A MOUNTAIN BRIDGE.
A characteristic example near the village of Alot on the Lesser Zab.
No. 12
On another occasion, a worthy old qasha, or priest, Qasha Tuma by name, better known for his straight shooting than for his learning, turned up to interview Mr. Browne; assured him of his attachment to the English, and asked if there was nothing he could do to serve him.
“Certainly, Qasha,” said the Englishman; “gather the boys of your village and teach a school; I will find you books enough.”
“Nay Rabbi, that is quite beyond me. It is as much as I can do to read the services. But, if there was anyone whom you wished shot now, I should be delighted to undertake the job!”
Mar Shimun is accustomed to think of himself rather as Chief of his nation than as Patriarch of its Church (or to be accurate, not to separate those two offices in his mind);{274} but it is as Patriarch notwithstanding that he appeals to the imagination of outsiders—Patriarch of one of the most interesting and picturesque Churches in the world. We give a picture of his Cathedral, which like most of the mountain shrines is very small in size, and resembles a border “peel-tower” rather than a church of the type we are accustomed to.[131] Orientals are not troubled with any desire for pews and either stand through the service, or kneel or sit upon the floor during the Lessons and sermon, and thus a very small nave will accommodate a very fair congregation. Though the Church of Mar Shalitha at Qudshanis measures at the most a scant thirty feet square, we have seen a congregation of about 400 accommodated in it; and that without more crowding than was advisable to keep people warm before the dawning of a Kurdistan winter’s day. Once only, we may mention, have the Christmas day services been postponed till after sunrise; and that was on an occasion when a wild snowstorm, of the sort known by the expressive name of the “white darkness,” made it a physical impossibility for any person to win his way over the 200 yards that divide the church from the village.
Internally the church is divided into nave and sanctuary; the latter being partitioned off by a fairly solid wall, and raised on three steps above the nave level. Outside the sanctuary door two solid “tables” of masonry carry the book of the Gospels, and the Cross which is kissed by every person who enters the building. Curtains and small votive offerings form the decorations, the latter being chiefly bunches of aromatic herbs, which are suspended from the tie beams; but in these matters the Nestorian is of more than evangelical severity, and will allow no picture, far less any image, to be brought into the church. Even a stained glass window would excite his prejudice, if it contained any figures; a fact which is no doubt due to his desire{275} to escape any reproach of “idolatry” from his Mohammedan neighbours.[132]
The Liturgy of this Church is one of the oldest used in any part of Christendom; for it is practically certain that it existed in something like its present form by the year 450, and tradition ascribes it to an even earlier date. However, in a land where all services were until very lately manuscript and not printed, a certain amount of “fluidity” is natural; and indeed at certain services anyone who will bring an anthem of his own composition is entitled to have it chanted!
Evening celebrations of the Eucharist (Qurbana is the Syriac name for the Rite) are customary on the vigils of the greater festivals; and these are performed in a way that suggests a possible and most beneficial concordat on that disputed point between the “high” and “low” divisions of the Church of England, for all who attend the evening celebration in the Nestorian Church do so fasting!
That so ancient a Church as this isolated body should have certain rites peculiar to itself, in addition to those that are variants of services common to all Christendom, is of course to be expected; and every Nestorian attaches great importance to what is known among them as the “Succession of the Leaven.” Like all Orientals they celebrate the Eucharist with leavened bread,[133] and a certain amount of this is reserved after each “Qurbana” for one purpose, and one only. That purpose is neither communion of the sick, nor adoration; but the leavening of the dough that is to be baked for the next celebration. That baking of the bread, as is general with Orientals, is performed by the priest himself, and in the sacristy of the church, at a special preliminary office; and the admixture of the reserved crumbs at once leavens it, and puts it “into connexion” with that used on the previous occasion. And so they hold it is put “into connexion” with that used at all previous celebrations also, back to the institution in the{276} upper room at Jerusalem. As a matter of history, the fact can be of course neither proved nor disproved. As a piece of instructive and interesting ceremonial, we imagine that at the least nobody could object to it; while many would envy such a possession.
It is at the patriarchal diwan that the real life of Qudshanis finds its centre. At this solemn gathering, which is held daily in the course of the afternoon, anyone may be present; and anyone may bring forward any conceivable business that he wishes to have discussed in public. Coffee and tobacco go round, and for picturesqueness the gathering is hard to beat. It is composed mostly of mountaineers who look as if they had stepped down from the Assyrian sculptures, clad in loose home-spun coats and trousers, gay cummerbunds that are wrapped round and round their waists, and high felt caps that have been their headgear since time immemorial. Below these hang the long, plaited pigtails that form the traditional arrangement of their long hair. A bishop, or so, in long dark robes, serves as a foil to the many coloured dresses of the men of Tyari and Tkhuma; and the wonderfully handsome face of the young Patriarch (for good looks are part of the inheritance of the men of his family) forms a centre to the whole. He has himself unfortunately departed from the tradition of his fathers, and wears semi-European dress, which is seldom becoming to the Asiatic. Any visitor at Qudshanis is expected to attend the reception; and indeed to be in the place and not to be sometimes at the diwan of the Patriarch is a marked act of discourtesy and almost a proclamation of disloyalty. As far as the writer can make out, something the same line of thought governs the Oriental attendance at the services of his church. In attending the Qurbana, he is attending the diwan of that Great Power to whom he certainly does not intend to be openly disloyal.
Absolutely any business may be discussed, or any subject brought forward at these gatherings. Who is to be malik of such and such a district; what villages stand in need of clergy; what terms of agreement can be suggested for the settlement of some grazing dispute. And though these{277} questions may be settled in camera, the meanest man has his chance of making his opinion heard. If there is no special business to talk over, other subjects crop up; and a good fund of general information is a desirable possession for any Englishman who may be present, for strange questions are put before his wisdom. Thus, he may be asked why it is the case that some wild animals take so much more killing than do others; or invited to pass an opinion as to whether it is really the fact that shooting stars are the javelins cast by the Seraphim at the Jann, when they see them come up from earth to the lower courts of heaven for the purposes of eavesdropping. Once, a worthy old priest started the problem whether the angels kept the Fasts of the Church; and this was discussed with much learning and in true scholastic style. The theory propounded that they could hardly fast because they did not eat was scouted on the authority of the text, “Man did eat angels’ food;” this proving that they certainly ate something! “Then they eat but do not fast” said some; but that seemed unlikely, for of all sorts of men known to these present, whether Christian, Mussulman, Jew or Devil-worshipper, the only folk who did not fast in some way were the American Missionaries, and there was a general feeling that this was not quite a conclusive precedent![134] Finally the meeting somehow hammered out the very sensible conclusion that laws{278} made for fallen creatures like man did not necessarily bind unfallen beings; and the matter was left at that.
Occasionally some queer anecdote is related by one of the visitors; and one of these sticks in our memory as exemplifying the exceeding toughness and callousness of the Kurd. A gentleman of that race was riding his mule along one of the mountain paths when he was caught by an avalanche, which carried him down some distance, and then (in the sportive way that avalanches sometimes have) flung him on one side with his leg broken, but with his mule unhurt. He was ill enough off even so; for the spot was very lonely, and it was near nightfall. There was frost in the air already, and the temperature would be somewhere about zero before dawn. But by great good luck another traveller passed, and that traveller the victim’s own brother. This model of fraternal affection rode off with the mule “lest it should get stolen,” and left his brother in the snow till morning! But the latter was little the worse for his experience after all!
This episode was told us, as it happened, on the day after the query why some animals were very hard to kill; when we had explained that roughly, the lower the animal in the scale of creation, the more cutting and hacking he would stand. Hearing of the Kurd’s adventures, the Patriarch looked across at us and observed drily, “I always thought that Kurds were precious low animals, Rabbi, and now I know it.”
On the same occasion, a visitor detailed his own experience, when he had gone to pay a visit of sympathy to a Kurdish neighbour, who had recently lost some near relative. He entered the house, and found all the family as he had expected, seated wailing round the fireplace, as proper Kurdish custom dictates. They will sit thus, literally in the ashes, for some days; keeping up a low keening continuously, though at times some one of the party, without the least warning, will spring to his feet and shriek. Any visitor who wishes to express sympathy, takes up a shovelful of ashes from the hearth and pours it on the heads of the whole circle. The Christian, of course, did not neglect this{279} act of courtesy, but performed it liberally. However, quite unintentionally, he took up some live coals in the shovel, and these, by ill-luck, went down the neck of one of the mourners, who at once sprang to his feet with a howl, exclaiming “I burn, I burn,” and began tearing his clothes off. This, however, was quite ordinary behaviour, for wailing and rending of garments are habitual on these occasions; so all the family simply sat still and wailed in sympathy. The unlucky lad was really painfully, though not dangerously, burnt before his friends could be brought to understand that his sufferings were physical rather than mental!
As the recognized head of the Christian “ashirets” of Tyari and Tkhuma, and as the present holder of what all Mussulmans of the district recognize as a most ancient and venerable throne, Mar Shimun has a high position among the Kurds personally; though that fact does not, of course, keep them from plundering his people. In the past, indeed, it has not always availed to protect the House of the Patriarch itself from outrage; for when Bedr Khan Beg, the formidable Mira of Bohtan, attacked these Christian tribes in 1845—and perpetrated a massacre so appalling that the years are dated from it to this day—a special attempt was made to “extirpate the head of this brood of serpents.”
Qudshanis itself was ravaged; the church plundered; and many priceless records utterly destroyed. Even a firman said to be signed by the Prophet himself, and specially granting toleration to members of this body, was destroyed; no doubt as a forgery, because it condemned the very thing that its captors were in the act of doing. Whether as a matter of fact the document in question was actually Mohammed’s own dictation and sealing, cannot of course be proved now; but tradition has it that he was taught what he knew of Christianity by a monk of this body, so the story may be true. It is perhaps more probable that the grant in question was made by Omar, who was Khalif at the time that the Mussulmans over-ran Persia; and who is known to have made some such grant of toleration to the Nestorian Patriarch of his day.{280}
However that may be, it is the fact that every Kurd in the district of Hakkiari (a general name for the mountain districts of southern Kurdistan) has some reverence for Mar Shimun, as a sort of titular head of the land, and as a man of as much hereditary sanctity as a Christian can aspire to. Thus, strict Mussulmans will often consider that the flesh of animals killed by Christians is not clean enough for a true believer to eat. Who can tell if it has been properly made hallal or no? If, however, the beast has been killed by one of the patriarchal family, the strictest Moslem will not hesitate; particularly if the slaughtering has been done with one particular knife that is one of the heirlooms of the house.
Many other strange survivals of old days remain in this home of ancient semi-royalty and even more ancient patriarchate, but these must suffice. There are few spectacles more romantic and more attractive than that of this young man whom Providence has called to so difficult a position, loyally doing his best, with the help of his devoted sister, to guide and preserve those that are entrusted to him; to save them in the perils that encompass them, and to make them once more worthy inheritors of their own splendid past.
Note. The conclusion of this chapter provides an opportunity for the insertion of a few notes upon the bird and animal life of the mountains of Hakkiari. The subject has some interest of its own; though the fact that every self-respecting man in the country carries a gun prevents the land from ranking as a sportsman’s paradise.
Ibex are fairly common in the southern portions of the range, which are also the more rugged; and moufflon are to be obtained upon the lofty downs of the Armenian plateaux—but not in any great numbers. The former carry very fine heads, and we have seen them with knobs that marked a life of ten or even eleven years, and a measurement, round the curve of the horn, of over four feet.
Bears are common enough to be a nuisance in the spring—when they do much harm to the flocks—and are usually of the ordinary brown type. Sometimes they are of a greyish colour; and the district of Jilu can boast a variety which is described as “white.” The only skin of the type that the writer has seen, however, was light sandy in hue, and it is probably no more than a slight local variant in colour.
Generally they are hunted in a strictly utilitarian way; the object being not so much as to provide sport as to get rid of a nuisance. All the men of the village who can raise anything that can be fired without bursting go out en masse, and beat the hillside till the quarry is roused. When that happens there is as much firing as at an ordinary tribal{281} skirmish; and by the time the skin is brought in, it sometimes has some resemblance to a fishing-net.
One good man of Qudshanis, however, had a more sporting disposition, and made a practice of hunting the bear in a way that would have delighted the soul of the Emperor Maximilian, with no other weapon than a short stick (some eight inches long, pointed at the ends) and a dagger. His method was to track the bear to his lair, to approach to within arm’s length if possible, and then rouse the enemy. It seems that the bear could be trusted to stand at gaze for an instant with open mouth, and the hunter (so said deponent, who was the worthy old steward of the Nestorian Patriarch) then thrust the stick into his mouth, thus propping his jaws apart. The bear was sure to use his paws to get rid of the nuisance, and so laid himself open to just one stab from the dagger. It was certainly a sporting method, and the hunter got many skins and much local kudos, the latter being certainly well earned.
However, as often happens, there came a day when something went wrong. Precisely what happened was not known, for the hunter was, as usual, alone—and he never came back to explain how he had failed.
As is the case with many half-wild races, Assyrians regard the bear as half-human, or at all events nearer to man than other beasts; and are convinced, among other things, that he understands human speech. In one instance known to the writer, a girl went down to the fruit-orchards one summer evening with the reprehensible purpose of helping herself from trees that did not belong to her family. As she peered up the tree in the dusk, she saw the soles of a pair of feet above her, and called to the supposed boy to throw her down a share of the fruit. She got no answer, and so went on: “Then I’ll go and tell Abraham that you are stealing his fruit, and he will come out with a gun and a stick.” At that word, a half-grown bear dropped out of the tree beside her, and she perceived that the feet had been his, and not those of a boy. (The resemblance between the footprint of a bear and that of a man, in snow, is remarkably close.) It would be hard to say which party was the most scared, for they ran away in opposite directions; but, naturally, nothing would persuade the girl that the bear had not understood her.
Wild boar is fairly common in the lower hills, which are forest-clad; but the sportsman must reconcile himself to shooting them, for orthodox “pig-sticking” is out of the question in that land. Some of the Christian tribes (though they keep no domestic swine) will shoot and eat these beasts; and at times play unkind tricks on their Mussulman neighbours, inviting them to a banquet and putting pig before them. Kurds are not too particular under these circumstances, though they will not eat the meat knowingly. Still, if trapped thus, they salve their consciences with the remark: “The Christian had the sin, and I had the good dinner.” It is, however, only men of Tkhuma who act thus. The good folk of Tyari might not be above scoring off the enemy in that or any other way, but they will never themselves eat either pork or hare. They do not realize, however, that the rule is not peculiar to that elect people, their own tribe. A good lady of that valley once expressed to the writer her disgust at hearing that Christians were to be enrolled in the army in future. “How can I endure to have my sons set to eat pigs’ flesh among the Mussulmans?” Nothing would persuade her that they were not likely to be exposed to that horror at any rate.
Wolves are numerous, and their packs are at times a positive danger to life, particularly in hard winters. Solitary travellers are known to have been pulled down by them; and the local sheepdog is of necessity a powerful{282} and savage brute, though he has little of the sagacity of a Scotch collie. We have known a case in which a pack of wolves (driven by hunger, of course) actually entered the suburbs of the city of Van, and sent in a crafty old she-wolf as decoy. She brought a pack of rash street-dogs out at her tail, and the ambush was a great and shining success. The wolves got a good meal for once, and the nights in that quarter of the city were more peaceful for some time after. In the same winter (that of 1905-6, which was of exceptional severity) a pack of hunger-driven wolves actually invaded an Armenian village, and remained in possession of it for a matter of an hour. All human beings were driven to take cover in the houses, and every dog in the place was killed, while the middens were cleaned up as they had not been for many a day. The folds could not be entered, nor could the houses—else a grim tragedy would have been enacted—and, after a while, the enemy withdrew, after a strange temporary reversal of the normal condition of things.
Leopards are still to be found in the mountains, but very rarely. We have, however, seen a cub in captivity, and he was certainly not imported into the land. Lynx and marten are rare now; and the foul-eating “ghoul,” which is apparently a type of hyæna, is found on Mosul plain, as mentioned above, in company with the equally disreputable jackal. The lion which, on the evidence of Assyrian sculptures, was once common on the Mesopotamian plain, is extinct now; though old men among the Arabs still look back fondly to the days when a youth was expected to prove his manhood by killing one as a gift to his bride.
If the lion is extinct, however, another great beast that figures with him as royal game for the King of Nineveh would seem to be not quite exterminated yet. This is the aurochs, which appears repeatedly on the carvings in the British Museum.
We have never seen this animal in life, but we once saw the head of something of the genus bos on the wall of the house of a Kurdish gentleman of Amadia. Its preservation was deplorable, but it had long fine horns, and its colour had been white originally, as is the case with wild cattle elsewhere, but is very rare with the domestic animal. We observed to our host that his ox had unusually fine horns, but he declared “that is no common ox, Effendim; it is one of the wild cattle of the mountains, of which there are very few in these days.” We regret to add that seven years later the head had perished altogether, which is a distinct loss; still, there is other evidence that the animal is not entirely extinct as yet.
Birds are not numerous, but what there are are mostly of the decorative order. The great golden eagle is fairly plentiful in the mountains, and the black one is seen at times. Vultures and kites are common enough; and Haji Laqlaq the stork comes in regularly from his pilgrimage to Mecca in the spring. Magpies are plentiful and are seen in flocks of twenty at a time, in numbers that preclude any superstition attaching to them. They are good scavengers; and the parts that appear as black in their English cousins are seen, on examination, to be of a dark metallic blue and green in these specimens, so that the total effect is really brilliant.
The “blue jay” too, is really blue in this land; for he does not confine himself to a few blue feathers in his wings, as with us, but does equal honour to both our universities, by appearing with a Cambridge blue body and Oxford blue wings, and thus has a magnificent appearance. Even he is outdone by the kingfisher, who is a large specimen of his kind, and clothes himself entirely in deep metallic blue with a marvellous sheen. That at least is the livery of the fisher on the River Zab. Lower down{283} on the Tigris, the blue is light in colour, though equally metallic in tone, and is set off by a pair of bright russet wings.
The hoopoe comes in the summer and is, as ever, an attractive and gay neighbour, with his body of bright chestnut, and wings and crest of barred black and white. Nestorians call him “the bird of Solomon,” and tell the familiar legend of his crown; but Armenians account for it in a different way. “Their fathers say” that the hoopoe was once a damsel, very pretty, but also very conceited, who would not veil her face as decency dictates, but kept the covering that should have concealed it cocked up on the top of her head, so that all the young men could see her. So she was turned into a hoopoe, and goes about for ever in the same flirty way as of old, with the veil still on the top of her head in the guise of a crest!
Of all feathered fowl, however, none are more brilliant in colour than the bee-eater and the golden oriol. A gold-coloured body and black wings distinguish the latter; but we have never been able to satisfy ourselves as to how many hues go to the livery of the small and quick-flying bee-eater. Gold, red, green, and blue all form part of it we know; and a flock of them flying in the sun is at least a beautiful sight, though not one that is too welcome to the keeper of hives. If only they would turn their attention to flies of other varieties, one would afford them unstinted praise; as it is, one pardons their iniquities for the sake of their good looks.
Page 275. Note. We add a note to make this matter clearer, for the benefit of liturgiologists. Two sorts of leaven are put into the dough to leaven it, and both are called “melka” (King, cf the Spanish title for the Host “Su Majestad.”)
One of these is a portion taken, before consecration, from the loaf prepared for the last celebration, and reserved for this purpose. The other consists of a mere pinch of flour, or of bread reduced once more to the consistency of flour, which is kept in a special vessel in the sanctuary.
The tradition concerning this is as follows. When the Lord distributed the elements at the first Qurbana in the upper room, he gave a double portion of the bread to St. John. The Apostle consumed one part and reserved one, which he moistened with the blood of Christ on Calvary, and divided, after the Ascension, into twelve portions. One was given to each Apostle when they went forth to preach, that the act of mingling particles of it with the dough to be consecrated at every Eucharist, might connect the bread used on each occasion with that used at the first. This Melka is supplemented as needful, either with pulverised bread from the Qurbana or with fine flour, (our informant was not clear on this point), and is held to contain particles of the original, or at least to have been put into connexion with it.
QUDSHANIS is probably a spot that is unique on the world’s surface; but on leaving it for the south, the traveller soon finds himself in a land that is fascinating enough, though plenty of parallels might be found for it, even in the present orderly world, and numbers in the history of every nation in the past. This land is the country of the Nestorian “ashirets” of Tyari, Tkhuma, Diz, Baz, and a few other wild mountain cantons; men who live under the peculiar conditions described in an earlier chapter.
It is to be expected that the natural features of a land where so primitive a state of things prevails will be rugged; and those of Hakkiari are wild and strange enough to merit a special description. The mountains are in fact a section of that great Taurus range, which extends in a curve from the shores of the Mediterranean to somewhere south of Baghdad. At this point they are pierced by a large river, the Zab, which rises well to the north of them on the Armenian plateau; and with rare determination bores its way clean through the range, till it emerges on the Mesopotamian level to the south of it, and so falls into the Tigris a little below Mosul. The cleft that it makes in the mountains is one of the great cañons of the world, comparable, in the opinion of those who have seen all, to the gorges of Yosemite and the “great Cañon of Colorado.” Midway in its course the peaks of Supa Durig and Koka Bulend, the two kings of that wilderness, stand opposite to one another. Each is nearly fourteen thousand feet in height above the sea; and as a bird flies, their crests{285} are not more than twelve miles apart. But the level of the river Zab that flows between them is only 4000 feet above the sea at that point, so that the net depth of the gorge is over 9000 feet.
We presume that this insistence on the part of the river arises from the fact that the huge wrinkle of the earth’s surface which men call the mountains of Taurus is of later date than the elevation of the plateau to the north of it; and that consequently, as the rivers were already flowing to the south, they steadily gouged away the barrier, as it was being slowly heaved up. Or perhaps the Zab may have found some great crevasse in the mountains which gave it the opportunity that it needed. Whatever the process, the result has been a series of most magnificent gorges, with walls falling almost precipitously from the level of eternal snow to that of fig-tree, vine, and olive; and side ravines which are scarcely inferior to the main gorge in grandeur. So narrow is the chasm, and so steep the sides of it, that even at the river level avalanches form a very real danger to spring travel, and must often be crossed by hundreds in a day’s march. Such crossing is not too easy; for smooth snow at an angle of 40°, terminated by a drop into a swollen torrent, may be dangerous for any caravan to traverse; and many are the tales told of the escapes or deaths of mountaineers.
One man of our acquaintance was caught by a descending avalanche and swept down the hill by the moving mass. While motion lasted, he was of course fairly safe; but he had the wits to remember that the peril must come when the foremost part of the great snow-slide was checked on the level, and the hinder part, still advancing, squeezed itself together like a telescoping railway train. By good luck he was upright when motion ceased and he felt the snow consolidating round him. Working his body frantically to and fro, he made as it were a little cell for himself, so that he remained uncrushed; but he was buried and held a prisoner, for his legs and feet were fast. There he remained for three days, for a man can breathe through a considerable thickness of even compressed snow; and there{286} he was when his friends came out to search for his dead body. They probed the snow with stick; and, as it happened, poked one down actually into his chamber, so that he was able to catch the end of it and hold on. He was extricated but little the worse.
An American missionary in the land had a similar experience in one of the side valleys. He and his party made a rash attempt to cross a slope of new snow, lying to the depth of perhaps six inches on the smooth surface of old hard stuff; and naturally they started an avalanche. The whole party of eleven men were borne down a matter of 2000 feet; and the marvel was that only one of them perished.
At one particular place an enormous avalanche is an annual event, owing to the peculiar configuration of the gorges. The winter fall on a whole mountain side is artfully concentrated into one funnel-shaped valley, which discharges into the Zab itself; and the snow-slide frequently dams the stream for some hours. There is a profitable harvest of great fish to be gathered in the dry bed below the dam at that time; though such gleaning is of an unusually exciting character. For naturally when the dam does go, it goes with a rush; and the point of safety is a good distance above the normal level of the current!
The average width of the river in the mountains is perhaps fifty yards, and its pace is very great; yet such temporary bridgings are not uncommon. The writer has seen a case where an avalanche had not only crossed the river, but had then been swirled round by the configuration of the rocky slope on the other side, so that it overwhelmed a house that had been built in what appeared to be an absolutely safe recess. Seven lives were lost on that occasion, though one old man was found living after six days burial under the snow, the roof-beams having so fallen as to make a protection for his head.
In such a land as this, life is a hard matter; all cultivation is on terraces, built as described above, and subject to the constant danger of destruction by flood or avalanche.{287}
Barring such accidents the terrace fields are fertile enough, if they have a sufficiency of water; but this again has to be supplied them artificially by leading the irrigation channels from the main stream (often along precipitous faces of rock) and maintaining them carefully when built. Millet and rice are the staple crops; the former furnishing food both for man and beast, for its long stalks are excellent fodder. Its grain is very sustaining as food, as we know from experience, but it is not attractive. In fact bread made from it rather suggests that your host has run short of flour, and has eked matters out with an equivalent weight of sawdust! Even so, however, “it is better to eat millet bread and carry a gun, than to be an unarmed rayat under the Ottoman” under present conditions.
Roads are of course unknown in the land, and there is no such thing as a wheeled vehicle from one end of Hakkiari to the other. Tracks scramble up the gorges along the slopes of shale, and climb by what are known as stangi over and round projecting noses of precipice. A stanga is a built up track; the stones being often held in place, by their own weight only, on branches of trees stuck in crevices of the rock, and projecting out over the torrent.
Mules can get along these roads fairly well, being to the manner born; and sheep and goats do well enough also. But certain villages have a happy immunity from the attentions of the raider, owing to the fact that no quadruped can be driven along the tracks that lead from them. Such cattle as they possess were either born on the land, or were carried up in the days of their calfhood on men’s backs. As for horses, it is a tradition that they cannot be got through the gorges at all, and nobody but a mad Englishman ever thinks of attempting such a thing. It has been done twice, however; once by the writer, and once by a military Consul from Van. Of course the horses were not ridden; and in fact had each of them two men to look after their needs, one at the head to lead them, and the other at the tail to hold them on to the track when it went round sharp corners at a steep angle. This secured that when the poor beast slipped at such a place, he did not fall into the{288} river, but onto the track; after which a man held his head down to prevent his struggling to rise (which would have meant disaster), till all the men who could get a hold of him were gathered round. Then came the signal, “Are you ready—lift!” and the astonished horse found himself raised with a straight hoist upwards, like a baby, and so set on his feet once more. Thus they were got through; but they all left their shoes behind!
The bridges which cross the river form quite a feature of the land, and show considerable engineering skill; though the crossing of them needs a steady head as they are constructed at present. In principle, they are true cantilevers. Piers are built at some convenient place, and a long “bracket” of poplar trees is built out over the stream from each shoreward side. The butts are weighted down with stones, and the projecting ends are perhaps forty feet apart. Two long poplars are then slung side by side between the ends of the converging brackets, and a floor of withy hurdles makes the bridge complete.
As the trunks are very elastic, the whole structure swings considerably even if it does remain horizontal. Often, however, it acquires a pronounced tilt to one side or the other; and in any case a three-foot track without any sort of parapet is narrow for a bridge. By old rule, you ought not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the sight of the torrent whirling below should unnerve you. In this case, however, look down you must, and make the best of the vision of the torrent as seen through the withy hurdle floor; for that floor is full of holes and other traps and stumbling blocks, and if you trip, disaster follows! Even natives sometimes condescend to be led across these places, or even to crawl; but animals vary as much as menfolk in their behaviour on such occasions. The writer has known a plains-bred horse walk over one of these bridges as if to the manner born, without even a man to his tail; and has seen a mountain-bred mule jib till he had to be ignominiously towed through the river by a combination of tethering and baggage ropes!
One would expect that the useful donkey would be the{289} very best of all possible animals for use in this land; but the Assyrians of Tyari have a prejudice against him. “He that is Lord of Ears”—his name is quite unmentionable,—is iyba for the ashirets. Iyba is an institution that needs some explaining. The word means “shame;” but the European presently gets the impression that it can be extended to cover any mortal thing which he orders, and which for any reason the native does not want to do. Anyway, the poor donkey is iyba, and no mountaineer will own one. A legendary man of Tyari dared to do so once; but life was made such a burden to him by the jeers of all his kin, that at last he hove the unfortunate jackass into the Zab from one of the bridges we have been describing, and was free of further reproach. A mule is honourable enough, if you are so fortunate as to own one; but it is etiquette to address a hybrid beast like that in Kurdish (which is a second tongue to all mountaineers); whereas your ox, being a proper and biblical sort of animal, is addressed in Syriac, which is a good Christian tongue.
So far does prejudice against the ass go, that when the Gospel for Palm Sunday has to be read, the priest (who usually translates the text as he reads from the “Old Syriac” of the Pshitta into the Vernacular) substitutes a word that means “colt” for “ass.” One poor rector, who determined to be faithful to the text, found that sundry “aggrieved parishioners” were complaining of him to the Patriarch for a shameless falsification of the sacred Scriptures.
Nor is there a prejudice only against the ass. Few mountaineers will eat the hare, or the pig, in that these come under Levitical prohibition. And as regards the eating of other animals, we remember this conversation with a certain trusted servant and steward, which speaks for itself. “Tell me O Rabbi; is the thing really true which they say, that the French do eat frogs?”
“It is true, O deacon; and they say that they are good.”
“Rabbi; if we had a man who did that in Tkhuma, we should kill him.”
Hitherto, there has been no law in the land (as may{290} perhaps be inferred from the foregoing paragraph), but tribal custom has ruled; and in consequence Hakkiari has been the home of good manners, and of that self-respect which comes from a sense of natural superiority to the plainsman! This last is strongly developed among them; “The greatest nation in all the world,” said an ashiret Christian one day, “is the English. Next to that comes the Tyari.” (One may readily guess that this was the speaker’s own tribe.) “Third, but a long way behind these, is the Russian. There are no other nations.”
This sense of congenital superiority brought the writer into rather hot water, when in the year 1904 he brought a select party of these wild Highlanders down to the city of Van, there to receive at his hand instruction that (it was hoped) would “soften their morals and not allow them to be ferocious.”
They came, they deposited their goods; they ate a meal. And forthwith went out into the street and began to thrash all the Armenians they could find! There was some sort of excuse urged, “The dogs dared to laugh at our long hair, Rabbi.” But the real reason, as subsequently explained, was the general feeling that the sooner these inferior beings learnt to know their place, the better it would be for the comfort of everybody!
Next day a complaint came in from an American mission, also established in the town. These ashirets had caught the Armenian headmaster of their school, and were playing leap-frog over him in the street, greatly to the scandal of his pupils, who were, however, all too scared (or possibly too appreciative) to attempt a rescue!
Stealing, properly so called, is almost unknown in the mountains. There are of course a good many things that are practically held in common, and which you take when you need, such as pasturage for instance; but theft is very rare and punished with exemplary severity. A father of unusually Roman disposition has actually been known to assent to the death sentence passed on his son when that young man had so far disgraced himself as to steal. It must be owned, however, that death was only adjudged{291} in this case because nobody could think of any alternative. No prison was available; and yet something must be done under the circumstances; so what was there for it but to shoot the man? The Patriarch forbade that penalty, and the unworthy mountaineer was only banished from his valley.
It is of course clearly understood in Hakkiari—and one hopes that the English reader understands it also—that robbery and theft are not at all the same thing. Any gentleman may go on the raid. His plunder is his lawful property, and his exploit a source of legitimate pride. In fact, their code is exactly similar to that of another thorough gentleman, Evan Dhu Maccombich; “He that steals a cow from a poor widow is a thief, but he that lifts a herd of cattle from the Sassenach is a gentleman drover.” The good folk of Tyari have been in the habit for generations of imitating the heroes of another of Scott’s novels in these matters; for a tithe of all the plunder got in raids went always to the Church of Mart Miriam (Lady Mary, i.e. the Blessed Virgin), in the valley of Walto. “They paid tithe on every drove they took from the south; and if they were something lightly come by, and their confessor knew his business, I have known them make the tithe a seventh.” Alas, however, those days are passing; and though the devotion of the men of Tyari is as good as ever, the profits of raids are not what they were.
One case, indeed, is recorded (his Holiness the Patriarch is our authority for the tale) when the raiders had some scruples about disposing of their spoil. The heroes of the incident were the men of Diz valley, who had successfully lifted a cow from some Kurdish neighbours, and were proposing that she should furnish a sumptuous Christmas banquet. Some scrupulous soul, however, had grave doubts whether the beast, having been Mussulman property so lately, was clean enough for a religious purpose of that kind.[135]
The worthy rector of Diz rose to the occasion when this religious difficulty was put before him. Rabbi qasha exorcised the cow; and so was honoured with an invitation to the banquet at which she subsequently figured as the pièce de resistance!
We have given in a previous chapter the “rules to govern the conduct of a gentleman in case of feud;” and the only occasion when these do not hold, is when a Jehad is proclaimed by Moslems. When you go to war in the name of Allah and religion, you are naturally entitled to commit any atrocity you like, and usually do so. The old courtesies, too, were further abrogated as the result of the Armenian massacres of 1895. The systematic outraging of the women then was part of the Turkish plan, and seems to have been the deliberate order of Abdul Hamid. When such acts had been once authorized by the Khalif, it was natural that the lower type of Kurd should not readily return to the better ways of his fathers in more ordinary raids.
Speaking generally, however, feuds are carried on with great lightness of heart, much gaiety, and very little malice. The writer has known men who were at open feud with one another meet in the household of the English Mission (where of course, truce was observed), and chaff one another in most friendly wise as they shared tea with the English “apostles.” In war time even “booby traps” (or something like them) were not unknown; and once the men of Tyari rejoiced in a score gained over an opponent, who feared to make any attack upon a position held in truth by a dozen men and boys, because they suddenly found themselves confronted with a formidable battery of artillery which they had not credited the Tyari men with possessing at all.
As a matter of fact, the cannon were mere dummies; and were neither more nor less than beehives (the local beehive is a long narrow thing, in shape much resembling an old-fashioned eel-trap), which had been artfully faked for the occasion and plastered all over with black mud!
The heroes of this exploit were so delighted with their score, that they set to work to make a cannon of their{293} very own. A hollow poplar trunk formed the barrel this time, and it was wrapped round with bands of iron on a system not unlike that on which a modern “wire-wound” gun is made at Elswick, though the materials were hardly such as Messrs. Armstrong’s inspector would have approved.
The engine was only meant to bluff their enemies, and did that well on at least one occasion; but the temptation to see what it could do got too much for its possessors, and they (with the wonderful courage of ignorance) charged the thing and fired it! Of course, it burst; but the providence that guards schoolboys guarded these boys too, and nobody was hurt.
Some years ago, the chances in these feuds and battles were about even; and had they continued so the writer could not have found it in his heart to advocate the abolition of so ancient and interesting a form of sport, nor would any of the combatants have wished it. It is true that the Christians had usually to face odds in numbers; but they had strong positions to defend, and such a reputation as fighting men, that the Kurds themselves admitted that when you went against the men of Tyari and Tkhuma, it was well to have odds of five to one in numbers on your side. Then, however, each side used old guns of much the same character; flint-locks to wit, with home-made powder and bullets. This, as noted elsewhere, is not the case now; for the Kurds have been equipped with more modern arms. The powder the folk of the mountains manufactured for themselves, being able to get sulphur in plenty in their hills, and burning their own charcoal. Nitre could always be gathered in some caverns where the sheep were folded, but our knowledge of chemistry does not enable us to say exactly how. Bullets were easy to come by, for lead crops out in thick veins in certain gorges, and can be absolutely cut out of the rock in chunks for the purpose. As for the casting, it is wonderful what unsuspected uses there are for a thimble! Nobody dreams of using it hereabouts as an assistance to sewing; but when set in a lump of clay, it makes a very tolerable bullet-mould!
One skilful old priest of our acquaintance earned quite a{294} good income by converting muzzle-loaders into “Martinis,” which is the general term for any sort of breech-loader. He was a very fair smith, and though his copies of the Martini lock and breech mechanism might not have passed the War Office standard, they were very satisfactory for their owners.
Some artists hope to improve the local brand of gunpowder. One of the first questions put to us during our wanderings in the mountain glens was, “Rabbi, is it oak charcoal or walnut that you English use for the making of your gun-medicine?” “Neither, but willow,” said we, that piece of unclerical information having somehow stuck in our mind from some old “book of useful knowledge.” Hence it would appear that the most unlikely things come in useful at times, for the answer materially increased our prestige.
Many a primitive practice and habit goes on in these mountains, but perhaps the most startling to a stranger is the taking of the bath coram publico; a custom which is common to both Christians and Kurds. The rationale of the habit is sound enough. Mud floors get damp and unhealthy with the weekly wash, and the much splashing of water that it entails; let it then be done in the open, by the spring or river, where a fire can be lit to heat the water and for the comfort of the bather.
It is a little disconcerting for the European at first, and seems a startling drop back through a good many centuries, when you turn a corner in the road suddenly, and find yourself confronted by a group of maidens, who have put all their clothes in the big copper to wash, and are engaged in performing that office for one another. However, if the stranger is embarrassed, they are not. It is not manners to stare of course; and they sit still undisturbed till the man has passed, without even interrupting their conversation. Good narrow-minded folk at home say that they have no sense of decency. That, however, is an absolute libel; and it is far more near to the truth to say that it is the sense of indecency that is absent, as it was in the Garden of Eden. Layard had experience of this custom{295} when he brought men of these tribes down to Mosul to work at his excavations. This he did for convenience’ sake, in that they, having only a mountaineer’s superstitions, were immune to those of the plain; and did not raise the same difficulties about digging in the mounds that the Arabs did. Naturally, his excavators brought their wives and daughters to cook for them; and naturally, those ladies brought their habits, and took their tubs as they had always done at home. When it was represented to them by their employer that they had scandalized the decent and respectable city of Mosul by so doing, they replied innocently, “But, sahib, if the Mussulmans object, they need not look.” A Saturday tub in Tyari is a solemn and proper ceremonial. All the family go down together, and the washing is carried out, in true Homeric style, by the ladies personally. The old women scrub the old men, and the damsels the youths. When the men have finished the girls take their tubs.
Certainly one poor Englishman had a painful experience, when he, a newcomer to the country, took a walk down the valley of Tyari on a Saturday afternoon. Turning a corner abruptly, he found a fair maiden sitting in all innocence in her bath. The Englishman had been properly brought up, so he averted his gaze, and passed by, as far away as the narrow limits of the path allowed. However, the damsel had been properly brought up too, but in a rather different school; and seeing that it was a qasha (Priest), who was passing, she sprang out of her bath and came to kiss his hand as politeness dictates. Saint Anthony fled, totally misunderstanding her purpose; and the damsel followed after, ejaculating plaintively “Rabbi, Rabbi, what have I done that you will not allow me to kiss your hand?” It is said that he ultimately covered his eyes with his left hand, and extended his right at arm’s length for the salute. However, a very few weeks’ experience gave him perfect indifference to the spectacle.
Old chivalrous rules of the obligation of hospitality still hold in the mountains; and a conspicuous instance of this was given by one of the Nestorian maliks in the January{296} of 1907. As a general rule, no effort is made to march troops through these hills, for it is at once toilsome, useless and dangerous. In that month, however, a company of infantry were sent through the gorge of the Zab, with orders to report at Julamerk, a seat of government to the north of it; the object probably being to show that the thing could be done.
Being at best but half-trained men of Kurdish blood, and knowing that they had been sent where no troops had gone before, they naturally got more and more “jumpy” as they penetrated the gorge, and began to see an ambush behind every rock. Thus when they met a party of four Tyari men descending the road, they opened fire on them and shot down the lot!
This was not, we believe, the cold-blooded murder that it seemed, but a pure fit of nerves on the part of undisciplined men. However, having done it, they were naturally more frightened than ever at what they had done; and fairly ran for it (so far as anyone can run on those roads, which is not very fast), to the house of a prominent Christian malik of Tyari, Ismail of Chumba. They crossed the bridge to his house; and so demoralized were they that they did not even secure safety by breaking it down behind them, a result that could have been secured by ten minutes’ work with a pocket-knife. They told the chief that they had killed his own clansmen without provocation, and asked him to protect them! It says much for mountain chivalry that he recognized the claim of the suppliant without hesitation, and promised to do his best, if it was in his power to control his own tribesmen under the circumstances.
Those tribesmen gathered very soon for their revenge, and came up the valley towards Chumba in force; and then the malik went out and met them at the bridge, to urge that the thing had been after all an accident, so to speak, and not a butchery, and that it must be judged as such. A long and hot discussion followed; the tribesmen saying, with some force, that they did not care whether the thing was an accident or not; their men were dead, and they would have blood for blood. All arguments were tried{297} in vain, till at last the mountaineers summed up, “It is no good, malik; you have done your best, but we must have our revenge, and that is our last word. Stand out of the way.”
At that Ismail took his stand on the bridge and used his final argument. “If that is your last word, now hear mine. These men are my guests now, and have eaten my bread and are in my house. What they did before is nothing to me; and if it were my own brother they had killed I would guard them now. If you dare to attack, I and mine will defend them; and you will have to kill your own chief before you lay hand on any one of his guests.” At that the avengers held back and hesitated till night fell; and under that cover, Malik Ismail and his son Shlimun escorted their guests into safety by the tracks over the hills, and led them unharmed to Julamerk. The whole was as fine an act of chivalry as these days can show.
With their chivalry goes as is often the case with mountaineers, a vein of what we can call nothing but school-boyishness. The pure lark of a fight appeals to them irresistibly. In the spring of 1912, the men of one particular Christian district known as Salabekan contrived to carry out a most successful raid against their neighbours over the hill, the Kurds of Châl. It was only an episode in a feud that had dragged on for many years, but was executed with some skill; the raiders securing 500 sheep without even waking their late owners! When they were well on their way home, however, it occurred to some young hotheads that there is really no satisfaction in lifting your enemy’s sheep, unless you know that he knows who has scored off him!