CHAPTER XI

A LAND OF TROUBLE AND ANGUISH (URMI TO VAN)

The country between Urmi and Van is easy, as travel goes in Kurdistan; and, speaking normally, safe. High hills, rising to as much as 11,000 feet, cover the country; and one great mountain saddle, the Chokh range, has to be crossed. But the hills are rounded, and grass-grown in summer; and the valleys wide and fertile, though for the most part uncultivated, and carrying a scanty population. A long winter and heavy snowfall are natural at such an elevation, and a journey at that time of year is always a toilsome experience and may be a dangerous one. It is not pleasant, for instance (as once happened here to the writer), to find oneself in a position where baggage-horses can get neither forward nor back; and where the whole party has the duty of "humping" the loads and carrying them for some hours in deep snow.

That too zealous reformer, Mejid-es-Sultaneh, owns much property among these lower hills; and this fact is responsible for the development of a new type of village, the invention of that English gentleman to whom he assigned his property. It will be understood that "a good head of labour" is as necessary for a Persian estate now as it was for a mediæval manor in England; but conditions may make it difficult to maintain that desirable thing. Hence, when the Englishman found himself charged with a large depopulated estate, he bethought him of settling upon it the dispossessed Christians of Tergawar. They were put there upon the usual terms of the Persian village system, which deserves a word to itself.

The "Lord of the country-side" who owns the land, assigns a certain district to a village. It is his business to provide seed-corn; and in this particular case he built the houses as well, though usually that is not necessary. The villagers then pay him, instead of a money rent, a proportion of the crop, varying from a third to a half of the corn grown. Vineyards pay the same proportion; but if you desire to grow melons, you must ask leave and pay a special rent; for this is a crop that is exhausting for the land, and still more for the water.

A big landlord will often own many villages; and in such cases he places a steward in charge of each, to compute the amount of produce due to him and to receive his proper share. It is easy to understand from this the method by which the "unjust steward" of the parable proposed to defraud his lord: neither is it at all difficult to sympathize with that lord's "commendation," in a land which still believes implicitly in the policy of "setting a thief to catch a thief," and where it is recorded that Ahmed the Calamity and Hassan the Pestilence were made captains of the watch at Baghdad for no other reason than that "they excelled all men in villainy and tricks of cunning."

Both sides profited by the arrangement in the Mejid-es-Sultaneh estate; the owner getting a good supply of labour for a previously unproductive property, and the villagers a new home in the land.

They were of course in some danger from Kurds; and it was to meet this that the new type of village was evolved by the English administrator--a type which is much to his credit as an amateur military engineer. In ordinary villages the flat-roofed shielings are huddled together without plan or defensibility. But in these, a square space of perhaps 2 acres was enclosed by a wall of mud brick some twelve feet high, with projecting towers at the corners and one good strong gate. Then the houses of the village were built against this wall on the inner side; their flat roofs forming an excellent "banquette" for the defence of the battlemented wall, while the towers provided a flanking fire. The central space was left clear, except for the village church, and provided ample accommodation for the flocks. The Kurds came and reconnoitred, and cursed the inventive and innovating Englishman up hill and down dale. Half a dozen men with flint-locks could keep thirty of the best of them outside such a place; and we believe that no village built on this pattern has ever been seriously attacked.

Normally this district ought to be safe for Europeans; yet it was the scene of one of the narrowest escapes that the writer has ever experienced. In the summer of 1909, when Urmi plain was in the condition of anarchy mentioned in the last chapter, some of the Christian villages protected themselves by enlisting parties of exiles who belonged to the fighting clans of Tergawar; men who loved a battle for its own sake, and who also had a very special personal grudge against the Kurds who were most obnoxious to their hosts. Hence it came to pass that when the Kurds of a certain district came down to plunder the village of Ardishai, with their usual insolent confidence, they met with a most unexpectedly warm reception. In fact they walked straight into a well arranged ambush; whence they only escaped with the loss of fourteen dead, besides wounded; and several captured horses. This was of course a fearful blow to their prestige, and they went home "with their faces blackened," and feeling that something must be done to wipe off that stain.

The most obvious thing to do was to destroy the whole of the next party of travellers that came their way from Urmi district; and, as it happened, this was the writer's caravan. A party was detailed for the job; and when we reached the village of Umbi, one easy day out from Urmi, and asked for hospitality for the night, this party settled there also, camping on the roof next to the one we were occupying. We were not aware of the fact, and in any case were safe in the village; for any attack there would be at once a breach of hospitality, and a crime for which it would be too easy to fix responsibility. Our would-be murderers, however, made no secret before their hosts as to what their errand was; and the men of the village, though naturally interested and sympathetic, advised them to push the business no farther. "You see, this is an English party;" they argued. "Now we killed just one American three years ago and have not heard the last of that trifle yet.[116] You had better drop the scheme." Finding, however, that their guests were resolute, the hosts were far too good sportsmen to interfere by giving any warning to the intended victims; and the gang, who knew they could easily catch our slow-moving caravan, allowed us to go on our way next day, and followed after at their leisure.

We stopped about noon to call on a small Agha whose hold stood near the road; and were sitting at lunch with him under a tree outside the house when this party of five well-armed Kurds rode up and dismounted. The Agha invited them to join us at our meal; and though we were surprised at their refusal, we did not attach any importance to the matter. We said farewell, and started on the road. As soon as we were gone, however, our host, who had read the signs better, turned at once to his new visitors. "Now then, what is your game? Why would you not eat with the Englishman? or was it me that you had a grudge against?"

The Kurds were as frank with him as with their hosts of the previous night; but he took a different view of the matter.

"No, you don't if you please! I have no special interest in that Englishman or any other; but if he is killed on my land it is me that the Government will come down on. Take another party; it makes no odds to you, and will not cause trouble for other gentlemen."

As there was after all no personal feeling in the matter, they agreed to that compromise; and we proceeded safely. When we heard the tale later we could only be grateful to our host for his consideration; and convinced even more in the semi-fatalistic belief that is apt to soak into one in a land of "_Kismet_"--the belief that every man is immortal till his work is done.

There was an afterpiece to the play; what had very nearly been a tragedy developing into something resembling a farce. This is not unusual in the East; for the angel, (or devil) charged with looking after the Persian and Ottoman empires, has a strong--if grim--sense of humour; and mercifully sees to it that the most serious and painful of matters shall always have also a ridiculous side. Our kind hosts at Umbi, having allowed reasonable time for their guests to carry out their expressed intentions, reported them at Urmi as already accomplished; saying that the Englishman and his party had been actually killed. "Is it not already done sahib?" is what your servant says to you about some order that he may, or may not, intend to carry out when convenient; and the minds of these gentlemen were working on similar lines. Word was accordingly brought to the British Consul, then staying in Urmi, that some of the men for whom he was responsible had been murdered. At first that official was blankly incredulous. One acquires a large fund of scepticism about all rumours in the East, and this was a man of some experience. Still, the report grew and grew, and was confirmed again and again, and the bald and unconvincing narrative was embellished with corroborative detail; till at last somebody with an artistic mind came in to declare that he had not only seen our corpses lying on a certain pass, but had smelt them as well; and gave the name of the Sheikh whose bridle was now adorned by the writer's beard! Even consular scepticism broke down under this strain; and a caravan was got ready, and even coffins ordered for us so that decent interment might be given to our bodies; when a Nestorian _qasha_ turned up opportunely from the mountains, and was summoned before the Consul at once.

"Have you heard anything of this reported murder of Mr. Wigram on the Jerma pass, on the 25th day of the month?" was the query.

"I have sahib; but I think that on the whole it is not true, because I had tea with him at Qudshanis" (well beyond the scene of the supposed murder), "on the 30th."

As the road goes north-west towards Van, the traveller gradually enters the land of the Armenian Christians, leaving the Assyrian or Nestorian land behind. Kurdistan, which is the general though unofficial title for the land where the Kurds live, embraces both; and of course any Turk will tell you that there is no such land as Armenia or Armenistan. Under the old régime, the word was carefully erased from all maps or books that entered the country,[117] lest erroneous teaching should be given in the Sultan's schools; and much in the same spirit, books on chemistry were sometimes barred, because they contained the treasonable formula, H_{2}O. The seditiousness of this is perhaps not obvious: but it will be clear to the meanest capacity when it is explained that H_{2} means, and can only mean, Hamid II, Sultan of Turkey; and if you supply the obviously understood symbol = between the 2 and the O, you get the appalling doctrine, "Hamid II = Zero," which clearly cannot be allowed to pass.

Armenia then, does not exist; though there are districts where Armenians are the prevailing type of Christians; and we are now entering one of them. Of course there is a certain amount of "interlacing," and isolated villages of either form of Christianity are found scattered among the districts mainly inhabited by the other.

Bashkala, which will be found upon the map, is the seat of government for the district; and this place is inhabited mainly by Jews, who are, as always, the financiers and merchants of the land. It is a postal centre, principally remarkable for the fact that the post goes to that point from Van, for distribution to such centres as Julamerk, Neri, and Diza; but only strays on to them, when a _zaptieh_ or policeman happens to be going in that direction. Then he takes on the letterbag, provided that he does not forget, or that it is not too heavy for him to carry. Hence letters and papers sometimes spend some time in that office; and we remember the courteous remark of the _mutaserif_[118] of the place, who observed to us when we called upon him on the way to Van after a winter spent in Qudshanis, "_Effendim_, the papers you used to receive during the winter had very good pictures in them." It sounded cool, but after all, the poor man had little to read; the papers were none the worse for his looking at them, and he never meddled with the letters. Also, he always sent them on when he had done with them, and his action did not even imply any delay in the forwarding; so it seemed to us that there was nothing very much to complain about.

Somewhat to the west of the Urmi-Van road, and up among the highest of the mountains, stands one interesting memorial of the past. One particular valley runs down from the edge of lake Van to the Tigris; a pass open practically all the year round, between the plain of Mesopotamia and the Armenian plateau. It should be a highroad for commerce; but the Kurds who live in it are too turbulent to allow any traveller to pass that way as a rule, and it is very little known in consequence. It was a passage of strategic importance, however, in the days when Rome held Nisibis as her frontier post on the Persian border; and when Armenia was a buffer state of most uncertain loyalty, between the Roman and Sassanid Persian empires. Hence it was a road to guard; and Roman engineers planted upon it one of the grandest of Roman fortresses, which stands to this day practically unruined. Diocletian, who fortified this strategic frontier, was probably its builder; and it must have been evacuated when Jovian ceded the provinces to Persia some fifty years after his day. Since then it has remained derelict, for anyone to occupy who cared; and so it stands still--one of the grandest Roman relics anywhere.

It is a great square fortress, built after the pattern of their camps, with the prætorium as its citadel in the centre of the western side. One wall, the northern, has been pulled down to provide material for the mediæval Kurdish _kala_ into which the general's quarters have been transformed; but this probably embodies much of the old citadel in itself. The whole would well repay examination by an expert--provided that its present owner could be got to understand the difference between antiquarianism and espionage, which is doubtful in the extreme.

A miserable Kurdish village occupies the interior of this grand fort; the hovels being built, of course, from the hewn stones of the walls. But even these "beggars hutting in the palace" are dimly aware that such a place has harboured greater men than they; and tell you that it was the work of giants and enchanters--at which one does not wonder.

The writer once visited the spot, in company with the British military Consul of Van; being attracted both by the interest of the building itself, and also by a story that there was a hoard of ancient documents in some unknown tongue in one of the rooms of the castle. The tale is quite probably true, though the documents may be of any date; but the present owner of the place politely denied all knowledge of them. His guest was a marvel of erudition, he declared, but had been misinformed in this particular; and so he changed the subject to something that interested him more. This was the Consul's Mannlicher rifle, a beautiful tool that always excited envy everywhere, and was invaluable as a topic of conversation. Our host examined it, dandled it, played with it; and finally proposed a fair exchange--that rifle against his newly married wife! A deal which the Englishman rather ungallantly declined.

Disappointed in this, the Agha started yet another hare, with a hint that if we could oblige him in this, he might find it possible to refurbish his own memory in the matter of the documents. He told us a long tale of woe, of which the principal feature was that his hereditary enemy had recently been building a fine new castle, just in the one spot where he least wished to see it. We sympathized, but were not very clear what we could do in the matter, till we were enlightened by a confidential whisper from our host. "Look here Bey, I know the ways of you English, and you're sure to have a little dynamite; you always have. Could you not spare me just a few cartridges? I want--_to kill a few fish_!"

We were the guests of the Agha for the evening, and ate of course what was set before us; next day, however, there was some bargaining to be done for the fowl that was to have the honour of providing our supper that night. It is always well to buy your fowl in the morning, because it saves time at the hour of cooking; and it is easier to drive a bargain when you are obviously not dependent on the completion of the purchase for getting your next meal. Here the Consul's kavass hit on an ingenious expedient. The Consul had a good rook-rifle with him; and the kavass, a Serb by nationality, was a very good shot with it. Five piastres was the sum demanded for the old cock we had fixed on; two was our offer, which is the usual market rate. The kavass produced the rifle and made a sporting suggestion. "Look here," he said to the owner, "the bird is about eighty yards off. If I bring him down with one shot, will you let me have him for two piastres? If I have to spend a second cartridge, you shall have the full five." A Kurd has a sport-loving soul, and the offer was accepted at once; particularly as their rifles do not throw too accurately. The kavass bowled the fowl over neatly; and the same trick got us several dinners at a fair rate that journey, though naturally it could not be played in the same place twice.

When this frontier province was occupied by the Turks (an event that occurred shortly before the revolution), it was strongly garrisoned from end to end. But the sufferings of the unhappy soldiers in the ensuing winter were terrible. No provision was made for their accommodation; no medical stores were provided; and hardly any food. It says much for the troops that they did not loot every village in the neighbourhood; but the fact is that "Nefer Mustafa" (the Turkish Tommy Atkins) is the most easily disciplined and normally one of the kindliest of men. He is not the most intelligent of soldiers, but he is the most obedient; and he will march and starve, fight or freeze, and die in scores of dysentery and cholera, not only without a mutiny, but even without a sense of grievance against anybody; though he can hardly be ignorant that the rascally minor officials are making their profit out of the stores which he does not get. In one particular case, two battalions, amounting to perhaps 1200 men in all (the contractors probably drew stores, &c., for the 2000 they should have been, but that is a detail), were marched from Van to Tergawar late one autumn. There they remained, billeted in the deserted villages, till the following spring; when such of them as could walk were brought back to Van once more. Four months' peace service in that district, without a shot being fired, had brought those 1200 men down to 400; of whom a bare half were able to march at all! It was simply the work of cold, hunger, fever, and neglect! Things did improve with the army under the new régime, or did for a while at any rate; but the pre-revolutionary state of things would have been regarded as exaggerated for a comic opera but for the tale of human suffering that it implied.

The pay of the soldier was nominally one or two piastres a day; but when he got this magnificent sum, which was not often, it was paid him in _sanads_, Government assignats, not cash. The local treasury, moreover, would not cash them (in fact, they were usually payable in some other province than that where the poor recipient was quartered), and no shop would look at them as payment for goods. Certain merchants made a business of buying them, at 1/5th of the face value, and presenting them in the proper quarter, when they might perhaps get half the sum due. The Government would be debited with the full amount; and the officials got the balance. By a final touch, which surely nobody but Ottoman officials of the old régime could have conceived, the Government would not receive its own bank-notes from its own soldiers in payment of its own taxes! Those had to be paid in gold, the Government only accepting silver at a heavy premium.

Add to this that the soldier, nominally enlisted for five years with the Colours, and seven in the "_Redif_" or Reserve, was never allowed his discharge. Greybeards in the ranks were the commonest of sights; and we have seen men serving in 1905 who bore the medal granted for the defence of Plevna in 1878, and who had never been discharged.

Bashkala, to which we must now return, is two days journey from Van; and the road crosses the lofty Chokh range, an obstacle easy enough in summer, but uncommonly formidable in winter. At the best of times it is impassable to artillery, though a road could be constructed across it with a little labour. Half of it has in fact been accomplished, and a properly graded track, with wide sweeps and zigzags, goes up part of the ascent. Like most Turkish roads, however, it has neither beginning nor end, and nobody ever uses it. A little more trouble over the removal of the rocks in which it terminates at each end (and which keep it inacessible to all beasts of burden) would have made it useful. However, when this point had been reached, the official interested in it was recalled, or the money ran out, or the _Vali_ wanted the funds for something else; and so it remains unfinished and useless to this day. It is somehow characteristic of the Arab and Ottoman races (though not of all Orientals) that they can form magnificent designs, and can begin and work at them for a time. Seldom, however, can they finish them, and never can they undertake the toil of maintenance and repair. So magnificent monuments and civil works fall into utter decay, and boats go to ruin everywhere, for lack of a ha'porth of tar.

One of the gorges of the Chokh range was the scene of a strange episode during the Armenian massacres of 1896. A party of Armenians, mostly women and children, were endeavouring to escape by this route, in the early spring. At that season frequent avalanches descend from the upper slopes to the bottom of the defiles, choking them for hundreds of yards on end. The streams of course make their way under the snow, winding through caverns which no man dare enter; for the water nearly fills the tunnel, and the roofs are constantly collapsing as the melting proceeds. As the party approached one of these caverns, making their way along the track on the hillside above it, they found their pursuers close behind. "Let us fall into the hands of God rather than into those of the Kurds," said their leader; and wading into the stream, they entered the snow-cave. As they did so another avalanche thundered down the slope behind them blocking the entrance of their refuge and burying them under the snow. "They have gone to their deaths," said the pursuers, and halted where they were. But, as a matter of fact, the refugees were just within the cavern when the avalanche fell. This naturally dammed back the ice-cold torrent for a while, and they were able to crawl down the empty bed to the lower end of the passage. Here they emerged, hidden from their enemies by the curvature of the valley, and so escaped!

It may well be recorded too that at least one man of this district, Agha Zohar of Zirnek, sheltered the Armenians who fled to his country for refuge in that black time. When the slaughterers came in pursuit, and said that it was the order of the Sultan that the Armenian dogs should die, he replied proudly that he knew of no order of any Sultan that could constrain a gentleman to surrender his guests to the sword! The refugees had brought some few cattle with them, and these they offered as a reward to their protector. He not only refused to accept them, but gave them pasturage with his own herds till it was safe for the men to return to their homes.

The best type of Moslem gentleman is unsurpassed in any land.

The half-way house between Bashkala and Van is the city of Khoshab, which boasts the one castle of our acquaintance, which really embodies the dreams of Gustave Doré. As we give a picture of it, we may spare the reader any attempt at a description; but may say that though the main part of the architecture is Seljuk in style and date, it presents some features that are of European character, and support the local tradition that its real designer was a "Frank" of Italian birth--though whether a captive or an adventurer is left uncertain. The same tradition says also that the castle was built by the illustrious Saladin, the only Kurd whom history is able to mention with esteem. The place may perhaps have been part of his family property, but as he was born in Egypt, he can hardly have dwelt in it himself. Certainly there was a stronghold here long before the days of either Saladin or Mohammed, for the masonry of the lower courses of one of the great towers cries aloud that it is Urartian. It was built, that is, by the men of that ancient kingdom whose capital was at Dhuspas, (which is Van), in the days when Tiglath-Pileser ruled at Nineveh; and which disputed the sovereignty of Asia with the might of Assur itself. That subject, however, belongs to another chapter.

In the neighbourhood of Khoshab there is one monument that was probably venerable even when the Urartian foundations of that grand castle were laid; and that is one of the finest "_ziarets_" that we have seen in Kurdistan. A great isolated hill, Boshet Dagh by name, stands up in the vicinity; rising to 11,000 feet, and commanding one of the grandest views in the country, from Ararat in the north to Shamsdin in the south. It is yet so easy of ascent that a horse can easily be ridden the whole way up; and it forms an ideal "High Place," like those of the Old Testament.

Here, the men of old time (and how old one is afraid to say) constructed a Temple of the orthodox Semitic pattern, such as once stood at Jerusalem, and still remains at Baalbek. It comprises a court for worshippers, where sacrifice can be offered; an outer sanctuary; and an inner shrine. All is rudely built of course, but all the essential features are there; even to the detail of "ceremonial pillars," like the "Jachin and Boaz" of Solomon's temple, which are here represented by a round score of rough dwarf columns. What these stood for in the mind of their builders it is hard to say. They are a witness, perhaps, of a covenant between man and God, like those which Jacob set up at Bethel. In any case, there they stand; a token of how thoroughly the most primitive form of Semitic religion is a living reality to-day. No fossiliferous strata preserve the forms of past ages more thoroughly than does the corporate mind of the living East; though it is often hard to extract the fossils, and harder to ascertain their true significance.

An easy road takes us from Khoshab to Van, down a valley that should bear a large population; but where to-day nothing but a chilly wind wanders, that makes living unpleasant, and is said to blight wheat. "There were Armenian villages here once," said a Nestorian to us, "but when the Kurds turned them out, this wind came, and now none can live here. It is the breath of the curse of the dispossessed upon their oppressors." And so the fertile Havatsor plain lies empty, though villages abound upon its borders; and though a prosperous little town stands where the road begins to climb the low pass leading over the last range to the gardens and orchards of Van.