It took another hour before we were loaded, and as we were starting I remembered I had left something with Salim, so I ran back all the way to the bazaar to get it, the muleteer saying he would keep my mule. It took me, I suppose, twenty minutes or more to return, to find the caravanserai empty, so I started out on foot, walking quickly. They must have started immediately after I left, for I walked right through the outskirts of Kirkuk, through Quria the suburb village, and for a couple of miles along the plain before I found them, and as I was carrying a large water-melon I had bought, and was walking at my quickest under the hot August sun, I was not sorry to get astride my beast and open out my clothing to let the sweat dry a little. The sun temperature in these parts at this time is about one hundred and forty degrees.

There was the usual mixed crowd of travellers. Almost the first I addressed was a native of Sina, of Persian Kurdistan, going to Bagdad. He had, for a Kurd, travelled widely, having followed six or seven trades anywhere from Teheran to Bushire on the Persian Gulf. He offered to come with me as a servant and companion to Bagdad, on the terms usual in such engagements, the price of his passage and his food. I assented to this, but as it turned out, I left Altun Keupri before he was ready, and so missed him.

There was also an Armenian of Aleppo returning to his native place, a man of some intelligence and tremendous verbosity, who launched into a long eulogium of the English and their behaviour during the Armenian massacres. He was an unsavoury creature, though, like most of his race, so I entered into an argument with a Sulaimanian in Kurdish—of which the Armenian was ignorant—to rid myself of him.

We jogged along for hours and hours, through the low hills, across them, and to the plain on the other side. There was no moon, and the usual straining of eyes was accompanied by drowsiness, and the state of semi-unconsciousness that overtakes one on long night journeys. Once we were all brought to a halt by being bombarded from a village, bullets flying around and over us, killing a donkey, whose owner, a Shuan Kurd, calmly shifted its load to another beast and went on without a word, for we had decided to go on through the firing and get away out of it, which we did after a bit, the bullets—flying wide in the dark—hitting nothing else.

I made the slight acquaintance during the journey of a queer pair of people. One was a young man of singularly foolish appearance. His garb was of Sulaimania or Kirkuk, and at first I took him for a Sulaimanian, only finding my mistake when, on addressing him in Kurdish, he replied in Turkish. His companion was his father, an elderly man of sturdy build and firm demeanour, who rode upon a small donkey immediately behind his son, urging them both along. To hear their conversation, one would imagine that the youth was the victim of a harsh parent who sternly rebuked him for everything he said and did, but a few moment’s conversation with him was convincing evidence of his stupidity, and of the justice of his father’s admonitions.

What attracted my attention to them at first was the crash of a water-pot the lad had let drop, because he tried to drink from its wide mouth while riding in the thick of the caravan. The inevitable result occurred—a mule jostled him, and, putting out his occupied hand to save himself, the jar fell. Not ten minutes after, he asked me for a drink from mine, but as I was unhooking it from my pack-saddle his father intervened.

“No, brother, give not to the foolish; for he that goes thirsty from the breakage of his water-jar deserves no chance to smash another’s.”

Nor would he permit it at all, but turned upon his son and rebuked him for his folly, and for his ill manners in thus addressing a stranger, asking for the little water that another possessed.

The old man was not of a conversational nature, and rode in absolute silence except when some foolishness of his son urged him to speech, so I saw little more of him before we arrived at Altun Keupri, which we did an hour before daybreak.

I had to rely upon my muleteer, Umar, for a place to sleep, and he said he knew of such a one, and would take me there. The caravan melted away as soon as we crossed the high-peaked bridge, and we with two Kirkuklis who had a load of “run,” made our way along the long main alley to a caravanserai, at whose door we beat in vain for some time, to be told at last that four “Aistr-sawar,” or mule cavalry, had taken the place and would let no one in. We succeeded in persuading them to do so, however, and stumbled, in the dark, into the small courtyard. Here the muleteer threw our loads and drove off his beasts, before I realised that he did not intend to stable them there, or that the place possessed no “Darban” or “Khanchi” men to look after travellers and the caravanserai. The place was, moreover, a ruin. A flight of mud stairs, so worn as to be little more than a smooth-backed buttress to its wall, led up to the stable roof, and three or four rooms which I did not explore. The soldiers were sleeping on the roof, so making the best of a bad job, I shouldered my goods and got them up the stairs somehow to the stable roof, and casting a sack upon the floor, lay down beside the soldiers and slept for a couple of hours.