At daybreak I woke, and immediately went to look at the rooms, one of which I required to put my things in. Two were locked, a third and a fourth had the roofs fallen in upon the floor, and a fifth I found I could lock after a little repair, which I effected with a horseshoe nail from the courtyard and a piece of wood broken from another door. I dragged my things in, avoiding the holes in the verandah that looked through into the stable below, and padlocked the door.

The bazaar was not yet open, and as I went out of the caravanserai door the soldiers were just waking, and shouted at me to shut it again after me. I turned to the right down the street, continuing the direction of my journey of the night before, and came out upon the wide beach of the north branch of the loop of the Lesser Zab, which makes Altun Keupri an island. Here I had a good wash and a drink in the cold, sweet water, and ate a scrap of bread I found in my pocket. I was rather hungry, for except for a little bread and half a melon, I had had nothing since the morning before in Kirkuk.

Turning back, I came again into the town and sought a coffee-house, where I might glean some information as to how and where to find a raft going to Bagdad.

There are four coffee-houses in the main street of Altun Keupri, of which the largest and most popular sells only coffee. So I left this on my right, desiring tea, and stayed at another. The attendant told me that to get a kalak—or raft—I must address myself to the people beyond the grain market, and instructed me how to go. The proprietors, he said, were to be seen in a coffee-house by the beach, where the rafts loaded.

So having paid my reckoning, I again went along the little main street to the beach, at which I had washed earlier, but turned to the left outside the town, and keeping along its outskirts came to the grain market, a busy space where heaps of fine wheat lay upon the ground neatly marked with the impression of a spade or some special implement to prevent thieving, and picking my way among these came to two great coffee-houses on the beach of the southern branch of the river. Here under a pleasant canopy of green leaves outside the coffee-house I sat, and, drinking tea, looked about me. There were many Arab kalak-owners here, but the coffee-house proprietor, who spoke Persian, told me of one that would leave during the morning. As I was talking my acquaintances of the previous day entered, the stern father and silly lad, and hearing our talk, said they were upon the same errand, and that we might search together. At this I was extremely grateful, for the stranger in a strange land hails with delight the prospect of a travelling companion.

At the recommendation of the coffee-house keeper we sought, and soon found, one Haji Uthman, a surly Arab, whom we found contemplating the loading of a kalak from the shelter of a canopy of boughs upon the beach. Upon asking him if he had a kalak leaving that morning, he replied in the affirmative, and pointed to one just before him—then turning his back upon us he entered into conversation with a dirty Arab upon some trivial matter. He refused for some time to recognise that we existed, till we turned to go away in disgust, when he shouted over his shoulder that he would give us a passage to Bagdad if we wanted one. The price he quoted as four mejidies a man, and when we protested at this large sum, he again ignored us and engaged himself with other matters. Once again we turned away, and this brought the price down to three mejidies, but it required another rehearsal of the same act to bring him to the proper price, two mejidies. Even then he only consented with the most perfect ill-manners possible, telling us we must sleep on our own luggage and not spread it about the raft on the cargo.

He further demanded a mejidie from each of us, which we paid, and told us to go away as quickly as possible and buy ourselves provisions, for the kalak might start in a few minutes, and would wait for no one. Hurried off in this abrupt manner, we separated, each to seek food and luggage. On the way to the caravanserai I hired an old man with a donkey, and together we went to the room and loaded my things on the beast’s back, and entrusting him with the transport and custody of the luggage, I left him to go to the bazaar, where I met the muleteer of yesterday, Umar.

Him I pressed to my assistance, and as he heard that I was leaving immediately, he thought of the most necessary thing, bread, so calling a boy (he seemed to know everyone in the place), he told him to run to his mother and tell her bake a large quantity of bread, and while it was making to have a bag made to put it in. We then turned our attention to the purchase of anything else the bazaar could supply for the journey, and found the only lasting fruit to be small pears. After much haggling we decided upon the goods of a certain man, and asked for a huqqa of them, and in view of the fact that we were thus purchasers on a large scale, were allowed to inspect each pear before accepting it. So we joined in together in the task, biting one here and there, feeling each and examining it for bruises and rot, and after what seemed an hour, having made our version of the weight agree with that of the seller, poured our purchase into a handkerchief, and set forth to find cheese. Various kinds we saw and tasted, unsavoury lumps of what would appear to be grey stone, and chose some the vendor swore was at least a year old, and so warranted not to deteriorate with keeping. To eat such, it must be soaked in water for half an hour to soften it and expel some of the salt with which it is impregnated. We poured the cheese in with the pears, and my food for the journey—when I should have my bread—was complete, and I should have laid out, fare included, about four mejidies (or thirteen shillings) for a journey of eleven days to Bagdad.

All things being now ready, except the bread, we returned to the coffee-house, the terminus, so to speak, for all kalaks, and called for tea. While discussing this, I heard “Ghulam Husain,” and was joined in a moment by a tall Arab, who had accompanied me on the journey in the spring to Sulaimania. Now I was not certain whether Umar knew what I purported to be, and was glad that the old man and his son were not present, for they knew me for a Christian, and to appear in a false light before either them or the Arab would have been very undesirable, particularly as the latter was an extremely fanatical fellow, with whom I had had many a religious argument on the right of Shi’a and Sunni.

He ran upon me, and embraced me with the greeting of Islam, a kiss upon either cheek, and talking in a loud voice in Turkish, began to ask me where I had been, and what doing. All the time I was keeping a weather eye lifting for the old man and his son, and endeavoured to get away, but the Arab refused to let me go, saying that by a chance God had thrown us together and we must not lose the time thus given us for brotherly conversation. And so he held me talking, speaking of Shiraz and Persia, subjects that attracted the idle in the vicinity, making us the centre of a listening group. In the thick of it a kalak-man came running to say that they were just leaving, and it occurred to me at the same moment that I had not yet got my bread, so entreating him to wait a few minutes I rushed off, glad to get away from the Arab, and full of the new fear of being left behind to kick idle heels in Altun Keupri for another week or so.

My shoes I had left on the kalak to mark the particular bales which I claimed as my place, and I ran through the streets of Altun Keupri, my feet scorching on the hot earth. I was wearing my old dressing-gown and a Kurdish headgear, a distinguished costume, and as I ran the tail caught between two donkeys’ pack-saddles, and I left half a yard behind. Sweating, I arrived at the door of the baker, to find the housewife counting out the flaps of bread and putting them into a bag. I snatched it up and threw it across my back, astounded at its weight and bulk; and still wondering how I could ever eat this mountain of bread, I stumbled out of the yard, regardless of the good woman’s cries to count the bread, and arrived at the beach just in time to get myself and my load aboard by wading through four feet of water, and mark my Arab friend emerging from the coffee-house to bid me a farewell that he shouted as he ran. The current was full here, though, and we were soon carried beyond earshot, and my attention was drawn to my immediate surroundings by the congratulations of the old man, who had installed himself at the opposite end of my row of bales, and sat viewing my torn skirts with sympathy.

For a half hour or so I was occupied in arranging a place upon the bales, spreading my cotton quilt under me, making a pillow of my bread, trying to arrange some means of forgetting that under me was not even level ground, but what I have called bales, bundles of knobby sticks of the hardest and spikiest wood on earth, I was sure, being taken to Bagdad for sale.

This I managed to a certain degree, and at last sat quiet to fry under the August sun, in a breathless day—and feel the sweat running down. The raft turned round and round slowly, veritably roasting us all like kebabs on a skewer. The temperature in these quiet reaches of the river between low red hills was immense, and to think of it was but to remember that worse was certainly to come when we reached the Mesopotamian plains.

About an hour before sunset we tied up at a little village of Kurds where we were to take more loads of roots, and all our nice arrangements were upset, for we had to take our goods ashore to allow of the shifting of cargo. The place was at the end of a long, still reach of the river; and entrusting my goods to the old man, I retired to a secluded spot and indulged in a bathe, the first swim I had taken for a year, and the first bath of any sort for well over a month.

We ate our simple meals of bread and fruit there upon a stony beach, and lay down to sleep upon the pebbles until early morning. And so for three days we progressed, our way winding among low hills along the picturesque Lower Zab through an almost deserted land. That we had left Kurd and Turkoman behind was now evident, however, for we saw none but Arabs, and very few of them.

At intervals along the bank would be tiny patches of cultivation of melons, where the falling summer river left a damp bank of silt, and occasionally the owner would be there tending the fruit, but often enough we would not see any signs of habitation for miles and miles near a cultivation, which seemed ownerless and deserted. The day heat was intense. As the river was too low to navigate at night, we were enabled to sleep on the banks, and early morning saw us once more afloat enjoying the half-hour of light before the sun rose. Then, too, two hours followed of cool, the breeze overcoming the sun’s heat, but during the morning this would drop, and we floated unsheltered from a sun that seemed to scorch the bare flesh, and sent the perspiration rolling down among the hair and into the eyes. Then one afternoon, following a day during which we had been nearing a forbidding and perpendicular ridge of mountain, we spun round a corner, across a bar, and out into a very lake—the Tigris—which crept round a great bend and flowed under the Jabal Hamrin range, a barren and desolate mountain that harboured nought but Jabaur Arabs. Now we tied three of our small rafts together, and there would be no more nights ashore. Till we got to Bagdad we must sleep on our bundles of roots, and bear the ever-increasing heat through days of still slower progress.

The stream carried us under the great red bare rocks of the mountain, and from behind them sprang out a score of Arabs, who ran along the bank shouting to us to stop. One, stripping, swiftly dived and swam off to us. He was a savage-looking creature, and swimming with a strong, determined stroke, he overtook one of the rafts. Naked he sprang upon it, and—like all the robbers of the East, in a terrible hurry—he demanded tobacco and bread. These were given him and he pushed off to another raft, taking toll again, when finding it drifting afar he sprang off, and holding his spoil above his head, swam rapidly to shore. Meanwhile his mates continued to threaten, and our Arab kalak-men, intimidated, propelled their clumsy craft near the side, and to satisfy the shrieking Arabs, collected a little tobacco from each of us and swam ashore with it, considering themselves fortunate to be allowed to go on without suffering further loss. These same Arabs had and have a bad reputation, and will fire upon a kalak till the craft comes alongside, when they will strip it, carrying away even the skins and poles of which it is made.

The current took us away gradually from them, and the last we saw of them was a fight going on for shares of the tobacco.

We had taken as a passenger at the Kurdish village a queer old man, wizened and bent, clad in curious garments, flowing and old, who carried a little bag and a tin water-pot. He had appeared on the beach that evening when we had first halted, and announced himself a native of Samarqand. In truth, he had a Mongol appearance. His little eyes went up at an angle from the bridge of his flat nose, and his beard grew in that straggly, meagre way typical of the Turkoman and Mongol races. He spoke Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic, but was so old that he had forgotten which was which, and, mixing them up, was utterly unintelligible to the Arab kalak-men. All day he muttered to himself, fingering his water-pot, or mending ancient garments with a wooden needle. He had no bread, and ate sparingly of what we gave him. He made this out to be his fifteenth journey to Mecca, but had quite forgotten the pilgrim season. His talk was of many people and places, jumbled together. Relics he had of each: a penknife from Meshed, a piece of wax from Aleppo, a knob of some aromatic gum from a village in the remoter wilds of northern Kurdistan.

“That,” he would say in his mouthing way, “is what they call in my language a knife—‘buchaq,’ or Arabic ‘sikkin’—those Kurds call it ‘kiard.’ It is a good one, and I bought it for two metallik (a small Turkish coin) in Meshed bazaar, near the Imam Reza mosque, of a good Musulman that never let pass a day but he gave bread to such as myself. It was here in this Bagdad I bargained for the knife of him, a tall Kurd of Diarbekr, when—” and he would break off, and in the middle of the morning, having forgotten his ablutions, stand up—back to Mecca, instead of face to it—and say afternoon prayers.

On being addressed, he would give an answer to some thought in his reminiscent brain, as like as not in Turkish, and finished in Kurdish, which he spoke often enough—the rough Kurdish of Bayazid that we southerners hardly understood. He reckoned to get to Mecca in a year’s time, begging his way from serai to serai, or perhaps getting a passage from Busreh to Jedda by a pilgrim ship. “Oh,” he said, “I found my way from Bagdad to Palmyra and Medina twice, perchance I may do it again, who knows?”—and he would ramble off into reminiscences of thirsty days in the Arabian desert, mixed with the memory of the defiles of Kurdistan and the freezing winter plains of Turkistan, lapsing now and again into a queer dialect we could only suppose to be that of his native place.

So this strange company floated to where a cliff cropped out of the flat desert, and we came to dirty Tekrit, upon a slope under its lee, a desert town, isolated in a barren stretch of nothingness upon the loneliest river surely that ever ran. Filthy Tekrit, with its thirteen shops which it calls a bazaar, and its two coffee-houses, one full of Turkish parasites, who sit upon a little verandah high on a rock to catch the warm evening breeze.

Hideous straight-sided houses, a town of ugliness, full of well-dressed Arabs sitting in the shade doing nothing—the favourite pursuit of all Arabs—their women filing down in strings to fill the narrow-necked, big-bellied water-pots the Arabs use from Mosul to the Gulf. Pretty girls some of them were, that stopped carefully to wash their feet and the water-pot before carrying it back. The young bride might be seen there, soon entered upon the life of drudgery that would age her at twenty-five, bearing gold ornaments hanging about her; and the hag, who lived upon the charity of an idle and arrogant son, and gathered her dirty rags about her shrivelled and blackened limbs. Essence of barrenness, this Tekrit, a scorpions’ nest of venomous Arabs, a city of dust built in the dust. Not a blade of grass, no sign of a green leaf. Yet from somewhere came one selling fresh dates, and we bought the sticky, half-ripe things as a luxury, while we crouched among the Arabs under a falling wall to get away from the sun’s rays.

It has a kind of history, and its antiquity is undoubtedly great, like that of most of the Mesopotamian towns. Persian and Arab historians tell that it was built by Ardashir Babakan, the Persian king who ruled in the 3rd century of the Christian era, and founded the great Sasanian dynasty that ruled till Muhammad upset the growth of Christianity and spread of civilisation, under the Persians. Others say that the founder was a niece of that Bekr that built Diarbekr, but this can be little but a fable.

On the cliff above Tekrit there are ruins, and in the vicinity of the town there are signs of the time when Birtha, as the place was called in ancient times, was a large and important place. During early Christian times it was the residence of an important Christian official, and is said to have contained as many as twelve churches. At any rate, during the time of the khalifas of Bagdad it was important enough to possess a good bridge, no relic of which now remains, and it withstood a siege against Timur Lang.

Here, hoping to enter by the bridge into Mesopotamia and approach Bagdad from the west, Hulagu Khan, the leader of the Mongol horde that blighted all the Middle East, advanced upon Tekrit, but the Khalifa Al Musta’sim b’Illah destroyed it before he reached the place, and a great battle occurred between the two armies around the place. This was in the first half of the 9th century.

Now it is a place of some fifteen hundred houses, whose inhabitants, says a Persian traveller, “are a people friendly to darvishes,” and of the Hanafi branch of the Sunni Musulman.

Here we took as a passenger an old woman going to Bagdad, a relation of one of the kalak-men, who looked after her with great care. She, on her part, took the ancient man under her special protection and provided him from her plentiful store of bread. She pressed such delicacies as sweet thin wheat cakes and dates upon us, and was extremely sympathetic when she found I spoke but little Arabic and was a stranger from a far land. It was she, too, that rigged up a shelter from the sun between two rows of bales, and gave me some of her sticks, with which to do the same, for which I was grateful, for the mid-day sun was now almost past bearing without some shelter.

Next morning we woke to see the spire of Imam Daur, a small town upon the left bank of the river, backed by one of the ancient mounts. This Daur, or Dura as it was anciently called, has a very old history indeed, for we read of it in the Bible:—“Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits and the breadth thereof six cubits: he set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon;” and here the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego was enacted. Here the Roman army, after Julian was dead, attempted the passage of the Tigris, and part actually waded and swam across; and here Jovian, who succeeded Julian, having retreated from Ctesiphon, made a treaty with the Persians which gave them back the northern Mesopotamian provinces. Here at the same ford attempted by the Romans, we saw a caravan of asses being swum across the river, their drivers effecting the transit by wading part of the way and swimming the rest.

The third or fourth day out of Tekrit we saw the golden domes of Samarra—“Surra-man-ra” (“That maketh glad the heart of him who espies it”). It is a big place upon a cliff that juts out into the broad Tigris; tawny, like the desert out of which it rises, its great mosque standing clear above all, with that clean, new appearance that any strong building must possess in this clear, dry atmosphere. No trees adorn its streets, they are as desert as the plain outside. Only upon the opposite side are a few gardens, and the remains of a bridge of boats, which affords sufficient excuse for the Turks to take a toll from all who pass down the stream.

The ancient fame of Samarra is departed, the crowds of Persians that once inhabited it are departed, leaving behind a mixed population, noted for its immorality and rascality.

Persian historians affirm that Samarra was built by Shapur the Sasanian in the middle of the 3rd century A.D., but that after the power of the Sasanians waned and disappeared in the 7th century before the rising might of Muhammad, the town fell to ruins and was neglected till the reign of Al Mu’tasim, khalifa of Bagdad, who made it his capital, and one of the famous cities of the East. This position it held till the time of the Khalifa Mu’tamid, who re-established the Khalifate at Bagdad. The period of the occupation of Samarra by the khalifas was a decadent one. Following immediately the brilliant times of the famous Harun ar Rashid and Al Ma’mun,70 who died in A.D. 813, Mu’tasim, whose mind was fanatical and his ambitions those of a rapacious plunderer, by his employment of Turkish mercenaries took the first step upon that road that led to the decline of the dynasty, which, however, was never extinguished till the Mongols sacked Bagdad and murdered Al Musta’sim in A.D. 1240.

Here Mu’tasim built a great mosque, and enlarged the city so much that the Persian historians describe it as having “stretched its length and breadth, so that they said it was seven leagues long and a league broad.”71

Here, too, was the famous minaret of Mu’tasim, which figures in the romantic stories of Wathiq, of whom the most fantastic tales have been told.

The fanatical nature of Mu’tasim has already been mentioned, and this was the moving factor in the pursuit of one of the greatest heresiarchs that ever threatened early Islam. This was Babak, who was known as the Khurrami, and who defeated in battle many of the bravest and most accomplished generals of the Khalifate. He was, however, captured by Afshin, a leader of great renown and bravery. To arrive at a knowledge of what the tenets of Babak were is now almost impossible, as the only record we have is the prejudiced accounts of Musulman writers, who naturally endeavour to fix upon him every loathsome and repulsive doctrine that is possible. At any rate, it would appear that Babak was supported in his wars by the northern Kurds, many of whom, not converted from the corrupt form of Zoroastrianism they had originally professed, were perfectly ready to throw the weight of their arms against any power that would force upon them new rulers and a new religion, particularly when those same were their hereditary enemies, the Arabs.

Professor Browne, one of the greatest authorities, writes at length on the subject of his beliefs,72 which appear to have included the doctrines of metempsychosis, and a pretension to divinity.

When captured, he was sent to Samarra, where he was killed, his body being crucified on the cliff that overlooks the Tigris. And the grimmest feature of the whole tragedy is the ultimate fate of Afshin, the conqueror and captor of Babak, for he was suspected of having abetted the rebel Mazyar (who was crucified beside Babak), and was tried at Samarra on the charge of himself being a follower of Babak, and of pretending to the Divine Title. He was found guilty of these and other crimes, and while Mazyar was executed and his body hung next that of Babak, the unhappy Afshin languished in a prison. Then he too, dead, took his place between them, and his ashes—for the body was subsequently burned—were cast upon the waters of the Tigris.

These things happened in the years A.D. 839 and 840, and with the accession of Mutawakkil (A.D. 847), a tyrant and profligate, the dynasty declined, and Samarra began to acquire that name for evil that it has never lost.

Yet it ranks high among the holy cities of Arabian Iraq, for here the tenth and eleventh saints of the Shi’a succession lived and died. During the time of the Khalifate at Samarra, there lived the saint Ali bin Muhammad bin Ali bin Musa bin Jafar bin Muhammad bin Zain ul Abidin bin Husain bin Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet himself. This was the “Tenth Imam,” and he was succeeded by his son Husain al Askari, the Eleventh Imam, whose offspring Muhammad “as Saghir” (“the Lesser”), is that Twelfth Imam, the mysterious saint who has passed from the living, but upon whose coming again the Shi’a waits, and around whose second advent are clustered such masses of prophecies and tales as would fill volumes. He is the “Mahdi,” at the mention of whose name the Persian rises and bows, for—who knows—he may see, as he is in the world of spirits, invisible but extant. He disappeared in the year 873 in a cellar in Samarra—a place where the dwellers retreat during the heat of the day. According to some he departed in Hillah, near Bagdad.

These religious circumstances, combined with an ancient fame and a present very fine mosque, make Samarra a favourite place of pilgrimage for Shi’a and Sunni alike—particularly the former—but all will agree with the Persian traveller who says, “The numbers of Sayyids73 and beggars passes all description”; and again, “The inhabitants of Samarra are said to be Hanafites, but it is really impossible to assert of what race or of what belief they be, for they are of an extreme meanness and servility of character, and of an avarice such that the beggars of Samarra are a bye-word in all Islam.”74

As the golden dome faded from sight in the distance and the growing night, I realised that my journey as a poor man was nearly over, for we were approaching Bagdad. During the succeeding two days we passed cultivations, and gardens, and date groves, signs of the city we were approaching. From afar we sighted Kazemain, that holy place, too often described to call for mention here, and at last, one evening, our kalak-man told us that midnight would see us at the bridge above Bagdad, below which kalaks may not pass.

I began to think how I might enter Bagdad as a European, for I wished to go straight to the only hotel, and appear next day among the Europeans, with some of whom I had affairs, and some acquaintance. So, behind the bales, in the dark, I donned a suit of white clothing I had kept ready, minus a collar—for it was summer, and heat excuses many such details. I donned a pair of socks, a luxury to which I had long been a stranger, and had a soft felt hat, much squashed and battered—but still a Ferangi hat—ready in a handkerchief. Drawing the old dressing-gown around me, I climbed up on my bundles of roots and lay down and slept awhile. About two in the morning I woke, for the kalak bumped against a bank, and I saw we had arrived. My friends were collecting their goods, and the old Kirkukli asked me how and where I proposed to go? to which I replied, I would depart in a “quffa,” or round bitumen-covered coracle, to the house of a friend lower down the river. This craft one of the kalak-men found for me after some minutes, and I took a farewell of my friends, the last friends I should have in a world I was leaving—not without pangs, for I had become one of them, and found myself often enough contemplating with disgust the prospect of striding about as a Ferangi—the “vulgar and blatant abomination” at which Turkoman, Turk, Arab, Kurd, and Persian stand astonished.

I slipped into the quffa, my fez still upon my head, still “effendi,” and sat quiet, waiting till we should arrive at the back-stairs of Bagdad’s only hotel, a humble house kept by a Christian. When we arrived I hurried to the door, and standing in the shade of the portal, bade the men of the quffa wait beside my luggage. In the dark and shadow I slipped the European hat upon my head, threw the dressing-gown over my arm like an overcoat, and stood, a European in appearance, if somewhat shabby.

The door opened, I entered, and pleading fatigue sat in a dark corner while the baggage was brought in and the boatman paid. I was shown to a room, and slept for an hour, and woke in the morning to a hot bath and a meal of European bread, milky tea, and boiled eggs, the sight of which discomfited me, so that I passed them away and called for tea from a tea-shop—milkless, and in a small glass—not a footbath of a cup.

I spent most of the day trying to get used to sitting upon a chair, but it was horribly uncomfortable, and my legs would gather under me in spite of myself.

I felt stranger and more lonely than I had done ever before. Gone was the coffee-house and the bazaar, of the multitudes of which I was one, and equal, with whom I spoke and laughed, and fought and wrangled. They were far away, and I must learn to look upon them as upon strange and inferior beings, if such were now possible, and taking place again on the platform of Western birth, once more go on my way affecting to ignore their joys and sorrows—which had so lately been my own.