Next day we had crossed the high plains and got into the warm desert towards Diarbekr. As we approached, the black walls rose above the horizon, and occasionally the gully where the Tigris runs would be apparent, the yellow of the cliff face showing against the duller colour of the plain. Approaching from the west, Diarbekr is not beautiful nor remarkable. In the middle of a great desert, the river, too, hidden by its cliff banks, Diarbekr appears as a citadel of black stone without any green or vegetation. Nearer views revise the unfavourable first impression, for on the slopes and the lands by the river banks, there are splendid gardens, which in this month of April were dressed in all the delicate hues of blossom and new leaf. The fine bluff upon which the city stands, looking up and down the river, is, of course, invisible from the west, facing the rising sun as it does.

My driver told me to prepare my passport, for he assured me we should not be allowed to pass the gates through the walls without showing our credentials. So I produced my passport and got it ready—that traitorous document, proclaiming me English, British-born, and Christian!

I began to wonder how the “Kurdish Haji” would look if questions were asked of the driver, to whom by now I had employed so many pious Musulman expressions and ventilated such orthodox sentiments, besides conducting myself in the manner of any other travelling Asiatic, that I knew he would swear to my Islamism. Not only that, but the police would certainly never believe that I was a European, my style of travelling, the only language I knew well—Kurdish—being convincing arguments against such a possibility. So it was not that I was afraid of being found out, but that I regarded with some trepidation the possibility of being accused of having stolen another’s passport, a very heinous crime indeed. English passports and European correspondence would serve me little among people where Europeans are very rarely seen, in places where the Englishman seldom, if ever, travels, and never in such guise. The weather, too, had done its best to disguise me. I was darkened by wind and sun; nine days’ black beard scraped the chest left bare by a buttonless shirt. My trousers were muddy and torn, and I wore a long overcoat, very much like the robes of any of the myriads of Turkish subjects who affect a semi-European dress.

There was no alternative, however; one could not stop outside in the plain nor enter unperceived, so we drew up just outside the gate in the massive walls at a police post, and an official demanded my passport. I handed it to him, and held my breath. The coachman who had seen this done a thousand times, and took no interest fortunately, seized the opportunity to descend and buy some cigarettes at a shop near by. The effendi, unusually civil for his class, asked me where I came from, and by what route, and where I was going. Hearing that my destination was Mosul, he seemed to lose interest, but produced a pocket-book and prepared to note particulars of my passport, when I observed that he held it upside down and made illegible marks in his book, and I realised that no art of the Constantinople passport clerk could betray me, for he was utterly illiterate. He asked my name, and still fearing eventualities, I repeated my own name very indistinctly, which he aptly transliterated as Ali as-Sūn, after which all was plain sailing, for he presupposed that I was a Haji, which the coachman confirmed, and I let him know I was a British subject, the supplementary fact that I was Persian-born being supplied by the driver, and so with a polite good-day we passed on.