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We now passed with our ragged regiment straggling around us, now with their long guns under our ears, and now cutting off the long bends of our crooked and little used path. In about ten minutes from the pass, we were hailed by another party, posted upon a hillside, and a discussion of many minutes ensued between them and our escort, in which our Kurdish muleteers took an active part.
Eventually permission was granted him to live in Baghdad as long as he kept out of the Kurdish hills, so he set off by motor accompanied only by a French chauffeur. Gasolene was sent ahead by camel caravan to be left for him at selected points.
Some Turkish aeroplanes heralded our arrival. In front of us rose the Jebel Hamrin Red Hills beyond them the snow-clad peaks of the Kurdish Range. A few months previous we had captured the passes over the Jebel, and we were now busy repairing and improving the roads in particular that across the Abu Hajjar, not for nothing named by the Arabs the "Father of Stones."
Towards the north and east it is provided by nature with an ample supply of water, rills everywhere flowing from the Armenian and Kurdish ranges, which soon collect into rapid and abundant rivers.
I am not at all sure some accidents of that nature did not happen. So when we had fired at the Kurds enough to make them face about and so expose their rear to Ranjoor Singh, we would get to horse again and send the Kurdish horses galloping up the pass in front of us.
Then, instead of keeping along the hills, as I had intended, until we were well to the rear of the Kurdish firing-line, they turned half-left too soon, and headed in diagonal bee line toward the horses, those who had begun by leading being last now, and the last men first.
At last he found himself once more at Galata bridge, and the light of the lantern began to pale before the grayness of the coming morning. He paid the Kurdish porter a generous fee, and giving his tiny coin to the tall keeper of the bridge, whose white garments looked whiter in the dawn, he walked on until he was half way over the Golden Horn.
On rising ground between us and the Kurdish firing-line was a little group of Turkish officers, and to our right beyond the horses was miscellaneous baggage under the guard of Kurds, of whom more than half were wounded. I could see an obviously Greek doctor bandaging a man seated on an empty ammunition box.
To be mewed up in a squalid Kurdish village in close companionship with a man who was only your husband by adoption, and to have the attention of all Europe drawn to your plight, was about the least respectable thing that could happen. And there were international complications, which made things worse.
And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say. When it was the Three Hundred and Eighteenth Night, She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that quoth Kurdish Jawan to his mother, "Keep thou watch over her till I come back to thee at first dawn of day," and went his ways.
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