One evening at sunset I joined Haji Rasul where he sat meditating on his bench. He had a companion and assistant who performed the labour connected with their daily life, cooking, cleaning their room, spreading the bed-clothes and the carpet upon which we sat. This youth was a native of Smyrna, a simple Turkish lad, the best specimen of his race I ever met. He was a rarity in Muhammadan lands, a Sunni converted to Shiism, for the old Haji had converted him in Smyrna. Despite his travels he could talk nothing but Turkish.

A constant companion of this strange pair was a small white cat, to which they were both strongly attached. Having been with them since kittenhood, it fully reciprocated their affection, and had developed a high degree of feline intelligence.

The old Haji had brought it from Aleppo, and it possessed a little cage in which it performed its journeys. Its food was specially cooked for it by the youthful Turk, and it had regular time and its own dish, for meals.

Spotlessly clean it was, and very exclusive, desiring no intercourse with the roof-prowling cats of the caravanserai, whom it ejected from its neighbourhood.

Both Persians and Kurds have a strong liking for domestic cats, and in the bigger towns of Persia it is a sorry household that does not possess one or two, as petted as any in Europe.

It was a strange sight to see the rough Kurds who sometimes came to see Haji Rasul, gravely rolling cartridges for it to pursue, or stroking its arching little back with a lighter hand than they ever laid upon anything else, the while talking seriously to it in their rough tongue.

Haji Rasul himself talked Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, and a little Persian. He had acquired these during his twenty years’ wandering. From Sauj Bulaq he had started twenty years before, and had walked via Kurdistan and Anatolia to Constantinople. There he had learned the art of making sweets. Saving a little cash, he embarked for Jedda, whence he performed the great pilgrimage. From Medina he walked to Damascus, and finding employment, rested there. Later he went by ship to Salonica, and thence to Smyrna, where he remained some years collecting money to make the long journey to Kazimain and Kerbela, near to Bagdad, the most holy shrine of the Shi’a Muhammadans. It had taken him two years working by slow stages to get from Smyrna to Kirkuk, and he was attempting to collect enough cash here to get him to Bagdad. At any rate he could not have gone when I saw him, for the Hamavand had closed the road to Bagdad by their raids.

Fanatical he was to a degree I seldom have seen. He observed the letter of the law regarding Christians, and was most careful to have nothing to do with them, yet I found him a just, charitable man, very kind hearted, and willing to take the greatest pains to help or make me comfortable. If a Christian said Salam to him, he would not reply by the same salutation, displaying thereby the haughty fanaticism of the most bigoted Shi’a; yet, as every sincere Musulman must, he deplored the decadence of Islam and cursed more violently the backsliders of his own religion than the reprobates among Christians, “for,” said he, “these have the law and the book, and the light of the saints before them; while those have ever been in a mistaken path, and know no better.”

In all his dealings he was just, nor would he favour the Musulman more than the Christian in a matter of business.

He had a habit of dropping into deep meditation. One night he asked me my name; hearing Ghulam Husain, he repeated several times:

“Ghulam Husain, Ghulam Husain,” he murmured, “The Slave of Husain, may I be his sacrifice! Ah! Husain, Husain, shall we not rise up and smite the Sunnis, for that they slew him, him the pure, the sinless, betrayed, and murdered by the evildoer—ah, what a name, The Slave of Husain, and what a life to live up to, Husain! Husain!...” and he would drop into a reverie murmuring now and then “Husain”—reviewing doubtless the details of the tragedy of that holy man, whose character bears comparison with that of any Christian saint, and whose self-sacrifice and resignation was no less heroic.

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

We were hopelessly detained in Kirkuk. Behind, on the road we had come, the Hamavands had closed in; towards Bagdad it was the same, and to the east where our course lay was their own particular country, across which not even companies of soldiers would dare to go.

Every day it was announced that a certain army accountant, whose presence was needed in Sulaimania, would attempt the passage with a hundred soldiers, armed with Mauser rifles, and a number of mules were engaged; but the good man never seemed to make up his mind to go. Rashid, my muleteer, had engaged all his spare mules to the Government for this purpose, and a daring Chaldean merchant prepared fifty loads of sugar for isolated Sulaimania. Sixteen days we waited, and at last the order came to load at midnight, and collect just outside Kirkuk—that is, to join the main caravan and the guard. The leader was one Shefiq Effendi, a Kurd of the Shuan or “Shepherds,” a large tribe inhabiting the hill country south of the Lower Zab River. By his influence and that of the hundred soldiers, we hoped to pass safely these terrible Hamavands.

By law they were outlawed, and orders existed that any entering the town were to be shot on sight; but such was their reputation for daring, that I often saw them strolling in the bazaar of Kirkuk, caring nothing for a knot of Turkish soldiers, who followed them round, afraid to molest them, for the people of Kirkuk, armed though they were, and protected by a regiment of soldiers, feared a sudden raid of revenge from this intrepid handful of Kurds.

Hearing that I was resolved to go, Haji Rasul did his utmost to persuade me to stay. For they were Kurds, he said—Kurds, more savage than the Jaf, or the Guran, more daring even than the Mukri themselves. He took me by the hands, beseeching me to stay, nor risk the life God had given me for a mere mundane consideration of time.

“Time,” said he, “is long, and your life is young; what matter if you stay another month, two months, nay a year, if you are enabled to preserve the body God has entrusted to your care. Have I not been twenty years wandering, and do I complain that I have not yet got back to my native place?”

We were seated round a mess of a kind of porridge at the time, in which we dipped our bread, eating it with our fingers.

“See,” he said, “I eat this morsel not because I delight in its flavour, for it is of the poorest, nor because I crave a plenishment of belly, but I am performing that duty which is incumbent upon all of us, even pagans, the conservation of the flesh, which God has given into the keeping of our intellects.”

Though the restless spirit of the Western had been long calmed within me, yet it was not quelled, and here asserted itself. For sixteen days I had remained in Kirkuk. The weather, with that suddenness of progress to hot and cold that it exhibits upon these dry plains, had grown oppressive; the plain which, when we arrived, was covered with green, if scanty grass, was now a bright yellow, the dried stalks were scorching, and the mules’ daily expedition to the plain to graze was almost a farce. In that peculiar way that marks the approach of summer, the sun shot up at a high velocity from behind the crimson hills towards Kurdistan, climbed to his ever-mounting zenith, hung there, it would seem for twelve hours or so, and as quickly descended; the hours of cool daylight were but three. Towards sunset the decrease in temperature was hardly appreciable, for the world was heating, and it took an hour or two of darkness to make it reasonably cool. As has been said before, the town is situated in a position that in our climate we should call “sheltered,” which in these lands means extra hot and stifling. The afternoon hours were approaching that temperature which induces sleep behind closed doors, and the one occasion upon which business called me outside, at about three in the afternoon, showed me an empty town, and also scorching heat of the sun in Kirkuk in May.

Besides, the fez, the most utterly ridiculous headgear man ever invented, protecting neither from heat nor cold, acts with such calorific power as to make one’s scalp regularly boil in sweat under a hot sun.

Flies, too, were breeding like microbes. My daily journey to the bazaar took me past some butchers’ shops, and I noticed one morning that the never-cleansed beams upon which the meat hangs were unrelieved black in colour—flies, solid, and overlaid with flies, that hardly even moved when the butcher swept his long knife along, squashing hundreds, to cut meat next moment without even wiping his blade. Fortunately the custom of the country doubtless prevents a great deal of disease that might result from such condition. Butchers’ shops open in the early morning till about the second hour; one sheep only at a time is killed, and until that is sold another does not appear. Consequently owing to the short time during which it is possible to purchase meat, there is a great rush of buyers, and the flesh of the sheep and goats does not remain long enough than to have one thin layer consumed by flies.

Water was becoming scarce too; the river, which had run fairly full as we entered the town, was now the merest trickle, and all the water was obtained from wells. To waste such a valuable would have called upon the stranger the wrath of all in the caravanserai, so a scanty rinsing of hands and face was all that could be attempted, and that only when I could by stealth draw a potful and convey it unseen to my room. There are public baths in Kirkuk certainly, but even the natives, bound by tradition and custom to extol all indigenous institutions, admitted that they were not very nice. Nevertheless it surprised them that I did not patronise the “hammam”; but what upset my neighbours was the fact of my shaving myself, which I had attempted to do in private, knowing the prejudice against it. For the East reckons a barber as a very mean fellow, and to perform upon oneself, if it be the beard, a transgression of the Quranic law, and if it be the head, a dangerous folly. And whether it be the result of this repugnance to the trade or a naturally despicable nature that consents to the odium, it is a fact that Oriental barbers are as a class very mean fellows indeed.

Through the offices of my friend the consular watchmaker, I was taken one day to see a notable of Kirkuk, one Reza, called by the Muslims Shaikh Reza, and by the Christians, who hate him, Mulla Reza, an inferior title.

This worthy is the principal priest of the place, and though a Sunni, and a fanatic at that, has no objection to seeing and being polite to the dissenters of Islam, the Shi’a, among whose ranks both myself and the watchmaker were classed.

He inhabited a house adjoining the mosque wherein he officiated, one of the best houses in Kirkuk. His courtyard was laid out in flat beds in the Persian fashion, and a few mulberry trees veiled the bareness of the high walls. He received us in a long room, well carpeted, and was alone. A very reverend seigneur this indeed; the frown of sanctity sat blackly upon his brow, unlightened by his white turban. At his elbow on the floor was a gramophone, from whose trumpet a raucous Arab voice had just ceased to shriek verses of the Quran—to such uses are European abominations adaptable! Hearing that I was from Shiraz, he at once began to quote Hafiz and Sa’di, for he spoke excellent Persian; and then, producing a manuscript book, read some of his own poetry. He versified in four languages—Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish; but preferred Persian to all of them, having a just contempt for the majority of Turkish verse, consisting as it does nearly all of Arabic and Persian.

He complained bitterly of the progress Christians were making, and doubtless would make under the régime of constitutional government; in speaking, his eyes flashed, he grew excited, the latent fanaticism in him boiled, and he longed to see the blood of these infidels spilt. With cries of disgust against the lukewarm sentiments of the Turkomans, he denounced Musulman and Christian alike, and frankly declared that he would like to see the heads of the latter adorning the barrack walls. This creature, who had naught but notoriety to gain from such a catastrophe, has several times attempted to harass the Christians, but they have found sufficient protection, and he sees himself foiled, and his proposals ignored every time he would rouse feeling against these harmless people. It took him the whole time of drinking three cups of tea to exhaust his fury, and we took leave of him, expressing no opinion upon his sentiments.

The watchmaker gave me an example of his hot temper, as we sat in the coffee-house afterwards. At his house he was visited one day by the sub-governor, a Constantinople Turk, and the talk turning upon poetry, the shaikh, who has Kurdish blood in him, was extolling the merits of Persian and even Kurdish verse, and expressing his scorn of Turkish. The Ottoman officer naturally objected, and rashly quoted a long poem terminating with the words:—

“Furukhta am bi sham’ u kafur u san sin.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the shaikh, seizing a perfect opportunity, “Furukhta am” is pure Persian, and “sham’ u kafur” are Arabic, and what Turkish remains, but a miserable insignificance? “u san sin,” the point coming in with the meaning of the Turkish—“and thou art it”—the miserable insignificance.33

About the tenth day of our stay there, the muleteer Rashid came along in great glee, saying that we should leave next morning, and that I had better lay in a stock of provisions for the journey, though, as he remarked, “God knows whether we shall eat our bread, or the Hamavand’s.”

Four regimental doctors had turned up from Mosul, appointed to Sulaimania, and they were to have as escort a “tabur,” or four hundred soldiers. The usual fiasco occurred to prevent our going, for the army, not having been paid for months, went on strike, and two hundred more appointed to replace them flatly refused to go, fearing to face the Hamavand, who had so barbarous a habit of thirsting for the guns and blood of the Turkish troops, and such a capacity for quenching the thirst. So we stayed.

As an instance of the self-imposed duties of the unattached Turkish officer, I may quote the following episode:—

Haji Rasul and myself were sitting in the dark one evening smoking our cigarettes, and conversing upon the usual topic of Persian politics, when a highly uniformed individual rolled up, and between hiccups gave vent to a hoarse “Salamun ’alaikum.” Without invitation he sat between us, and introducing himself to me as a major in some regiment, proceeded to bully Haji. It appeared that the old man had had some high words with one of the people, whom he employed to sell his sweets, and this officious busybody, overhearing, inserted himself between the two, constituting himself an arbitrator. Haji had naturally refused to have anything to do with such matters, but his opponent, seeing a chance of winning his case, commenced pouring out his woes to the officer. The old man in disgust had departed, leaving the pair, and laid his case before the mayor of the town.

The major, meanwhile, had settled the affair with the other litigant, arranging to receive two mejidies as a fee, and finding that Haji did not accept his mediation, came to try and bully him into acquiescence. Needless to say all the intimidation he could bring forth did not scare Haji, who threatened to throw him downstairs. He solved the question himself by falling over asleep, after a pause for the thought which his fuddled condition made difficult. Such are some—I hope not all—of the Sultan’s officers. This one had passed through the military school at Bagdad, but as I afterwards heard how this feat may be performed—being literally little more than a passage through the establishment in the case of certain favoured individuals—I understood how he had become a military officer.

One morning I received a polite note in Turkish from the postmaster—with whom I was not acquainted—asking me to come and see him. So I took my way along the dusty hot road, past the innumerable cafés full of hunchbacked, uniformed Turks, till I found the office. To-day not being post-day, the postmaster reclined in an armchair behind a table, smoking cigarettes. On my arrival, he saluted me very politely by my name, talking Turkish. It was, of course, not to be expected that he would state his business till after some small talk, so we conversed about various subjects till he worked round to that of antiques, upon which he was an enthusiast. “Antiques” in this country mean coins, and Assyrian cylinders, little cylindrical pieces of stone with images and figures carved upon them. He had invited me there to benefit by the opinion I must have formed upon the value of antiquities, for Ferangistan to him was a place where half the world sought antiques, and consequently anyone who had been there, as he heard I had, must know the value of such relics as were to be found near Kirkuk.

Having thus prepared me, he shut the door, and produced with empressement a small bag of coins and seals from his stamp-safe. These were for the most part early Muhammadan, a Parthian or two, and a few Assyrian pieces. The greatest treasure—to him—was a George III. five-pound piece, upon which he put a fabulous value. Beyond telling the probable date of his antiques I could not help him, but he pressed so hard—thinking my unwillingness to mention prices was due to an idea of purchasing—that at last I proposed some values which I was pleased to see highly gratified him. In these regions there is always a good market for antiques among the Turks and Christians, who buy them, gradually collecting a stock, and then take them to Constantinople in the hopes of selling for a fortune.

Coming back that morning I remember buying some lettuces of an old man, who cleaned and washed them for his purchasers. The price, which gives a good idea of the price of vegetables and fruit, was two lettuces for three “pul,” seven of which make a “qamari,” which is equivalent to three-farthings, so the lettuce worked out at about the twenty-fourth part of a penny each.

In this stands explained the tenacity with which two persons will haggle for an hour over fractional sums, for the acquisition of a farthing means a considerable part of a meal gained.

One morning early, the muleteer Rashid came along and woke me. The effendi under whose wing it had been arranged for us to go had suddenly made up his mind the day before, and was now ready. So hurriedly we loaded up, and barely getting time to bid farewell to Haji Rasul, who commended me to God and the saints, we filed out into the yet empty streets to the meeting-place outside the town. Just as we got there and saw ahead a collection of mules, foot-passengers, and soldiers, the day broke, and we bade farewell to this remote corner of Turkey for a time.