Hesso's house is just a "but and a ben," with a door which involves stooping. Its rough stone walls are unplastered, and the only light admitted comes from a hole in the roof, which serves to let out the smoke. I confess to a feeling of trepidation when I asked to see the Kurdish chief, and I felt the folly of my errand. A superbly-dressed Kurd took us into a room dense with tobacco smoke, which, from its darkness, the roughness of its walls, and the lowness of its rude roof, resembled a cave rather than a house. Yet Hesso receives £200 a year from the Persian Government, and has apparently unlimited opportunities for plunder.
There were some coarse mats on the floor, and a samovar with some Russian glass tea-cups. Two Persian officials and a number of well-armed and splendidly-dressed Kurds, with jewelled khanjars and revolvers in their girdles and rifles by their sides, sat or reclined against the wall. Hesso himself leaned against a roll of bedding at the upper end of the room, and space was made for us on the floor at his left hand. A superb stage brigand he looked, in fitting surroundings, the handsomest man I have seen in Persia, a large man, with a large face, dark prominent eyes, a broad brow, a straight nose, superb teeth, a fine but sensual mouth, a dark olive complexion, and a false smile. A jewelled Kurdish turban with much crimson, a short jacket and full trousers of a fine cream-coloured woollen fabric, an embroidered silk shirt, socks of an elaborate pattern, a girdle of many yards of Kashmir stuff, with eight knots, one above another, in the middle, and a khelat or coat of honour of rich Kerman brocade formed his striking costume. In his girdle he wore a khanjar, with an ebony hilt and scabbard ornamented with filigree gold knobs incrusted with turquoises, attached to the girdle by a silver chain two yards long, of heavy filigree balls, a beautiful piece of work. Hesso's brothers, superb men, most picturesquely dressed, surrounded him. The Kurds who handed round the tea and the jewelled kalians looked fantastic brigands. The scene was a picture.
Of course my errand failed. I could not speak about the sheep through the priest of the robbed village, and Hesso said that he could not speak on any "political" subject before the Persians who were present. The conversation was not animated, and Qasha Bardah was very nervous till Hesso turned round, and with an awakened expression of face asked how it was that "England had allowed Turkey to grow so feeble that her frontier and Armenia are in a state of anarchy"? Hesso's handsome face is that of a villain. He does not look more than thirty. He has 200 well-mounted marksmen at his disposal. The father of this redoubtable Kurdish chief died in prison, where he was confined by order of the Shah, and the son revenged himself by harrying this part of the Shah's dominions, and with sixty men, including his six brothers, successfully resisted a large Persian force sent against him, and eventually escaped into Turkey, doing much damage on his way. Hesso on arriving in Kerbela obtained a letter from the Sheikh, or chief Mollah there, saying that he offered his submission to the Shah, and went to Tihran, where after seeing the Shah's splendour he said that if he had known it before, he would not have been in rebellion.
Before this the Persians took a strong castle from the Kurds, and garrisoned it with an officer and a company of soldiers. Up to it one day went Hesso boldly, keeping the six men who went with him out of sight, and thumped upon the gate till it was opened, saying he was a bearer of despatches. He first shot the sentry dead, and next the officer, who came to see what the disturbance was about. Meantime the six men, by climbing on each other's shoulders, scaled the castle wall, and by confused shouts and dragging of the stone roller to and fro over the roof they made the garrison believe that it was attacked by a large force, and it surrendered at discretion. The lives of the soldiers were spared, but they were marched out in their shirts, with their hands above their heads.
The Merwana threshing-floor was guarded at night by ten men. The following morning we were to have started an hour before daylight, but the katirgis refused to load, and the Kurdish ketchuda, with his horsemen, declined to start till an hour after sunrise, because he could not earlier "tell friends from foes." The ground was covered with hoar-frost, and the feathery foliage of the tamarisk was like the finest white coral.
Turning into the mountains, we spent nine hours in a grand defile, much wooded, where a difficult path is shut in with the Marbishu torrent. The Kurds left us at Bani, when two fine fellows became our protectors as far as a small stream, crossing which we entered Turkey. At a Kurdish semi-subterranean village, over which one might ride without knowing it, a splendidly-dressed young Khan emerged from one of the burrows, and said he would give us guards, but they would not go farther than a certain village, where two of his men had been killed three days before. "There is blood between us and them," he said. After that, for five hours up to Marbishu, the scenery is glorious. The valley narrows into a picturesque gorge between precipitous mountains, from 2000 to 4000 feet above the river, on the sides of which a narrow and occasionally scaffolded path is carried, not always passable for laden mules. Many grand ravines came down upon this gorge, their dwarf trees, orange, tawny, and canary-yellow, mingled with rose-red leafage. The rose bushes are covered with masses of large carnation-red hips, the bramble trailers are crimson and gold, the tamarisk is lemon-yellow. Nature, like the dolphin, is most beautiful in dying.
The depths were filled with a blue gloom, the needle-like peaks which tower above glittered with new-fallen snow, the air was fresh and intoxicating—it was the romance of travel. But it soon became apparent that we were among stern and even perilous realities. A notorious robber chief was disposed to bar our passage. His men had just robbed a party of travellers, and were spread over the hill. They took a horse from Johannes, but afterwards restored it on certain conditions. Farther on we met a number of Kurds, with thirty fat sheep and some cattle, which they were driving off from Marbishu. Then the katirgis said that they would go no farther than the village, for they heard that robbers were lying in wait for us farther on!
In the wildest part of the gorge, where two ravines meet, there is fine stoneless soil, tilled like a garden; the mountains fall a little apart—there are walnuts, fruit trees, and poplars; again the valley narrows, the path just hangs on the hillside, and I was riding over the roofs of village houses for some time before I knew it. The hills again opened, and there were flourishing breadths of turnips, and people digging potatoes, an article of food and export which was introduced by the missionaries forty years ago. The glen narrowed again, and we came upon the principal part of Marbishu—rude stone houses in tiers, burrowing deeply into the hills, with rock above and rock below on the precipitous sides of a noisy torrent, crossed by two picturesque log bridges, one of the wildest situations I have ever seen, and with a wintry chill about it, for the sun at this season deserts it at three. Rude, primitive, colourless, its dwellings like the poorest cowsheds, its church like a Canadian ice-house, clinging to mountain sides and spires of rock, so long as I remember anything I shall remember Marbishu.
Steep narrow paths and steep rude steps brought us to a three-sided yard, with a rough verandah where cooking and other operations were going on, and at the entrance we were cordially welcomed by Qasha Ishai, the priest. After ascertaining that it would be very dangerous to go farther, I crossed the river to the church, which is one of the finest in the country, and a place of pilgrimage. The village is noted for its religious faithfulness. The church is said to be 850 years old—a low, flat-roofed, windowless stone building. Either it was always partially subterranean, or the earth has accumulated round it, for the floor is three feet below the ground outside. The entrance is by a heavy door two feet six inches high. Inside it is as nearly dark as possible. Two or three circular holes at a great height in the enormously thick wall let in as many glimmers, but artificial light is necessary. There are several small ante-chapels. In two are rude and ancient tombs of ancient bishops, plain blocks of stone, with crosses upon them. In another is a rough desk, covered with candle droppings, on which the Liturgy of the Apostles lay open, and on it a cross, which it is the custom to kiss. A fourth is used for the safe keeping of agricultural implements. Two are empty, and one of these serves the useful purpose of a mortuary chapel. The church proper is very small and high. The stone floor has been worn into cavities by the feet of worshippers; the walls, where not covered with lengths of grimy printed cotton, are black with the candle smoke of ages. The one sign of sacred use is a rude stone screen at the east end, at openings in the front of which the people receive the Eucharist. Behind this is the sanctuary, into which the priest alone, and he fasting, may enter. Old brass lamps and candelabra, incrusted with blackened tallow, hang from the roof, and strings of little bells from wall to wall, which are plucked by each recipient of the sacred elements as he returns to his "stand."
In this gloomy vault-like building prayers are said, as in all Nestorian churches, at sunrise and sunset by the priest in his ordinary clothing, the villagers being summoned by the beating of a mallet on a board.[41]
The church is a place of refuge when a Kurdish attack is expected. Nine years ago the people carried into it all their movables that they valued most, believing it to be secure, but the Kurds broke in in force and took all they wanted. The few sacred treasures of the village and the Eucharistic leaven are hidden in an elevated recess in the wall. The graveyard, which contains only a few flat slabs imbedded in the soil, is the only possible camping-ground; but though it is clean and neat, it looked so damp and felt so cold that I preferred to accept a big room with walls six feet thick in the priest's house, even though it overhangs the torrent with its thunder and clash.
Many a strange house I have seen, but never anything so striking as the dwelling of Qasha Ishai. Passing through the rude verandah, and through a lofty room nearly dark, with a rough stone dais, on which were some mattresses, and berths one above another, I stumbled in total darkness into a room seventy feet by forty, and twenty feet or more high in its highest part. It has no particular shape, and wanders away from this lofty centre into low irregular caverns and recesses excavated in the mountain side. Parts of the floor are of naked rock, parts of damp earth. In one rocky recess is a powerful spring of pure water. The roofs are supported on barked stems of trees, black, like the walls, wherever it was possible to see them, with the smoke of two centuries. Ancient oil lamps on posts or in recesses rendered darkness visible. Goat-skins, with the legs sticking out, containing butter, hanging from the blackened cross-beams, and wheat, apples, potatoes, and onions in heaps and sacks, piles of wool, spinning-wheels, great wooden cradles here and there, huge oil and water jars, wooden stools, piles of bedding, ploughs, threshing instruments, long guns, swords, spears, and gear encumbered the floor, while much more was stowed away in the dim caverns of the rock.
I asked the number of families under the roof. "Seven ovens," was the reply. This meant seven families, and it is true that three generations, seventy-two persons, live, cook, sleep, and pursue their avocations under that patriarchal roof.
The road is a bad one for laden beasts, and very dangerous besides, and the few travellers who visit Kochanes usually take the caravan route from Urmi viâ Diza, and the fact of an English person passing through Marbishu with a letter to the Turkish authorities was soon "noised abroad," and I was invited to spend the evening in this most picturesque house. All the inmates were there, and over a hundred of the villagers besides; and cooking, baking, spinning, carding wool, knitting, and cleaning swords and guns went on all the time. There were women and girls in bright red dresses; men reclining on bedding already unrolled on the uneven floor, or standing in knots in their picturesque dresses leaning on their long guns, with daggers gleaming in their belts; groups seated round the great fire, in the uncertain light of which faces gleamed here and there in the dim recesses, while the towering form of Qasha Ishai loomed grandly through the smoke, as the culmination of the artistic effect.
The subject discussed was equally interesting to the Syrians and to me,—the dangers of the pass and the number of guards necessary. We talked late into the night, and long before I left the female and juvenile part of the family had retired to their beds. Again I heard of Hesso's misdeeds, of the robbery of 1400 sheep; of the driving off on the previous morning of thirty sheep which they were about to barter for their winter supply of wheat; of the oppressive taxation, 100 liras (nearly £100) on 100 houses; of the unchecked depredations of the Kurds, which had increased this summer and autumn, leaving them too poor to pay their taxes; of a life of peril and fear and apprehension for their women, which is scarcely bearable; of the oppression of man and the silence of God. Underlying all is a feeling of bitter disappointment that England, which "has helped the oppressed elsewhere, does nothing for us." They thought, they said, "that when the English priests came it was the beginning of succour, and that the Lord was no longer deaf, and our faces were lightened, but now it is all dark, and there is no help in God or man."
I now find myself in the midst of a state of things of which I was completely ignorant, and for which I was utterly unprepared, and in a region full of fear and danger, in which our co-religionists are the nearly helpless prey of fanatical mountaineers, whose profession is robbery.
Looking round on the handsome men and comely women, who would greet the sunrise with Christian prayer and praise, and whose ancestors have worshipped Christ as God for fourteen centuries in these mountain fastnesses, I wondered much at my former apathy concerning them. It is easier to feel them our fellow-Christians on the spot than to put the feeling into words, but writing here in the house of their Patriarch, the Catholicos of the East, I realise that the Cross signed on their brows in baptism is to them as to us the symbol of triumph and of hope; that by them as by us the Eucharistic emblems are received for the life of the soul, "in remembrance of Christ's meritorious Cross and Passion"; that through ages of accumulating wrongs and almost unrivalled misery, they like us have worshipped the crucified Nazarene as the crowned and risen Christ, that to Him with us they bend the adoring knee, and that like us they lay their dead in consecrated ground to await through Him a joyful resurrection.
There were five degrees of frost during the night, and as I lay awake from cold the narratives I had heard and the extraordinary state of things in which I so unexpectedly found myself made a very deep impression on me. There, for the first time in my life, I came into contact with people grossly ignorant truly, but willing to suffer "the loss of all things," and to live in "jeopardy every hour" for religious beliefs, which are not otherwise specially influential in their lives. My own circumstances, too, claimed some consideration, whether to go forward, or back to Urmi. It is obvious from what I hear that the bringing my journey to Erzerum to a successful issue will depend almost altogether on my own nerve, judgment, and power of arranging, and that at best there will be serious risks, hardships, and difficulties, which will increase as winter sets in. After nearly coming to the cowardly decision to return, I despised myself for the weakness, and having decided that some good to these people might come from farther acquaintance with their circumstances, I fell asleep, and now the die is cast.
We were ready at daybreak the next morning, but for the same reasons as those given at Merwana did not start till seven for an eleven hours' march. I took two armed horsemen and six armed footmen, all fine fellows used to the work of reconnoitring and protecting. Three of them scouted the whole time high up on the sides of the pass, not with the purposeless sensational scouting of Persian sowars, but with the earnestness of men who were pledged to take us safely through, and who live under arms to protect their property and families.
After five hours of toiling up the Drinayi Pass, taking several deep fords, and being detained by a baggage horse falling fifty feet with his load, we crossed the summit, and by a long descent through hills of rounded outlines covered with uncut sun-cured hay, reached the plain of Gawar, where the guards left us. On the way we passed the small Christian hamlet of Eyal, which was robbed of its sheep with the sacrifice of the shepherd's life the following night. At the village of Yekmala on the plain the Kurdish katirgis by a shameful exaction got us into great trouble, and there was a fight, in which Johannes's gun was wrested from him, and some of my things were taken, the Kurds meantime driving off their animals at a fast trot. The aspect of affairs was so very bad and the attack on my men so violent that I paid the value of the Kurdish depredations, and we got away. A little farther on the katirgis were extremely outrageous, and began to fulfil their threat of "throwing down their loads," but I persuaded Qasha ——, who was alarmed and anxious, to leave them behind, and they thought better of it.
The mountain-girdled plain of Gawar is a Paradise of fertility, with abundant water, and has a rich black soil capable of yielding twenty or thirtyfold to the cultivator. On it is the town of Diza, chiefly Armenian, which is a Turkish customs station, a military post, and the residence of a Kaimakam. There are over twenty Christian as well as some Moslem villages on Gawar, and a number of Kurdish hamlets and "castles" on the slopes and in the folds of the hills above it.
The sun was sinking as we embarked on the plain, and above the waves of sunset gold which flooded it rose the icy spires and crags of the glorious Jelu ranges and the splintered Kanisairani summits. The plain has an altitude of over 6000 feet, and there was a sharp frost as we dismounted at the village of Pirzala and put up at the house of the Malek David, having been eleven and a half hours in the saddle. After consulting with him and other village worthies I dismissed the katirgis and paid them more than their contract price. The next morning they swore by the Prophet's beard, and every other sacred thing, that they had not been paid, and when payment was proved by two respectable witnesses, they were not the least abashed. Poor fellows! They know no better and are doubtless very poor. I was glad to get rid of their sinister faces and outbreaks of violence, but for some days it was impossible, being harvest-time, to obtain transport to Kochanes, though I was able to leave Pirzala for other villages.
The next day mists rolled down the mountains, and a good cold English rain set in, in which I had a most pleasant ride to Diza, which was repeated the following day in glorious weather, the new-fallen snow coming half-way down the mountain sides. I was surreptitiously on Turkish soil, and it was necessary to show my passport to the Diza officials, get a permit to travel, and have my baggage examined. Ishu, the present Malek of the plain, through whom all business between the Christians and the Government is transacted, accompanied us to the Mutessarif of Julamerik.
Diza is an unwalled town on an eminence crowned by barracks. The garrison of 200 men was reduced to six during the summer. The Kurds evidently took the reduction as a hint to them to do what they liked, and they have mercilessly ravaged and harried the plain for months past.[42] An official assured me that 15,000 sheep have been driven off from the Gawar Christian villages between the middle of June and the 17th of October, partly by the nomad Herkis. There are now sixty soldiers at Diza, and the Mutessarif of Julamerik is there, having come down to capture Abdurrahman Bey, one of the great oppressors of the Christians,—an attempt rendered abortive (it is said) by a bribe given by the Bey to the commanding officer of the troops.
I was interested in my first visit to a Turkish official. His room was above a stable, with a dark and difficult access, and the passages above were crowded with soldiers. The Mutessarif sat on a divan at the upper end of a shabby room, an elderly man much like Mr. Gladstone, very courteous and gentlemanly, with plenty of conversation and savoir-faire. He said that the letter I carry is "a very powerful document," that it supersedes all the usual formalities, that my baggage would not even be looked at, and that I should not require a teskareh or permit. By his advice I called on the Kaimakam, and in each room a soldier brought in delicious coffee. The Kaimakam was also very courteous, and talked agreeably and intelligently, both taking the initiative, as etiquette demands.
In this and in the general tone there was a marked difference between Persian and Turkish officialdom. The Persian Governor is surrounded by civilians, the Turkish by soldiers, and in the latter case the manner assumed by subordinates is one of the most profound respect. The sealing of my passport took a considerable time, during which, with Qasha ——, I paid several visits, was regaled with Armenian cookery, tried to change a mejidieh at the Treasury, but found it absolutely empty, and went to see a miracle-working New Testament, said to be of great antiquity, in an Armenian house. It was hanging on the wall in a leather bag, from which depended strings of blue and onyx beads. Sick people come to it even from great distances, as well as the friends of those who are themselves too ill to travel. The bag can only be opened by a priest. The power of healing depends on a sum of money being paid to the priest and the owners. The sick person receives a glass bead, and is forthwith cured.
On Gawar Plain I lodged in the village houses, either in semi-subterranean hovels, in which the families live with their horses and buffaloes, or in rooms over stables. Very many sick people came to me for medicines, and others with tales of wrong for conveyance to "the Consul" at Erzerum. No one seemed to trust any one. These conversations were always held at night in whispers, with the candle hidden "under a bushel," the light-holes filled up with straw, the door barred or a heavy stone laid against it, and a watch outside.
The Gawar Christians are industrious and inoffensive, and have no higher aspiration than to be let alone, but they are the victims of a Kurdish rapacity which leaves them little more than necessary food. Their villages usually belong to Kurdish Aghas who take from them double the lawful taxes and tithes. The Herkis sweep over the plain in their autumn migration "like a locust cloud," carrying off the possessions of the miserable people, spoiling their granaries and driving off their flocks. The Kurds of the neighbouring slopes and mountains rob them by violence at night, and in the day by exactions made under threat of death. The latter mode of robbery is called "demand." The servants of a Kurdish Bey enter and ask for some jars of oil or roghan, a Kashmir shawl, women's ornaments, a jewelled dagger, or a good foal, under certain threats, or they show the owner a bullet in the palm of the hand, intimating that a bullet through his head will be his fate if he refuses to give up his property or informs any one of the demand.
In this way (among innumerable other instances) my host at ——,[43] a much-respected man, had been robbed of five valuable shawls, such as descend from mother to daughter, four handsome coats, and 300 krans in silver. In the last two years ten and fifteen loads of wheat have been taken from him, and four four-feet jars filled with oil and roghan. Four hundred and fifty sheep have likewise been seized by violence, leaving him with only fifteen; and one night while I was at his house fifty-three of the remaining village sheep, some of which were his, were driven off in spite of the guards, who dare not fire. I was awakened by the disturbance, and as it was a light night I saw that the Kurds who attacked the sheepfold were armed with modern guns. The reis of that village and this man's brother have both been shot by the Kurds.
Testimony concurred in stating that the insecurity of life and property has enormously increased this summer, especially since the reduction of the Diza garrison; that "things have grown very much worse since the Erzerum troubles;" that the Kurds have been more audacious in their demands and more reckless of human life; and that of late they have threatened the Christians as such, saying that the Government would approve of "their getting rid of them." Very little of any value, the people said, was left to them, and the extreme bareness of their dwellings, and the emptiness of their stables and sheepfolds, while surrounded with possibilities of pastoral and agricultural wealth, tend to sustain their statements. "The men of Government," they all said, "are in partnership with the Kurds, and receive of their gains. This is our curse."
Many women and girls, especially at Charviva and Vasivawa, have been maltreated by the Kurds. A fortnight ago a girl, ten years old, going out from ——, to carry bread to the reapers, was abducted. It became known that two girls in —— were to be carried off, and they were hidden at first in a hole near ——. Their hiding-place last week was known only to their father, who carried them food and water every second night. He came to me in the dark secretly, and asked me to bring them up here, where they might find a temporary asylum. Daily and nightly during the week of my visit Gawar was harried by the Kurds, who in two instances burned what they could not carry away, the glare of the blazing sheaves lighting up the plain.
The people of Gawar express great anxiety for teachers. The priests and deacons must work like labourers, and cannot, they say, go down to Urmi for instruction. A priest, speaking for two others, and for several deacons who were present, said, "Beseech for a teacher to come and sit among us and lighten our darkness before we pass away as the morning shadows. We are blind guides, we know nothing, and our people are as sheep lost upon the mountains. When they go down into the darkness of their graves we know not how to give them any light, and so we all perish."
This request was made in one of the large semi-subterranean dwellings, which serve for both men and beasts in Kurdistan. The firelight flickered on horses and buffaloes, receding into the darkness, and the square mud-platform on which we sat was framed by the long horns and curly heads of mild-eyed oxen.
I answered that it would be very difficult to raise money for such an object in England. "But England is very rich," the priest replied. I looked round, and the thought passed across my mind of Him "who though He was rich yet for our sakes became poor," whose life of self-denial from the stable at Bethlehem to the cross on Calvary is the example for our own, and whose voice, ringing down through ages of luxury and selfishness, still declares that discipleship involves a love for our brethren equal to His own. Yes, "England is very rich," and these Syrians are very poor, and have kept the faith through ages of darkness and persecution.
This plain, the richest in Kurdistan, is also most beautiful. In winter a frozen morass, it is not dry enough for sowing till May, and even June. This accounts for the lateness of the harvest. The Jelu mountains, the highest in Central Kurdistan,—a mass of crags, spires, and fantastic parapets of rock, with rifts and abysses of extraordinary depth,—come down almost directly upon it. There is no wood. The villages are all alike, surrounded just now by piles of wheat and straw on their threshing-floors, with truncated cones of fodder, and high smooth black cones of animal fuel. These are often the only signs of habitations. One may ride over the roofs without knowing that houses are below.
Being entirely baffled by the difficulty of obtaining transport, I went on to Gahgoran, and put up at the house of the parish priest, where the subterranean granary allotted to me was so completely dark that I sat all day in the sheepfold in order to be able to write and work, shifting my position as the sun shifted his. A zaptieh had been sent from Diza, who guarded me so sedulously that Qasha —— dared not speak to me, lest the man should think he was giving me information.
Gahgoran was full of strangers. The Patriarch had come down from Kochanes, and occupied the only room in the village, whither I went to pay my respects to him. The room was nearly dark, and foggy with tobacco smoke, but a ray of light fell on Mar Gauriel, Bishop of Urmi, a handsome full-bearded man in a Nestorian turban, full trousers, a madder-red frock with a bright girdle in which a khanjar glittered, and a robe over all, a leader of armed men in appearance. I had met him in Urmi, and he shook hands and presented me to Mar Shimun, a swarthy gloomy-looking man. In his turn he presented me to Mar Sergis, Bishop of Jelu, a magnificent-looking man with a superb gray beard, the beau-ideal of an Oriental ecclesiastic. Maleks and headmen of villages sat round the room against the wall, not met for any spiritual conclave but for stern business regarding the taxes, for the Patriarch is a salaried official of the Turkish Government. All rose when I entered, and according to a polite custom stood till I sat down. They held out no hope of getting baggage animals, and I returned to the sheepfold.
It was a long day. The servants did not arrive till night, and Kochanes receded hourly! Many people came for medicine, and among them a very handsome man whose house was entered by Kurds a month ago, who threatened him with death unless he surrendered his possessions. After this he and his brothers fled and hid among the wheat, but fearing to be found and killed, they concealed themselves for a fortnight in the tall reeds of a marsh. He is now subject to violent fits of trembling. "My illness is fear," the poor fellow said. Three hundred sheep had been taken from him and twenty-five gold liras; his grass had been burned, "and now," he said, "the oppressor Hazela Bey says, 'give me the deeds of your lands, if not I will kill you.'" He had been a Malek, and was so rich that he entertained travellers and their horses at all times. Now his friends have to give him wheat wherewith to make bread.
The house of Qasha Jammo has granaries at each side of the low door, a long dark passage leading into a subterranean stable with a platform for guests, and a living-room, on a small scale, like the one at Marbishu. A space was cleared in the granary for my bed among wheat, straw, ploughs, beetles, starved cats, osier graintubs coated with clay, six feet high, and agricultural gear of all sorts. It was a horrid place, and the door would not bolt. After midnight I was awakened by a sound as if big rats were gnawing the beams. I got up and groping my way to the door heard it more loudly, went into the passage, looked through the chinks in the outer door, and saw a number of Kurds armed with guns. I retreated and fired my revolver in the granary, which roused the dogs, and the dogs roused the twenty strangers who were receiving the priest's hospitality. In the stable were fourteen horses, including my own two, and several buffaloes. The Kurds had dug through the roof of the granary opposite mine, and through its wall into the stable, and were on the point of driving out the horses through the common passage when the hardy mountaineers rushed upon them. The same night, though it was light and clear, another house in Gahgoran was dug into, and a valuable horse belonging to a man in the Patriarch's train was abstracted. A descent was also made on the neighbouring village of Vasivawa, which has suffered severely. Eight zaptiehs employed by the villagers at a high price to watch the threshing-floor, and my own zaptieh escort, were close at hand.
Horses having at last been obtained from a Kurdish Bey, I left on Tuesday, the Gahgoran people being stupefied with dismay at the growing audacity of the Kurds. The mountain road was very dangerous, but I travelled with Mar Gauriel and his train, thirteen well armed and mounted men, besides armed servants on foot. The ice was half an inch thick, but the sun was very hot. The mountain views were superb, and the scenery altogether glorious, but the passes and hillsides are not inhabited. We were ten hours on the journey, owing to the custom of frequent halts for smoking and talking.
In the afternoon a party of Syrians with some unladen baggage mules came over the crest of a hill, preceded by a figure certainly not Syrian. This was a fair-complexioned, bearded man, with hair falling over his shoulders, dressed in a girdled cassock which had once been black, tucked up so as to reveal some curious nether garments, Syrian socks, and a pair of rope and worsted shoes, such as the mountaineers wear in scaling heights. On his head, where one would have expected to see a college "trencher," was a high conical cap of white felt with a pagri of black silk twisted into a rope, the true Tyari turban. This was Mr. Browne, one of the English Mission clergy, who, from living for nearly four years among the Syrians of the mountains, helping them and loving them, has almost become one of them. He was going to Diza to get winter supplies before his departure for one of the most inaccessible of the mountain valleys, but with considerate kindness turned back to Kochanes with me, and remains here until I leave. This fortunate rencontre adds the finishing touch to the interest of this most fascinating Kurdistan journey.
Crossing the Kandal Pass, we descended on the hamlet of Shawutha, superbly situated on a steep declivity at the head of a tremendous ravine leading to the Zab, blocked apparently by mountains violet-purple against a crimson sky, with an isolated precipitous rock in the foreground, crowned by an ancient church difficult of access. Below the village are fair shelving lawns, with groups of great walnut trees, hawthorn, and ash, yellow, tawny, and crimson—a scene of perfect beauty in the sunset, while the fallen leaves touched the soft green turf with ruddy gold. The camping-grounds were very fair, but the villagers dared not let me camp. The Kurds were about, and had exacted a ewe and lamb from every house. Owing to the influx of strangers, it was difficult to get any shelter, and I slept in a horse and ox stable, burrowed in the hillside, the passage to the family living-room, without any air holes, hot and stifling, and used my woollen sheets for curtains. The village is grievously smitten by the "cattle plague." In telling me of the loss of "four bulls" within three days, my host used an expression which is not uncommon here, "By the wealth of God, and the head of Mar Shimun."
Yesterday we descended 1500 feet, alongside of a torrent fringed with scarlet woods, and halted where the Shawutha, Kochanes, and Diz valleys meet at the fords of the Zab, here known as "the Pison, the river of Eden." The Zab, only fordable at certain seasons, is there a fast-flowing dark green river, fully sixty yards wide, deep enough to take the footmen up to their waists, and strong enough to make them stagger, with a lawn bright with autumnal foliage below the savage and lofty mountains on its right bank.
From the Zab we ascended the gorge of the Kochanes water by a wild mountain path, at times cut into steps or scaffolded, and at other times merely a glistening track over shelving rock, terminating in a steep and difficult ascent to the fair green alp on which Kochanes stands at the feet of three imposing peaks of naked rock—Quhaibalak, Qwarah, and Barchallah.
Thus I beheld at last the goal of my journey from Luristan, and was not disappointed. Glorious indeed is this Kurdistan world of mountains, piled up in masses of peaks and precipices, cleft by ravines in which the Ashirets and Yezidis find shelter, every peak snow-crested, every ravine flaming with autumn tints; and here, where the ridges are the sharpest, and the rock spires are the most imposing, on a spur between the full-watered torrents of the Terpai and the Yezidi, surrounded on three sides by gorges and precipices, is this little mountain village, the latest refuge of the Head of a Church once the most powerful in the East.
Kochanes consists of a church built on the verge of a precipice, many tombs, a grove of poplars, a sloping lawn, scattered village houses and barley-fields extending up the alp, and nearly on the edge of a precipitous cliff the Patriarch's residence, a plain low collection of stone buildings, having an arched entrance and a tower for refuge or defence. The houses of his numerous relations are grouped near it. Everything is singularly picturesque. The people, being afraid of an attack from the Kurds, would not suffer me to pitch my tent on their fair meadow, and Sulti, the Patriarch's sister, has installed me in a good room in the house, looking across the tremendous ravine of the Terpai upon savage mountains, the lower skirts of which are clothed with the tawny foliage of the scrub oak, and their upper heights with snow.
I. L. B.
LETTER XXIX
Kochanes, Oct. 27.
After two days the Patriarch arrived from Gahgoran with nearly forty persons. To realise what this house is like, one must go back four centuries, to the mode of living of the medieval barons of England. Mar Shimun is not only a spiritual prince, but the temporal ruler of the Syrians of the plains and valleys, and of the Ashirets or tribal Syrians of the mountains of Central Kurdistan, as well as a judge and a salaried official of the Turkish Government. He appoints the maleks or lay rulers of each district, where the office is not hereditary, and possesses ecclesiastical patronage. For over four centuries the Patriarch has been of the family of Shimun, which is regarded as the royal family; and he is assisted in managing affairs by a "family council." Kochanes is thus the ecclesiastical and political metropolis of the Syrian nation, and the innumerable disputes which arise among the people of this region are brought here for judgment and arbitration.
It is a crowded life. From sunrise to sunset the pavement outside the rude hall of entrance, the great room, like that at Marbishu, where Sulti presides, and the guest-chambers, are always thronged with men waiting to be received by the Patriarch, sleeping on the big settle in the hall, or cleaning swords and guns, or wrestling, performing feats of horsemanship, playing chess, and eating. Sixty persons more or less are guests here. Every one coming into the valley is received, and horses are stabled while men are fed. Outside, sheep and fowls are being continually killed, two or three sheep being required daily; mules are departing for Diza for stores, or are returning with flour and sugar; oxen are bringing in hay, and perpetual measuring and weighing are going on. The cost of provisioning such an army of guests is enormous, and presses heavily on the Patriarch's slender resources. Intrigues are rife. In some ways every man's hand is against his fellow, and the succession to the Patriarchate, although nominally settled, is a subject of scheming, plotting, rivalries, and jealousies. Then there are various appointments, secular and spiritual, to be wrangled for, the difficult relations with Turkey to be managed, and such a wavering policy to be shaped towards Rome and American Presbyterianism as shall absolutely break with neither.
Among the guests who come and go as they please, unquestioned, are refugees from the barbarities of the Kurds, among the most pitiable of whom is Mar ——, Bishop of ——, bereft under threat of death of his Episcopal seal, and a fugitive from his diocese, which is almost destroyed by violence and exactions. Few hours pass in which some fresh tale of bloodshed, or the driving off of flocks, or the attacking of travellers, or the digging into houses, is not brought up here. A piteous state of alarm prevails. Mar Shimun, naturally feeble and irresolute, and his family council are helpless. His dual position aggravates his perplexities. Counsels are divided and paralysed. No one knows where to turn for help on earth, and "the Lord is deaf," some of the people say.
On entering the house by an archway, where the heavily-bossed door stands always open, a busy scene is to be witnessed in the hall, which is roughly paved with irregular slabs of stone. On the rude stone settle men are sitting or sleeping, or a carpenter is using it as his bench, or a sheep is being cut up on it. At the end of a passage is the "house," a high, big, blackened room, with shelving floors of earth and rock, ovens in the floors, great quaraghs holding grain, piles of wood, men sawing logs, huge pots, goat-skins of butter hanging from the rafters, spinning-wheels, a loom, great roughly-cut joints of meat, piles of potatoes, women ceaselessly making blankets of bread, to be used as tablecloths before being eaten, preparations for the ceaseless meals involved by the unbounded hospitality of the house, and numbers of daggered serving-men, old women, and hangers-on. This room is only lighted from the doors and from a hole in the roof. Nearly opposite is a low dark lobby, from which opens my room, sixteen feet square, with walls three feet thick, and Mar Shimun's room, about the same size, which serves him for sleeping, eating, reception-room, and office.
On the same side of the hall are two guest-rooms, now packed to their utmost capacity, and a large room in which Ishai, the Patriarch's half-brother, a young man of exceeding beauty, lives, with his lovely wife, Asiat, and their four children. In a ruinous-looking tower attached to the main building Mr. Browne has his abode, up a steep ladder. Below there are houses inhabited by the Patriarch's relations, one of whom, Marta, is a dignified and charming woman, and the mother of Mar Auraham, the Patriarch-designate, whose prospective dignity is the subject of much intrigue.
The presiding genius of the Patriarch's household is his sister Sulti, a capable woman of forty, who has remained unmarried in order to guide his house, and who rules as well as guides. When she sleeps I know not. She is astir early and late, measuring, weighing, directing, the embodiment of Proverbs chap. xxxi. No little brain-power must be required for the ordering of such a household and the meeting of such emergencies as that of to-day, when twenty Jelu men arrived unexpectedly.
The serving-men all look like bandits. The medieval Jester is in existence here, Shlimon, a privileged person, who may say and do anything, and take all manner of liberties, and who, by his unlimited buffooneries, helps the Patriarch and his family through the dulness of the winter days. He and another faithful fellow, said to be equally quick with his tongue and his dagger, are Mar Shimun's personal servants. At fixed hours the latter carries food to his lord in tinned copper bowls on a large round tray, knives and forks not having penetrated to Kochanes.
The routine of the day is as follows. The Patriarch rises very early, and says prayers at dawn, after which those who have the entrée are served with pipes and coffee in his room, and talk ad libitum. Business of all sorts follows; a siesta is taken at mid-day, then there is business again, and unlimited talk with unlimited smoking till five, when the Patriarch goes to prayers at church, after which everybody is at liberty to attend his levée, and talking and smoking go on till 9 or 10 p.m. It is a life without privacy or quiet. The affairs of the mountains, litigation, tribal feuds, the difficulty of raising the tribute, the gossip of the village, and just now, above all else, the excesses of the Kurds, form the staple of conversation, as I understand from Qasha ——, who, as a personal friend, spends much of the day in the Patriarch's room. In winter, when Kochanes is snowed up, chess and the pranks and witticisms of the Jester fill up the time.
The curious little court, the rigid etiquette, the clank of arms, the unbounded hospitality, and the political and judicial functions exercised by the Patriarch, with the rude dwelling and furnishings, combine to re-create the baronial life as it might have been lived in Roslin or Warkworth Castles.
Though I had half-seen Mar Shimun at Gahgoran, I was only formally presented after his arrival here. It is proper for a woman to cover her head before him, and I put on my hat and took off my shoes. His room is well paved, the plaster is newly coloured, and there is a glazed window with a magnificent prospect. There were rugs at one end, on which the Patriarch was seated, with two chairs at his left hand. He rose to receive me, and, according to custom, I kissed his hand. He took my letter of introduction, and put it under a cushion, as etiquette demanded, and asked me to be seated. On the floor along the walls were bishops, priests, deacons, Jelu and Tyari mountaineers, lowlanders from Urmi, and men of the Shimun family, all most picturesquely dressed and smoking long wooden pipes. On each subsequent occasion, when I paid my respects to him, he was similarly surrounded. Mr. Browne acted as interpreter, but nothing but very superficial conversation was possible when there was the risk that anything said might be twisted into dangerous use. Mar Shimun is a man about the middle height, with large dark eyes, a sallow complexion, a grizzled iron-gray beard, and an expression of profound melancholy, mingled with a most painful look of perplexity and irresolution. He cannot be over fifty, but the miseries and intrigues around him make him appear prematurely old. When I approached the subject of the anarchy of the country he glared timidly and fearfully round, and changed the subject, sending me a message afterwards that Qasha —— and Kwaja Shlimon, a Chaldæan educated in Paris, are in possession of all that he could tell me, and would speak for him.
He and his family are very proud both of ancestry and position. Within limits his word is law; a letter from him is better than any Government passport or escort through the nearly inaccessible fastnesses of the Ashirets; "By the Head of Mar Shimun," and "By the House of Mar Shimun" are common asseverations, but he and his are exposed constantly to indignities and insults from minor Turkish officials and from Kurdish chiefs, and the continual disrespect to his person and office is said to be eating into his soul.
He wears a crimson fez with a black pagri, a short blue cloth jacket with sleeves wide at the bottom and open for a few inches at the inner seam, blue cloth trousers of a sailor cut, a red and white striped satin shirt, the front and sleeves of which are very much en évidence, and a crimson girdle, but without the universal khanjar.
This is the man who is the head at once of a church and nation, the temporal and spiritual ruler of the Syrian people, the hereditary Patriarch, the Catholicos of the East, whose dynastic ancestors ranked as sixth in dignity in the Catholic Church in its early ages. It was not, however, till the early part of the fifth century, when the Church of the East threw in her lot with Nestorius, after his condemnation in 431 by the Council of Ephesus for "heretical" views on the nature of our Lord, that the Catholicos of the East assumed the farther title of Patriarch. As I look on Mar Shimun's irresolute face, and see the homage which his people pay to him, I recall the history of a day when this church, which only survives as an obscure and hunted remnant, planted churches and bishoprics in Persia, Central Asia, Tartary, and China; its missionaries, full of zeal and self-sacrifice, brought such legions into its fold that in the sixth century the ecclesiastical ancestor of this Patriarch, then resident at Baghdad, ruled over twenty-five metropolitical provinces extending from Jerusalem to China; and when in the fourteenth century it was not only the largest communion in Christendom, but outnumbered the whole of the rest of Christendom, east and west, Roman, Greek, and other churches put together. It is truly a marvel not only that Baghdad, Edessa, and Nisibis possessed Nestorian schools of divinity and philosophy, but that Christian colleges, seminaries, and theological schools flourished in Samarcand, Bokhara, and Khiva! How this huge church melted away like snow, and how the tide of Christianity ebbed, leaving as a relic on its high-water mark within the Chinese frontier a stone tablet inscribed with the Nestorian creed, and how Taimurlane pursued the unfortunate Christian remnant with such fury that the Catholicos himself with a fugitive band was forced to fly into these mountains, are matters of most singular historic interest. Most fascinating indeed is it to be here. Each day seems but an hour, so absorbing are the interests, so deep the pathos, so vivid the tableaux, so unique the life in this hamlet of Kochanes, on its fair green alp at a height of 6000 feet among these wild mountains of Kurdistan, musical with the sound of torrents fed by fifty snow-drifts, dashing down to join "the Pison, the river of Eden" (as the Patriarch calls the Zab), on its way to the classic Tigris.
The afternoon I arrived, Sulti, Marta, Asiat, and several other women courteously visited me, and the next day I returned their visits in their simple pleasant houses. These formalities over, I have enjoyed complete liberty, and have acquainted myself with the whole of Kochanes, and with many of the people and their interests, and have had small gatherings of men in my room each evening, Qasha —— or Mr. Browne interpreting their tales of strife or wrong.
"Fear is on every side," the fear of a people practically unarmed, for their long guns, some of them matchlocks, are of no use against the rifles of the Kurds, nor dare they fire in self-defence. Travelling is nearly suspended. A company of people whose needs call them to Urmi dare not run the risk of the journey till they can go down with Mar Gauriel and his large escort. It is evident that the Patriarch and his people hoped for a British protectorate as one result of "the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission," and that they are bitterly disappointed that their condition is growing worse.
"How can we listen to teaching," say some of them, "when we have no rest? How can we believe in God when He lets these things happen to us? The Almighty is deaf, and we cease to pray. Can we hear teaching when the wolf is on us by night and day? If we let go the Cross we might be rich and safe. Night by night we ask, 'Shall we see the morning?' for our oppressors wax fiercer daily."
Mar ——, Bishop of ——, mentioned previously as a fugitive from his diocese, is a fine, pleasant-looking middle-aged man, more like a sailor than an ecclesiastic. Late one night, in a whisper, with a trusty watch at the door, he told his story, through Qasha ——, in the following words: