Ely Banister Soane

“ The clouds descending in a funnel-shaped deluge hid the mound, and a din of thunder broke out about it, brilliant lightnings playing the while, making a tumult of the elements fitting in its grandeur to the memory of that great goddess of all, Ishtar of Arbela.
We were just in time to see the little town by daylight. There are no signs of antiquity about it now, except some Muhammadan ruins. All those of Assyria are safely conserved in the mighty mound upon which the modern Turkish ruler has built his castle. ”

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

“ The native place is very dear indeed to the Turk, Persian, and Kurd. It is an innocent enthusiasm that prompts the dweller in a pestilential and fever-ridden village with salt water, to extol it as little less than Paradise itself, for the discomforts of life in a strange land, far from his own language or dialect, make the place he left appear far superior, and distance lends an enchantment to his view that leads him to make the most flattering descriptions of his native place. ”

“ The population seems for the most part Kurd, wild men of great stature, from the north and east, with high felt hats, like those of the ancient Persians of the Sasanian sculptures, their zouave jackets of sheepskin with the hair outside, the scarlet shoes forming parts of a distinctive costume. The fierce look that a Kurd invariably acquires, the thin bony face, the long stride, mark the hillman, who walks in these peaceable, if noisy, streets with a hand on his rifle and dagger. ”

“ SHAHR-I-ZUR After four days’ stay in Sulaimania I rose early one morning, in answer to the summons of a muleteer, and, having packed my belongings and laid in a small stock of bread, mounted my steed, bade farewell to old Mustafa Beg, and set out in the dusk before sunrise upon my journey to Halabja, the place I had come all the way from Constantinople to see. ”

“ The women, unveiled, bright in coloured robes, turbaned as only Kurdish women are, came out to stare and to inform men within of our arrival. Soon mounted men came galloping over the hills, appearing from apparently deserted corners of the landscape, and approached our leader. Coming up to him they dismounted and took his hand, greeting him with affection, and then we discovered that he—the military accountant—was a chief of the tribe. And no sooner were we away from Kirkuk, than away went the fez from off his head, to be replaced by a Kurdish handkerchief. ”

“ The mountains, always the mountains, held the old man’s gaze. There is a fascination about them that it is not necessary to be a Kurd or a Persian to be able to acquire. The impassive monuments of old-time glacier and volcanic upheaval, relics of convulsions that rent continents, that rise straight up from the flat, broad plains, may well seize upon all that is impressionable in anyone, and inspire the dullest with that craving to penetrate the mysteries of their deep valleys, and view the world from their blanched heads. ”

“ A Kurd himself, he deplored the levity of the Kurds, who are much given to dancing and singing. Each night the Kurdish muleteers would collect on the roof of some rooms in the courtyard, and chant their interminable “Guranis” or folk songs, dancing hornpipes of ever-increasing fury and joining in roaring choruses. Sometimes they would engage in wrestling matches, and cast one another about the yard, the exercise often terminating in a display of hot temper, when knives would be drawn, to be sheathed as an onlooker made a jest that called forth laughter from all. ”

“ These provinces were Juanru, Aoraman, Merivan, Bana, Saqiz, and the Persian districts of Hasanabad and Isfandabad.
Of these, undoubtedly the most interesting is Aoraman. This tiny province was practically independent, living under its own rulers, a proud family claiming descent from Rustam, the Persian national hero, speaking a language of their own, not admitting themselves Kurds, but “Aorami.”
These Aoramani live in a knot of great mountains, guarded on every side by the mighty walls of Nature, and their habit and temperament is as exclusive as their country. ”

“ GULCHIN
What lost her the respect of her neighbours was the habit she had on hot days of coming outside the house without her turban, bareheaded except for a tiny skull-cap, her thick, long hair exposing its ten or twelve ropes of thick plaits uncovered by the veil that accompanies the turban. But she was perfectly honest; an immoral woman is the exception in Sulaimania, and she scoffed at those who sacrificed comfort to false modesty. ”

“ Our clothing could absorb no more, nor our bedding, and at last we, like the unfortunates outside, resigned ourselves to becoming shivering bodies wrapped in spongy swathings, our only advantage over them being a little shelter from the stinging wind. In the black darkness we had to crawl out over bales of apricots, slippery with the juice and wet that oozed from them, to secure our flimsy house: every few moments a new place had to be found for such valuables as matches, whose ever-changing refuge was invaded by the rain with a malignant persistency as regularly as we devised it. ”

“ And since that time it has been Kurdistan, home of wild races speaking a language the purity of whose ancient forms is one of the best proofs of the occupation by the Kurds of their great mountains ever since the Aryan horde started from its “land of the Dawn” to people Persia, Media, and part of Europe—of which we ourselves are the descendants, through the Saxons, and so kin to the Kurd, who has never mixed his blood with that of the Arab or Turk, but kept it as pure as his unmixed speech. ”

“ But the Turks gained possession, and, blight that they are, killed everything, so that now its only people are the Jaf nomads, who pass and repass every spring and autumn. All this I had learned, and so looked with more than usual interest upon the scene till we were hurried up by the horsemen, who had descried a large body of Hamavand riders in the distance. With bustle and hurry we fled to the shelter of a cluster of tents, the residence of a tiny tribe—the Muan—whose village, deserted in summer, lay half a mile distant in a grove of willow-trees. ”

“ Nor, in the present day, does the Kurd appear unfavourably in comparison with the European, judging him by the gauge of ideal and precept, upon the adherence to which alone a man can be judged, having in mind the exalted nature of each, or, as is too often the case, their absence. There is less crime of a despicable nature among any thousand Kurds, picked at random, than among the same number of Europeans taken in the same manner. ”

“ Now, if you are resolved to go, I will give you letters to Khwaja Salim, my agent in Kirkuk, and to Matlub in Bagdad. But I place upon you an obligation, by your soul! that you will not, with the European clothes, put off the thoughts and remembrances of Kurdistan, nor let our names slip from your memory. For we are rough and savage, our ways are not yours—though you know ours, and follow them here like ourselves—what we deem comfort you deem savagery, and the European (I know this, for I have been in Beyrout and Aleppo and met the European) ever scoffs at the Eastern land ”

“ During the centuries the Kurds, who drive out many peoples, have occupied the city, which is still the most important of the province. So powerful is the Kurdish language, however, that in many places whose population is not of that race, the forceful, graphic language has displaced all others; and as in Sulaimania, the people, originally mixed, now call themselves Kurds.
As we entered Erbil at nightfall and left it in the dark of dawn, I had practically no opportunity of seeing its modern aspect, but its mound was visible till we had gone many miles over the flat plain. ”

“ While I was having tea, the scribe of Tahir Beg entered and partook with me, and upon my asking him who the man was, explained that one of his objects in coming at this hour was to introduce him. He was a poor Mukri out of employment of any kind, and sought service, and as he was known to Lady Adela, Tahir Beg, and Mansur, he recommended him as a servant for me. “For,” he said, “you, as an important person, should not go servantless; it will be advisable to employ a local man while you are here, and he, too, will travel anywhere you like, and is desirous of seeing Persia.” ”

“ The race of Kurds is so little known, and so maligned when mentioned, that some idea of their origin and history, as well as an attempt at a vindication of their character, is not out of place here. Within recent years they have probably never come before the eye of the British public except in their traditional character of rapacious and furious fiends, fantastic figures of savagery pouring out from impregnable mountains and carrying desolation before them, slaying Christian and Musulman alike, resisting all efforts by princes and powers to subdue or even coerce them. ”

“ The people round about, sleeping on their roofs, woke at the noise, and in the surprise and confusion of the moment, imagining the Hamavands had at last carried out their threat of raiding Sulaimania, commenced a brisk fire upon the caravan, killing some mules and wounding a couple of muleteers who had not been able to convince the natives of their harmlessness in time. The robbers had taken advantage of the turmoil to get away, and by the time the caravan had once more got under way, half the people were beginning to find out the cause. ”

“ It took us an hour to get over the stony track to the neck, the exit from which is not more than332 a few yards wide, a break in an otherwise uninterrupted line of hills that shows an almost perpendicular face to the outside world, a rampart—almost the last—of Kurdistan, to the west. Outside the Darband the ground fell away, and the plain of Chemchemal lay before us, no plain at all in reality. It is, so to speak, a long and broad valley filled with rolling hills intersected by deep ravines, but whose summits are so exactly of the same height that the country looks from afar but a flat plain. ”

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

“ There was a fresh briskness, a hearty feeling in the air of Diarbekr, that took the fancy. The new springtime exactly achieved that mean of temperature wherein man feels at his best in the Mesopotamian plains, that scorch the life out, and make the strongest languid during the long summer.
The place was crowded and busy; the Kurds, released from their snow-bound mountains, were coming in to buy summer clothing; the Armenians, who are the craftsmen of Diarbekr, were enjoying a period of immunity from the terror in which they often exist. ”

“ And if the Kurdish nomad is reckoned unfit and not sufficiently intelligent to know what is best for him, what then of the Turkish peasant, an oaf of the understanding of a cow, and as inferior to the Kurdish peasant in wits as the sloth is to the horse. Thus these Kurds argued, and argued truly, making yet a very good case for despotic government in Eastern Asiatic Turkey and Kurdistan. ”

“ He obeyed with a bad grace. “Mud is upon my head, filth upon my eyes; I have eaten ordure and my heart is vile; I kiss the hoofs of the ass thou ridest, and clean the shoes of thy servant, whose slave am I; I go abased before all men, a speaker of lies, and I am not fit to attend the womenfolk,” and so on, and yet again and again. He was reluctant at first, but the sound of a cartridge clicking home in a Martini breech and the feel of a knife-point at the back of his neck made him voluble, to the great amusement of the company, and at last I begged Lady Adela to let him go. ”

“ There was a long bench in the verandah from which we could look down at the crowd below and the operations of the police, whose headquarters was just opposite. Here, too, every morning an auction was held, amid a crowd that sat upon high benches under a tree, drinking tea or coffee, discussing local politics, and hatching plots against their neighbours.
The crowd that frequented these coffee-houses—there were four of them round the caravanserai door—were the idlest collection of creatures it is possible to imagine. ”

“ A little excitement was caused during the afternoon, by a skirmishing party from a tent village discovering our presence and mistaking us for robbers, and we saw the spectacle of village Kurds calling to horse. We saw the village calm and quiet in the heat of the afternoon, and next instant, men—a moment ago asleep—darting forth at a gallop in twos and threes upon horses kept ever saddled and bridled, to take up positions around us and prevent attack. ”

“ Natives of Halabja and the district were there; two stray Hamavands, on goodness knows what business, sat there silent and awkward, dark-featured, wild-looking men, who kept their rifles in their hands and their alert eyes ever on the glance this way and that, from sheer force of habit. A black-browed priest from Pava, a village in Persian Kurdistan, three peasants from Sina, and various merchants, went to make up a collection of all sorts of southern Kurds. Every one, even to the shopkeepers and the priest, carried the large Kurdish dagger. ”

“ With horror I heard the voice of Haji, just arrived, answer:
“This is Musa Effendi, a Persian gentleman, for whom I vouch; my very good friend and comrade, a good companion, and a devout Muslim.”
The policeman folded up the passport with a triumphant air, and directed his two men to take me to the police office. A sudden thought helped the situation. “I am a British subject,” I exclaimed; “touch me at your peril; thank God we have a consul in Mosul who awaits me. If I do not arrive, there will be the devil to pay.” ”