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If the Bakhtiari Khans should annihilate us their own fate would not be likely to tremble in the balance very long. Yet if they admitted knowledge of us, what might that not lead to? And how was it possible for them to know really who we were in any case? Finally, they sent one of their Kurdish servants back to find us and ask questions.
How, robbed of their original leaders they yet reached the Black Sea and safety by way of the Tigris valley and the wild passes of Kurdish Armenia all readers of Xenophon, the Athenian who succeeded to the command, know well.
The English government, it seemed, had become embroiled in a local love-affair just at a time when Colonel Stewart was off on “diplomatic duty” on the Russian Transcaspian border. An exceptionally bright Armenian beauty, a graduate of the American missionary schools at this place, had been abducted, it was claimed, by a young Kurdish cavalier, and carried away to his mountain home.
With the head gone, the whole Kurdish firing-line would begin to be useless. I tried my stammering Turkish, but the men were in no mood to be patient with efforts in that loathly tongue. None of them knew a word in English. I tried French Italian smattering Arabic but they only shook their heads, and began to think nervousness was driving me out of hand.
Ranjoor Singh was no man to study comfort when opportunity showed itself. We rested two hours, and during those two hours our friend the Kurdish chief made tip his mind, and he and Ranjoor Singh struck a new bargain. "Give me the gold!" said he. "Keep the hostages and ten of my men to guide you, and send them back when you are two days into Persia. I go to fight against the Turks!"
It is 13,480 feet above the sea, or about 3000 feet lower than Ararat. "We started with some Kurdish guides to the mountain, and after a good deal of delay got to the place where the only path to the summit commences. Here we were obliged to dismount and take to our legs.
If the summits, even of the moderately elevated ridges which immediately bound the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and Armenian mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days, that water must have extended over the whole earth.
Ranjoor Singh, with our men, all mounted, and our Kurdish friends, were after them although our friends were too busy burdening themselves with the rifles and other belongings of the fallen to render as much aid as they ought. I left my horse, and climbed a rock, and looked for half a minute. Then I knew what to do; and I wonder whether ever in the world was such a running fight before.
The Kurdish chief returned on the fifth day and by that time, although most of us still ached, some of us looked like men again, and what with the plunder we had taken, and the chests of gold in full view, he was well impressed. He began by demanding the gold at once, and Ranjoor Singh surprised me by the calm courtesy with which he refused.
But the rest of the men were too interested to learn the reason of Gooja Singh's torture and death to care for the workings of a Kurdish chief's conscience. They crowded closer and closer, interrupting with shouted questions and bidding each other be still. So Ranjoor Singh said a word to Abraham and he changed the line of questioning. The truth was soon out.
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