south to the land which is never called Armenia officially, but where the Armenians dwell. The great plain of Mesopotamia, the wild gorges of the range of Taurus, are left behind; and the traveller emerges on to a lofty plateau, averaging 6000 feet above the sea, and dotted with the cones of one of the great volcanic fields of the world. Sipan and Ararat are both magnificent peaks, though the crater of the latter has been weathered away. ”

“ Men call them a nation of cowards; but that charge at least is false. In the massacres of 1895, armed men were butchering unarmed; and there was no test of anything but passive endurance. Yet how many could have saved their lives by a mere verbal acceptance of Islam? We shall have a good deal to say to the discredit of the revolutionaries among them, the “Fedais;” but at least the terror that that very small body could inspire among Turks and Kurds in three provinces ought alone to acquit them of any reproach of cowardice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Turkish leader in the north was now Jevdet Bey, previously Vali of Van, the brutal son of kind old Tahir and brother-in-law of Enver Pasha, a man who had already earned eternal infamy by his pitiless massacres of the Armenians at Van. Now on one occasion he forced the entire population of a village, numbering it is said 700, and including all the women and children, to dig a deep trench for their own grave along the foot of a lofty mud wall. When the trench was finished they were marched into it. The wall was thrown down on the top of them; and every soul was buried alive. ”

“ The village of Qudshanis, which is the residence of the Nestorian or Assyrian Patriarch, “Mar Shimun,” and the headquarters of his Church, has a marvellous situation. It lies on a sloping “alp” of rugged pasture, between two mountain torrents which spring from the towering snow-fields to the west of it; and which descend in gradually deepening gorges, enclosing the tongue-shaped plateau on which the village stands. They meet beneath the point of the tongue at the base of a lofty wedge of rock ”

“ These oppressed nationalities cherish pathetically futile hopes of British intervention, recognizing rightly that England is the only disinterested power. But the only power ever likely to interfere effectively is Russia; and though those who have tried Russian rule have found themselves bitterly disillusioned, it must be admitted that the Russians preserve better order than the Turks. What the country needs is a set of self-sacrificing administrators, with no axe of their own to grind, who will devote themselves solely to the good of the people. ”

“ It is interesting, too, to find that even that younger civilization has its monument here among the tombs of the old. Babylon fell before the Persian, and her glory passed away. But when the Persian fell before the Greek Alexander, that last of the great kings of the East showed himself the first of modern rulers also, in that he had dreams of uniting ancient East and modern West in one great empire. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Thus, Mosul plain is haunted by a fearful type of vampire, the “hiblabashi,” a satyr, half-man half-goat, who lures travellers from the path, and sucks their blood. [148] There is a tomb of one such at Aradin, a village in the lower hills, whence there issues at times a terrible gadfly, that infects all whom it bites with madness and hydrophobia. Mercifully, however, bane and antidote lie, as ever, side by side; for there is a sulphurous spring by the side of the tomb, and it has healing virtue for those afflicted in this way. ”

“ If war, famine, and disease shall spare them, and if a British democracy that fought the war to secure the safety of small nations shall not make peace at the price of handing over a small allied nation to its avowed and bitter enemy, then it may, perhaps, be allowed the chance of doing what it desires to do, and of continuing to serve England in the only way in which it can render service. ”

“ Still, time was not given; and two disastrous wars have not left much of the prestige that is the breath of life to an Oriental Government.
The Turk has the misfortune to be an anachronism in power. His present methods were those of every European Government some five hundred years ago; but European consciences have developed in the interval, and his has not. Modern civilization, though willing enough to shut its eyes to a good deal that is ugly, cannot avoid seeing what the Turk does. ”