Читать книгу The Cradle of Mankind; Life in Eastern Kurdistan - Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram - Страница 6

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DUE east and west, from the Gulf of Iskanderun almost to the heel of the Caspian, there stretches a range of lofty mountains—a sort of natural bulwark, fencing off the high rugged plateau of Asia Minor on the north from the low level plain of Mesopotamia on the south. At its western extremity this range is known as the Taurus, but further east it appears now to possess no generic name; yet it well deserves so much distinction, for it is here that the peaks attain their highest altitude, and hold in their wild recesses some of the grandest scenery in the world.

The hills which we entered near Urfa are the first outposts of these mountains, but at this point of their line the outposts are very far advanced. We must push on for two or three days across a broad undulating upland before we find ourselves approaching the foot of the main chain itself. On the whole it is a dull enough journey; for though the snow summits rise nobly on the horizon ahead of us, the heathlands immediately round us are as barren as land can be. There are a few sordid Kurdish villages at four or five hours intervals, but apart from these there is nothing for the eye to rest on; and our own little party, crawling slowly across the landscape, seem to be the only living creatures except the ubiquitous hooded crows.

During the second day, however, we became aware of another feature, which, if it adds no beauty, at least lends interest to the scene. A layer of higher ground is thrust across the plateau. It radiates out into long flat tongues; and its steep escarpments are littered all over with the big black boulders that have fallen from the bristly fringe along the upper edge. These boulders are covered with a grey-green lichen, and mottled with patches of moss of a warmer and richer green; but no other kind of vegetation seems able to flourish among them, and the prevailing tone of the landscape is a gloomy bilious grey. To those who have seen it before such a picture needs no commentary. A vast outpouring of volcanic scoriæ has covered the whole countryside.

As we pursue our way further the signs become yet more pronounced. The Acropolis of the little town of Severek is perched, like Bamborough Castle, on a platform of basalt rock. Not far off at the village of Kainak is an isolated cone—once doubtless a miniature crater: and we remember that Diarbekr is built of basalt also—Diarbekr, two days’ journey away. Whence came this prodigious outflow of seventy miles in diameter, and of four thousand square miles in area—as large as the county of York?

A full day’s journey ahead of us, all along the eastern horizon, lies a huge squat bun-shaped mountain, just over 6000 feet high. This is Karaja Dagh, the great extinct volcano, the outermost of that group of volcanoes which lie to the north of Mesopotamia, in Armenia and eastern Kurdistan. This region must have been the scene, at some remote geological epoch, of some of the greatest eruptions that have ever occurred on this globe. The five huge craters which produced them (not to mention a host of smaller ones)[16] are ranged diagonally athwart the country in a line some 300 miles long. At the north-eastern end is Alageuz, 150 miles south of the Caucasus. Then come Ararat, Sipan, and Nimrud; with Karaja at the south-western end. The biggest of all perhaps was Nimrud, a mountain but little higher than Karaja, but possessing the third largest crater that is known to exist in the world. Karaja would seem to consist of a group of associated craters; something like the Puy de Dome mountains, but infinitely grander in scale.

It is held by many commentators that the site of the Garden of Eden was near modern Van and Bitlis, round about the head waters of the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Araxes, and the Zab. If so, then the Garden of Eden now lies buried beneath the lava of these volcanoes; and where could we find fitter antitypes of the Cherubim with the flaming swords?

Karaja juts out towards the plains like a huge cape, isolated from the mountains; and our road slowly heaves itself upward to find a way over its tail. As a road it is incredibly villainous, for it takes the basalt boulders au naturel, and hardly an attempt has been made anywhereto form a surface at all.[17] Round our left sweep the desolate fields of broken and disintegrating lava. On our right they rise, terrace on terrace, toward the mountain from which they flowed. And as we leave the mountain behind, and continue our way to the eastward, the aspect of the country changes little: it is still lava that surrounds us on every side.

At length, two full days beyond Severek, we descry a city ahead of us. A city notable for its size, and yet more for its menacing aspect:—a grim black row of massive towers and curtains, with the slender stems of a dozen minarets shooting up into the sky behind the ramparts like reeds behind a dyke of stone. The snow peaks on our left stretch beyond it, and fade off gradually into the distance; and as we draw nearer we perceive that on our right the town is guarded by the deep ravine of the Tigris. Such is Diarbekr—Black Amida; whose classical name is not yet disused entirely, and which owes its inseparable epithet to the basalt of which it is built.

The city crowns a bold rocky bluff overhanging the gorge of the Tigris, which flows some 300 feet beneath it in a broad and sandy bed. The river is here wide and deep, and its modern name—Shat, the Arrow—testifies the rapidity of its current; but a little below the city its course is checked by a bridge and a weir. In the severe winter of 1910-11 it was frozen over so hard at this point that the caravans of camels were able to cross it on the ice. The river covers the eastern face of the city; and the ground falls fairly steeply along the southern face also. But toward the remaining two faces the approaches are over level ground.

We possess many cities in Europe which are still entirely encircled by Roman or mediæval ramparts. Such are Carcassonne, Aigues Mortes, Avila, Lugo, and Rothenburg; and we may add Constantinople, though in this case the circuit is incomplete. But, having seen all these examples, we feel bound to put it on record that the basalt walls of Diarbekr are distinctly the finest of all. The walls are some forty feet high and about five miles in circuit, and are strengthened at frequent intervals by eighty massive towers. Most of these are semicircular, but some are semioctagonal. They are spaced about three and a half diameters apart, and project boldly from the curtain walls between. The line traced by the walls is irregular, skirting the edges of the hollows; and at each salient angle is a huge circular bastion. The gateways are somewhat insignificant, being mere holes in the walls flanked by a tower on either side: and this is characteristic of most Roman fortifications, the gateways of Lugo (for instance) being very similar in design.[18]

The curtain walls are from ten to fifteen feet thick; thinner along the river front, where the precipitous basalt cliffs rendered assault almost impracticable; and thicker along the other three sides. These sides are further protected by a moat cut in the solid rock, but neither so deep nor so wide as the giant moat at Urfa. Along the inner edge of this moat, some paces from the base of the ramparts, is a low breastwork of masonry as at Constantinople and Carcassonne. A loopholed and vaulted gallery is carried along the top of the ramparts, and above this were the battlements, so that the defenders had a double banquette.[19] The towers are vaulted internally, and have double banquettes also; and the garrison could reach their stations by a double staircase at every tower. The citadel is at the north east corner overhanging the gorge of the river, and in the midst of it is a huge mass of masonry, once the mount of the demolished keep.

The walls are beyond all doubt, in the main, of Roman construction; though some Saracenic additions have since been incorporated in the work. They are built of squared black basalt, which has weathered externally to a dull yellow tone owing to the lichen which has overspread the surface. Possibly this process was assisted by the fact that some twenty years ago it was deemed a good idea to whitewash them, in order to give a distinguished welcome to a specially prominent Pasha! But fortunately the traces of this sacrilege are almost obliterated now.

The houses in the town for the most part are a set of squalid hovels, intersected in all directions by a maze of narrow crooked streets. Our carriage fairly stuck in one of these alleys as we were attempting to pass through it; and for some minutes it seemed problematical whether we should be able to wriggle free. Yet not all the houses are mean; and in the quarter near the citadel, the residence of the chief officials, a very considerable number are solidly constructed of stone. Some few of these are genuinely old, and possess a good deal of interest. They are often built in two colours, with alternate horizontal bands of black basalt and yellow marble, resembling not a little the black and white marble buildings of Pistoia. It is curious how this taste for coloured ornamentation seems inherent in the dwellers in volcanic districts, where materials of different colours are always readily available. The same trait is very conspicuous in the volcanic districts of Auvergne. The most notable example at Diarbekr is a big mansion in the main thoroughfare. A house very similar in type to the old palaces of Spain and Italy; bare, square and prison-like outside, and entered by a single great doorway; but with graceful arcaded porticoes surrounding the patio within. Once, no doubt, it was indeed a palace, the abode of some prominent magnate: but now it is only a khan; and a khan so notoriously filthy that even our Arabaji shrank from an encounter with its fleas.

The principal Mosque is also of peculiar interest, and presents an architectural problem which has never been quite fully solved. Two sides of its courtyard are formed by the façades of an ancient palace—a palace of regal dimensions, and constructed in a style that is admittedly unique. One of these façades is in two stories, with a pointed arcade below and square-headed windows over; the other has now but one story which consists of a pointed arcade.[20] These are not quite Romanesque in style, but more Romanesque than Oriental. They are rather like primitive versions of the Otto Heinrichs Bau at Heidelberg Schloss. But the building to which they are nearest akin is Diocletian’s famous palace at Spalatro; albeit they are far less massive, and far more fantastically ornate. The theory most generally adopted concerning them is that they formed part of the palace of the Armenian king, Tiridates; and this theory is strongly supported by their resemblance to the palace at Spalatro, for Diocletian and Tiridates were contemporaries and close allies.

Amida was one of the great fortresses that guarded the southern frontier of the Roman Empire. Northward, in Asia Minor, Pax Romana had a fairly long innings; but Parthia and Persia to the southward were at no time definitely subdued. The hold of the Romans on Mesopotamia was indeed in some sort analogous to the hold of the Austrians on Italy previous to 1860. They regarded it as within their “Sphere of Influence,” and sometimes they judged it expedient to “assert their interests” by invading it. But generally they found that enterprise was a bit beyond their capacity; their real “Scientific Frontier” lay along the mountains in the north. And here they, too, maintained their four great fortresses; not ranged in a square like the famous Austrian Quadrilateral, but en échelon one behind the other along the southern slopes of the hills. Nisibis and Daras were in the forefront; Amida and Edessa withheld in reserve behind them. And though thus in the second rank, Amida got its full share of fighting when the kings of resuscitated Persia began to make invasions in their turn.

Amida’s defences were perfected, and its arsenal formed, by Constantius; and it was Constantius’ great opponent Sapor II who undertook its first memorable siege. The great Sassanid Shah invaded the Roman territory with a huge army of 100,000 men in the year 360. He had at first intended to ignore the fortresses and to scour the hinterland for plunder; but as he rode past the walls of Amida an arrow struck his helmet, and he turned upon the place like an angry bull. His summons was answered by a volley from the balistæ which slew the only son of his chief auxiliary, Grumbates the king of the Chionites; and Sapor swore to the bereaved father that he would not rest till he had taken the city in revenge.

For seventy-three days he pressed his assaults with the utmost fury and persistence. He brought up battering rams and huge wooden towers constructed for him by Roman deserters; and on one occasion he succeeded in surprising one of the towers upon the river frontage, but the seventy picked archers who occupied it were overwhelmed by the garrison and slain. At last he breached the walls; and though some of the garrison (including the historian Ammianus) cut their way through his lines on the further side, and thus succeeded in escaping, the rest, with all the inhabitants, were massacred in the ensuing storm.

Yet Amida had at least performed the duty which is ordinarily expected of a fortress. It had held back the tide of invasion for the period of a whole campaign. Sapor had lost a third of his army; and the season was too far advanced for any further operations. He retreated again into Persia, and abandoned the city that he had won.

An even more notable siege occurred in the year 502. King Kobad, the father of the yet mightier Chosroes I. invested the city that autumn; assailing it from the western side (as Sapor had done before him), and employing similar siege engines to those of his predecessor’s days.[21] The garrison caught the blows of his rams on reed mattresses lowered from the ramparts, and greased the drawbridges of his wooden towers so effectively that the stormers could not cross. Also they employed “winged words” of such singular virulence and pungency as to scandalize even their own historian.[22] He felt obliged to draw the line at “Lime-house,” though boiling oil and firebrands were fair. “If the bishop had still been alive he would never have permitted it;” and indeed when the women took to stripping themselves on the ramparts, and taunting the besiegers with their inability to sack the place, we may grant that any bishop would have had good cause to protest!

Kobad next “cast a mount” against the walls in the manner of Sargon and Sennacherib; a huge incline of earth and brushwood to give his men access to the parapet. The besieged breached their own wall under it, and secretly drew away the core; propping the cavity with balks of timber, and then filling it with combustibles. When the assault began they fired their mine; and an hour or two later the mound collapsed beneath the feet of the attacking columns, precipitating the luckless stormers into the blazing furnace below.[23]

Three months had passed in vain assaults, and Kobad had made no progress. His thinly clad Persians were suffering terribly from the winter cold; and the Great King swallowed his dignity and offered to raise the siege for half a crown! But success had made the defenders more insolent than ever, and they scorned even this show of homage. They retaliated by sending him a bill for the vegetables which his army had consumed out of their gardens. This was too much for Kobad, and he resolved to fight to a finish. Three days later the laugh was on his side.

One night a party of Persians were pursuing a certain Kutrigo who had sallied from a privy postern to make a raid on their camp. As they neared the walls they received no challenge, and not an arrow was shot at them. That particular tower was manned by the “Sleepless” monks of Anzetene; and it chanced that “a certain man” (in the most friendly spirit) had given them a good supper and wine to drink, so that they were all in deep slumber. The Persians seized their opportunity and made themselves masters of the tower. The garrison were aroused and hurried up to expel them, endeavouring to cut away the vaulted floor under their feet. The Persians planted their scaling ladders and swarmed to the help of their comrades; and for thirty-six hours continuously the fight raged furiously on the wall. Peter of Amkhoro, a man of gigantic stature and clad in complete armour, held the banquette on one side against the utmost efforts of the Persians: but in the opposite direction they pushed on from tower to tower till at last they gained one of the gateways. The army poured in irresistibly, and the massacre began.

Kobad allowed his army three full days to sack the city, and at the end of that time 80,000 corpses were carried out through the north gate that the king might enter at the south. Even so the Persians’ vengeance was not sated, and they demanded leave from their king to execute one tenth of the survivors to appease the manes of their own dead comrades.[24] They bore these wretched victims outside the city walls, and killed them “in all sorts of ways.”

MOSUL.

View from the bridge, looking up stream. The Tomb of Cassim is one of the more distant buildings near the water-side.

Kobad pillaged the city thoroughly, sending his booty away on rafts down the Tigris to Ctesiphon; and when he himself departed, he left a certain Glon to hold the fortress with a garrison of 3000 men. This seems a small enough force to man such an extent of rampart: yet at first it proved amply sufficient; and when the Roman general Patricius attempted to regain the city he was repulsed completely and ignominiously, though the Romans were much more skilled than the Persians in the conduct of a siege. But Amida was not yet at the end of its agony: and what all the emperor’s horses and all the emperor’s men had so conspicuously failed to accomplish was reserved for the grim persistence of an irregular partisan.

Farzman was an active local Sheikh who had espoused the cause of the Romans, and who had made his name a terror to the Persians by a multitude of daring deeds. He was only in command of 500 horse; and any attempt to form a regular siege of such a first-class fortress would of course have been ridiculous. But an adroitly handled cavalry force can do a good deal in the way of “containing” an Oriental city. In the winter of 1911 Shuja ed Dowleh, the Agha of Maragha, nearly reduced Tabriz, with all its 300,000 inhabitants, with an equally puny band.

Farzman knew full well that the Persians in Amida could not have had time to replenish their magazines. He quietly cut off communication with the surrounding villages, and suppressed the daily market that was held without the walls. Glon very naturally grew restive; and listened greedily to a certain Gadono, a prominent local sportsman, who told him that he had located Farzman’s camp in the course of his hunting excursions, and would enable him to take it by surprise. Accordingly Glon sallied out with all his available cavalry. But the wily Gadono had been in communication with Farzman. The “surprise” had been all arranged beforehand; and Glon and his party were wiped out.

This signal miscarriage of their “aggressive defence” profoundly disconcerted the Persians. Glon’s son, now in chief command, kept breathing out threatenings and slaughter; but he no longer had any cavalry, and his infantry was barely sufficient to man the ramparts and overawe the citizens within. He shut up all the able-bodied inhabitants, to the number of 10,000, in the Stadium; and calculated by this measure to free his own hands for the defence. But, struggle as he might, he could not snap the line which held him:—Farzman had hooked a salmon with a trout rod, but he played it in masterly style.

Then came days of horror unutterable. The prisoners in the Stadium were left without any food whatever. They ate their boots, and their belts, and finally preyed on each other; and when the wretched survivors were let loose as no longer worth guarding, they crawled out of their prison “like men risen from the dead.” By this time the city itself was almost in equal extremity. Many of the living skeletons from the Stadium were enticed into the houses by the starving women and there killed and devoured. The garrison were so reduced by hunger that they could scarcely carry their weapons; and the Persian commandant sent to Farzman to say that he was willing to capitulate.

Farzman granted easy terms. They might go off on rafts down the Tigris, taking all their property with them, as many as elected to go. And he himself, on their departure, took possession of that ghastly charnel house; and assisted by the new bishop, Thomas (the same who was later to build Daras), set to work to import new inhabitants, and nurse the dead city back to life.

Diarbekr in 1895 was one of the centres of the Armenian massacres, and as many as 2500 perished in this place alone. Little enough was heard about it at the time in England, where attention was almost monopolized by yet more monstrous holocausts; but what passed then as a mere local incident wears a very different aspect when we visit the actual spot where it was enacted—when we see the doors still splintered and patched in the houses which were stormed by the rioters, the photographs of the luckless victims still treasured in the albums of their surviving friends and relatives, and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day.

The massacre was undoubtedly prompted by the Government of Constantinople; but their agents were the fanatical Kurds who swarm in the slums of Diarbekr, and who flocked in eagerly from the surrounding villages to take a hand in the work of slaughter and to share in the plunder which followed. That the massacre was political and not religious was proved by the fact that the Syrian Christians (who are also numerous in Diarbekr) did not suffer to anything like the same extent as their Armenian co-religionists. The crowd of refugees who sought sanctuary in the Jacobite cathedral were not molested, and only isolated individuals fell victims to the fury of the mob. That the outbreak wore a mask of fanaticism was a thing inevitable in the Orient. The perpetrators were the Kurdish riff-raff; and on this point Mohammedan badmashes are alike all over the world. Only religious zeal can excite their passions dangerously; and when their passions are dangerously excited they always find expression in religious zeal.[25] But the very fact that a distinction was made between Armenians and Syrians, is alone sufficient to indicate that in this instance the mob was under some sort of control.

The hatred of the Turks for the Armenians is due to the fact that the Armenians are the only one of their subject nations of whom the Turks are afraid. The Arabs and Kurds are their co-religionists, and have no national cohesion. The Nestorian and Jacobite Syrians are either too few to be dangerous, or too thoroughly tamed by long subjection to have any desire to rebel. But the Armenians are numerous and imbued with national aspirations; and though the majority of them are inoffensive cultivators, they include a considerable number of intelligent and capable men. A small percentage too are active political propagandists, who continue to work persistently to overthrow the present régime. Under equal political conditions the Armenians would soon secure dominance: and this would be a subversal which the Turks could never endure. So when the Armenians grow restive the Turks resolve to “take precautions.” They cannot cope with them in cleverness, but in physical force they can.

Will there be further massacres? It is an ever-present danger. The Turks do not wish it—it makes trouble with the European Embassies; and, after all, slaughtering the Armenians is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The Kurdish chiefs do not wish it either, for they too stand to lose pecuniarily: but beneath them seethes the fanatical mob, easily roused by hot-headed agitators, a sort of open powder magazine which any stray firebrand may ignite. “I will give you full warning if I can,” said a friendly Vali to a gentleman of our acquaintance; “but I can only tell you that I see no danger just now. There is talk of course—there is always talk; and so long as the talk reaches our ears it is not likely to go further. When you see little groups whispering together outside the mosques, and breaking up whenever a Christian passes within earshot—that is the real danger-signal, and you can see that as well as I.”

There was plenty of “talk” at Diarbekr; and we frequently heard the children (no doubt in imitation of their elders) invoking curses on us as we passed along the streets. The tension must have become greater since: for the Moslems will have been touched in the raw at the result of the Balkan fighting, and are prone to avenge their discomfiture on any Christian who is ready to hand. Moreover the Constitution had not altogether improved matters: for it was inaugurated by a general amnesty whereby all exiles and prisoners had been released. Some were certainly innocent sufferers, but a large number would have been much better kept in durance; and Diarbekr was consequently growing anxious at the intrigues of Abdul Reshek Agha, grandson and heir to Bedr Khan Beg of Massacre memory,[26] who had just got reinstated in his ancestral stronghold in Bohtan. He was credited with an ambition to establish himself under the ægis of the Russians, as Shah of United Kurdistan: and though a “United Kurdistan” is a sufficiently Utopian conception, such an attempt might well begin with an Armenian massacre, and bring Russian intervention in its train.

The old régime used to deal with such dangers tactfully, if not altogether discreetly, according to our insular ideas. And this may be exemplified by the case of another Bedr Khan Beg, a scion of the same family—a tale which, if not vero, is so ben trovato that we cannot refrain from quoting it; and which at least shows the sort of methods with which the Government was credited, and in which its liege subjects were quite disposed to acquiesce.

The Sultan, in an expansive mood, had recalled Bedr Khan Beg from exile, and proposed to re-invest him with part of his ancestral domain. That gratified gentleman blossomed out luxuriantly under such sympathetic usage, and began asking for all sorts of powers and privileges, and reviving a whole host of dormant claims. The Government grew rather uneasy, but showed no signs of displeasure. It granted each demand in turn; escorted him with high distinction on board a warship; and dispatched him to Trebizond en route for his satrapy.

Two days later the ship was back at its anchorage. Perhaps it had forgotten something. Perhaps it needed some repairs to its engines. But it seemed in no hurry to start again; and it presently transpired that Bedr Khan Beg was no longer on board. He had not been seen to land; and the ship could have touched at no harbour. There is often some apparent inconsequence in the movements of Government ships. “Et quaesitum est a Toad-in-the-hole ubi est ille Bedr Khan Beg?” “Non est inventus.”

The Young Turks have adopted a self-denying ordinance with regard to such expedients; but they have hardly attempted to touch that cancer of Ottoman rule—the chronic corruption of the Administration. Turkey enjoys an admirable code of laws, and a revenue system which should be the envy of our own fiscal extremists; but it has also evolved along with them that other modern panacea, a multiplicity of jobs. Every single official, be he Old Turk or Young Turk, Arnaut or Armenian, is frankly “on the make.” His post entitles him nominally to a starvation salary: yet he pays for it with a bribe, and he knows it is well worth paying for, since the incidental pickings will enable him to “make his pile.”

The present officials did not reprobate their predecessors’ conduct in this: they only envied their opportunities. If they had been allowed a chance of getting a look in themselves, they would have been quite content with things as they were. But the Old Gang had packed the Government so artfully that nothing but a revolution could oust them; and so in due course the inevitable revolution happened. But the methods of administration remain essentially the same.

Internal development of the empire is hardly ever attempted. The standing instructions appear to be “Thou shalt do nothing at all.” The central Government is quite content if open revolt is avoided; and if the taxes are gathered regularly enough to pay the officials’ salaries, and to maintain the standing army. Abdul Hamid even attempted to dispense with paying the army; and this ill-judged bit of economy was the primary cause of his overthrow. An army is an institution which cannot be prudently starved.

Of course all this systematized corruption involves huge losses to the Government. The officials, for a consideration, will always allow their friends to “make a bit;” and will often undervalue their property for assessment by as much as 90 per cent. The Kurds are favoured at the expense of the Christians because their support has to be courted, although in the development of the country they are much the least valuable asset. Yet even the Kurds are not reconciled by such means to the paying of their taxes. Not so much because the taxes are heavy as because they are unremunerative. They see no return for their money: no roads, no education, no irrigation works. They are paying not taxes but tribute, like the old vassal kings under Assyria; and consequently they are always ripe for revolt, if they see any prospect of obtaining external aid to enable them to revolt successfully; again like the vassal kings under Assyria, who knew well that they would get flayed alive if they failed.

The best one can say of the administration of justice is that it probably is not quite as corrupt as it appears to be. The judge takes bribes from both sides with a view to remaining unbiased; and, if he is scrupulous, restores his bribe to the loser. In criminal cases, however, one must make allowance for a further principle. Among ourselves criminal acts are regarded as an offence against the State, and it is the State’s duty to exact the penalty. But the Turks are inclined to regard such acts merely as an offence against the individual. The State does no more than recognize the right of the injured party (or his representative) to take his own revenge—if he can.[27] It will only itself occasionally condescend to act as his representative, if he chances to be an influential person, or if some influential outsider (say the British Consul) may be thereby obliged. Such a point of view is very primitive, and inevitably leads to much injustice; but we cannot hope to see this remedied until the Turk has digested our own Western principles, and he has not made digestion easier by electing to swallow them whole.

With regard to the Kurds[28] we desire to speak as charitably as we are able; and we may find warrant for this in the words of Mar Ephrem, the Syrian Bishop of Urmi, who, writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, could say no worse of them than that they were wakshi folk. Wakshi means merely “uneducated;” but it is only fair to add that it is a term of much greater opprobrium than seems quite reasonable in a country where not one man in a hundred is able to read or write.

The lack of education which the bishop laments is akin to that “weakness in arithmetic” which caused the Irishman to be hanged. They are apt to have more sheep in their villages than they can legitimately account for. They are a pastoral race, leaving agriculture almost exclusively to the Syrians and Yezidis; but we fear that their “pastoral” ideals are hardly those of Corydon or Meliboeus. Rather are they the modern representatives of those Elliots and Maxwells and Johnstones who used to practise “the faithful herdman’s art” upon our own border; and it might well be said to them (as was said to the chief of another great family whose enormities have since culminated in the acquisition of a dukedom)—

Had everye honeste man his awin kye, A right puir clan thy name wad be!

Such doings are hardly criminal according to their own code of morals; and if they confined themselves to cattle raiding, or even to an occasional clean murder, we should be able to think of them more kindly. But we fear that yet darker deeds must sometimes be reckoned against them; deeds like those of Edom o’ Gordon, or Black Adam of Cheviot, or like that which drew Hepburn’s vengeance on Bertram of Mitford tower. It is highly interesting, no doubt, to find Donald Bean Lean in the flesh still practising his old avocations in the highlands of Asia Minor; but if we could also find there “the kindly gallows of Crieff,” we do not hesitate to avow that our state would be the more gracious.

There is a British Vice-Consulate at Diarbekr, but at the date of our visit it was vacant. It is one of those posts which our Government is apt to suppress whenever retrenchment seems advisable. Certainly the Vice-Consul must lead a dull enough life; and the British trade, which is the ostensible cause of his appointment, is a very nebulous entity. Yet the mere presence of a European constitutes a very real protection of the subject races in such an environment; and we owe at least this much recognition of our treaty obligations towards them.[29]

Our national prestige in the East rests chiefly on our dominance in India; and this is reflected in the fact that our Indian consulates in the south are much better maintained than those in the north, which are controlled from Europe. Our prestige too is a waning quantity. We are living, as it were, on the capital accumulated for us by such men as Stratford Canning; and it must be confessed that latterly our policy has not been that of a Great Power. We seem content to preserve barbarism in Mesopotamia in order to make our position in India easier; and to discourage the Baghdad railway because it will make our frontier harder to defend. That our military men should take this view is excusable. They know our present unpreparedness; and some day it might even be their duty to destroy that railway, because forces at their disposal will not otherwise be adequate for defence. But from a national standpoint such a dog-in-the-manger policy must eventually bring its own punishment. Our most straightforward, and in the end our wisest, course would be to promote all developments, and to shoulder manfully the obligations which they entail.

We resumed our journey from Diarbekr across a lava-covered country by perhaps the bumpiest bit of road between Aleppo and Mosul. We and all our possessions were kept bouncing about in our araba like so many dry peas in a pod. The springs of a second carriage that was travelling with us burst, and had to be spliced with string. Presently our own pole broke off short at the socket, and had to be lashed up with string likewise. By some miraculous dispensation the splice held out to Mardin.

These accidents and repairs delayed us, and nightfall caught us still on the moorland. Our driver went astray off the almost invisible pathway, and after a while was reduced to hunting for it with matches. We fished out a portable candle-lamp, which gave somewhat more illumination; but which scarcely seemed adequate for the next undertaking that awaited us—the fording of a fairly wide river, running strongly, about axle deep. Good luck, however, attended us, and we at length got safely to our khan.

Next morning we were clear of the volcanic district and pursued our way up a winding and fertile valley, which was threaded (for a marvel) by a very presentable road. But over the col at the head there was no road whatever, and our horses had to scramble up a mountain side, rugged with earth-fast boulders and the roots of stunted trees. But this was the last of our obstacles. The road now revived intermittently; and though but half finished and hilly, it held on to the end of our stage. Towards evening we climbed the long zigzag ascent to the top of a 3000 feet mountain, and, crossing the ridge, wheeled immediately into the streets of the city of Mardin.

Mardin occupies a superb situation at the summit of one of the eminences which are ranged like a wall along the northern border of the Mesopotamian plain. All trace of an intervening plateau has here been completely eliminated; and from the foot of the declivity the ground stretches away to the southward in one illimitable level. The furthest identified landmark, a huge tel rising conspicuously in the far distance, was pointed out to us as Tel Kokab nearly eighty miles away.

These mountains are the Jebel Tur, the Mount Athos of the extreme east. They are a wild and barren district, containing very few villages, but thickly studded with ancient Christian monasteries; some of which date back to the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, and most of which are still occupied by small companies of Syrian monks.[30] Mardin is situated at the western extremity of this region; and the northern and eastern boundaries are formed by a loop of the Tigris, which flows behind the upland from Diarbekr to Jezire ibn Omar and issues there on to Mosul plain.

The hill on which the city stands is of a form which is not uncommon among the Kurdistan highlands, It rises from the plain in a single steep slope, unbroken almost from base to summit; but it culminates in a cresting of precipitous rock, so even and vertical that it looks like an artificial wall. Immediately behind the city this cresting forms an isolated knoll, cut off at the back and ends as abruptly as along the front, and thus forming an immense table with a perfectly level top. Many of the hills adjoining are of similar conformation; and another, almost a replica of it, may be seen in the mountains further eastward, forming the site of the town of Amadia.

Amadia is built entirely on the level top, and the encircling line of precipice serves it instead of a rampart: but at Mardin the space on the summit is only sufficient for the citadel, and the town lies just at the foot of the precipice, sprawling down the southern slope of the hill. The houses look forth across the plain, each over the roof of its neighbour; and as even the lowest rank must be fully 1500 feet above plain level, they form a conspicuous assemblage visible for scores of miles away.

The town is some two miles in length and perhaps half a mile in width, and is reputed to contain about 80,000 inhabitants. It is built of a warm-coloured stone similar to that employed at Urfa; and, like Urfa, is largely composed of good substantial buildings, which can sustain a certain amount of dilapidation without lapsing altogether into squalor. The streets are narrow and tortuous, and run for the most part longitudinally; thus it is evident that the cliff which overhangs them cannot (like the Amadia cliff) be in the habit of dropping fragments down the slope beneath it; otherwise the lanes would run vertically, and be a good deal wider than they are! Some of the principal mosques possess considerable architectural pretensions, with Arabesque stalactite corbelling inserted in the coves over the doorways, and a certain amount of good carving introduced here and there on the facades. They are generally covered with fluted domes—a rather unusual feature, but one which is very conducive to the general effectiveness of the design.

Mardin is a walled city, but its walls were never very formidable and are now mostly ruinous. They consist but of broken fragments even on the citadel rock. The place was no Roman fortalice like Urfa or Diarbekr, and the part that it played in history was not of any great note. For some time it was the capital city of a petty dynasty of little independent Sultans; and the tomb of one of the most powerful of these forms a graceful adjunct to one of the chief mosques. One unique distinction, however, belongs to its rock-perched citadel. This is said to have held out successfully against the invincible Timour himself.

Mardin is in these days best known to us as the residence of the Patriarch of the Jacobites—Mar Ignatius, the modern inheritor of the throne of Antioch, that earliest of all Metropolitan sees. He resides at Deir el Za’aferan, the “Monastery of the Yellow Rocks,” which is situated about five miles eastward upon the southern slope of the mountains, in a position very similar to that of the town itself but on a separate hill. Deir el Za’aferan is a very ancient foundation dating from the fifth or sixth century; and certain fragments of its original structure still survive to this day, incorporated in the existing buildings. They are of pronouncedly classical character, and display a strong similarity to the admittedly Roman work in the Church of St. James at Nisibin: but the major part of the monastery is of much more modern construction; for it has been almost constantly occupied ever since the date of its erection, and subjected to many vicissitudes, being frequently ruined and rebuilt.

The Syrian “Jacobite” Christians are a poor remnant now, but they were once the dominant Church in that group of old Roman provinces that we style loosely, “Syria and Palestine,” but which Romans called “The Orient,” Praefactura Orientalis.

Syriac (i.e. Aramaic) was the vernacular of these lands, whose capital for both ecclesiastical and political matters was Antioch. Their use of a separate language gave a national tinge to their Christianity; and they resented the Greek uniformity which the Emperor of Constantinople for political reasons sought to impose upon them. They fought this battle on the doctrinal field, refusing to accept the “Constantinopolitan” council of Chalcedon, and finding in that refusal a rallying-point for their own desire for independence.

For some time, it seemed probable that the emperor would seek to reconcile the discontented provinces by abandoning the council to which they objected; this policy, however, was rejected by Justinian (527-565), with the result that these “Monophysite”[31] malcontents organized themselves on a footing of separation from the Greek Church, but they remained in fellowship with the Churches of Armenia and Egypt; and the bulk of the Christian population of these provinces was in sympathy with them.

Thus, when the Mohammedan invasions of the seventh century commenced, the Arabs found that the bulk of the provincials were disposed to receive them as deliverers rather than as foes. In return, they recognized these Monophysites as the dominant Christian millet of these provinces, and so they remained for centuries.

Their nickname of “Jacobite” has nothing whatever to do with the “White Rose Society,” but was given them during the sixth century. Justinian attempted to force them into “Orthodoxy” by imprisoning their bishops, so as to prevent the ordination of any clergy but those of whom he approved. While in prison, the bishops consecrated a certain monk Jacobus Baradaeus, to the episcopate, and gave him a “roving commission.” For thirty-five years he wandered from place to place in a beggar’s horse-cloth (bara’da), and reorganized the whole separatist hierarchy.

Their Patriarch claims to be a true representative of the original Patriarchate of Antioch. In the days of their oppression, he was naturally not permitted to reside there, and shifted his quarters from monastery to monastery, till he settled at last at Deir el Za’aferan. The Greeks have of course a Patriarch of the see, though they have to admit the existence of gaps in his line of ancestry, and a Latin claimant of the same was established in the time of the Crusades. These reside now at Damascus and Beyrout respectively.

The Jacobite Church comprises about a quarter of a million adherents in Asiatic Turkey with—we believe—twelve bishops; and there are about the same number under British rule in Malabar.

Neither they nor their eastern neighbours the “Nestorians” hold now (if they ever did) the peculiar heresies which their names suggest, and which their enemies credited them with teaching. Each has now come to teach, and perhaps has always taught, all the doctrine that their Orthodox opponents sought to guard at the councils which these Separatists nevertheless continue to repudiate. The old division continues; but more as a matter of convenience than of principle, and the more intelligent bishops on both sides admit that all real differences have disappeared.

Yet no fusion is likely at present, for the rank and file are unreconciled, and fortify their mutual suspicion with all sorts of groundless ideas. “Is it really true,” asked an old Jebel Tur monk in all simplicity, “that the Nestorians wash their altar with asses’ blood before they celebrate the Eucharist?”

The Nestorian deacon who attended us, and who heard this amazing aspersion, could hardly be restrained from falling on the inquirer there and then!