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Ranjoor Singh asked him, and the Kurd said nothing; but I feared greatly because they seemed on the verge of a religious argument, and those Kurds are fanatics. If anything but gold had been in the balance against him, I believe that Kurd would have defied us, for, although he did not know what Sikhs might be, he knew us for no Musselmen.
The population is Armenian and Persian, for Persia ruled here during a considerable period until vanquished by Russia; but at the bazaar one meets with other nationalities, such as Tartars from the Steppes, Kurds, Greeks, and Turkish dealers in search of good horses, upon which they will fly across the frontier, defying Cossacks and custom officers alike.
That arrangement lasted until we came to a village where the Kurds were willing to exchange mules against the rifles we had taken from the Kurds, one mule for one rifle, we refusing to part with any cartridges.
The Kurds are of Persian race, speaking an old and barbarous Iranian tongue and often of the Shi'ah sect. They claim affinity with the English in the East, because both races always inhabit the highest grounds they can find. Burckhardt, who suffered from them, gives a long account of their treachery and utter absence of that Arab "pundonor" which is supposed to characterise Arab thieves.
The existence of these people, in their wild, semi-independent state, shows not so much the power of the Kurds as the weakness of the Turkish government, which desires to use a people of so fierce a reputation for the suppression of its other subjects. After half an hour’s rest, we prepared to decamp, and so did our Kurdish companions.
The entire staff took cover, and started a veritable hail of fire with their repeating pistols, all aimed at us, and aimed as wildly as our own shots had been. Meanwhile the mounted Kurds at the rear had heard the firing and were coming on full pelt, yelling like red Indians.
In China, more than thirteen millions are said to have died; and this is in correspondence with the certainly exaggerated accounts from the rest of Asia. India was depopulated. Tartary, the Tartar kingdom of Kaptschak, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Cæsarea, none was left alive.
Know that Kanmakan will be the cause of our expulsion from the kingdom; for he has slain Kehrdash, albeit he had with him the tribes of the Turks and the Kurds, and our affair with him will assuredly result in our destruction, seeing that the most part of our troops are his kinsmen and ye know what the Vizier Dendan hath done; how he refuses to recognize me, after all the favours I have done him, and is become a traitor to his faith.
It has been supposed that they were a race entirely distinct from the early Babylonians Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, or Sclaves who came down from the north long after the historical period, and settled as the dominant race in the lower Mesopotamian valley.
There was nothing else they could do, now that they had given way. It was like the letter Y thus, sahib, see, I draw in the dust the Kurds coming this way at an angle Ranjoor Singh and his forty coming this way and we advancing toward them all along the bottom stroke of the Y, with hills around forming an arena.
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