Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
A request was sent to the commandant of the city, and he was pleased to present us with a Kurdish cavalryman, who was to be our slave for the next four days, if on our part we would agree to pay him well and do as he said. We were now humble. We promised, and the Kurd came riding to the gates of the convent the next morning at the hour fixed for our departure. He was immensely long and lean.
We had thirty-six different races and creeds and tongues: grey-bearded Moslems, fierce-looking Druzes, a rough Kurdish chief, a Bedawin shaykh, a few sleek Jewish usurers, every one of the fourteen castes of Christians, the Protestant missionaries, and all the Consuls and their staffs; in fact, everything appertaining to public life and local authority, culminating in the various Church dignitaries, bishops, and patriarchs.
I picked my way through the narrow streets, scattering ragged Kurds right and left; past part of the covered bazaar, until I came to a house with a large courtyard, thronged with a motley array of Kurdish irregulars, armed with every sort of weapon. It was there that Soane administered his stern but practical justice, for he thoroughly understood how to handle these men.
When our own meal was brought to us some time after, we noticed that the fourteen eggs we had doled out had been reduced to six; and the other materials suffered a similar reduction, the whole thing being so patent as to make their attempt at innocence absurdly ludicrous. We thought, however, if Kurdish highway robbery took no worse form than this, we could well afford to be content.
It was a good thing to have the old mayor along, for he served as an excellent hostage, and I kept close watch upon him. He brought me to a prosperous, neat-looking house with heavy wooden doors. In response to his summons an old woman came and ushered us into a large, cool room, well furnished and with beautiful Kurdish rugs.
Its policy was to unite with a weak government to plunder a strong one, then, by subjugating its ally, to make itself master of both. By treasons and stratagems, by forged treaties and briberies, by infamies planned in cold blood and executed with more than Kurdish barbarity, the garden spot of the earth, with its teeming millions and inestimable wealth, was made to pay tribute to British greed.
Iron, copper, and lead are found in great abundance in the Tiyari Mountains within a short distance of Nineveh, where they crop out upon the surface, so that they cannot fail to be noticed. Lead and copper are also obtainable from the neighborhood of Diarbekr. The Kurdish Mountains may have supplied other metals.
The rich pasturage of Ararat’s middle zone attracts pastoral Kurdish tribes. These nomadic shepherds, a few Tatars at New Arghuri, and a camp of Russian Cossacks at the well of Sardarbulakh, are the only human beings to disturb the quiet solitude of this grandest of nature’s sanctuaries. The first recorded ascent of Mount Ararat was in 1829, by Dr.
Evening came, and no word from either the mutessarif or the Kurdish chief. Although we were extremely anxious to set off on the expedition before bad weather set in, we must not be in a hurry, for the military governor of Karakillissa was now the guest of the mutessarif, and it would be an interference with his social duties to try to see him until after his guest had departed.
The arch soon faded away, and the shadows lengthened and deepened across the plain, and mingled, till all was lost to view behind the falling curtains of the night. The Kurdish tents far down the slope, and the white curling smoke from their evening camp-fires, we could see no more; only the occasional bark of a dog was borne upward through the impenetrable darkness.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking