CHAPTER IX

THROUGH MUD TO KIRIND

A city of starving cave-dwellers--An American woman's mission to the wild--A sect of salamanders--Profiteering among the Persians--A callous nation--Wireless orders to sit tight--Awaiting attack--The "mountain tiger."

Next day we set out for Kirind, about fifteen miles from Surkhidizeh, where a platoon of the Hants held an advanced post. After passing Sar Mil and its ruined fort, we dipped down into a valley bordered by high hills, where grew dwarf oaks, with a background of mountains whose snow-topped peaks glistened in the warm spring sunshine.

Our way lay over a black cotton-soil plain, and the road looked as if it had recently been furrowed by a giant plough. It was hard going for the Ford cars, and our difficulties were increased when rain presently overtook us. Half an hour's downpour will convert any Persian road into a morass, and that between Surkhidizeh and Kirind is no exception to the rule. The Fords for once were baffled. The leading car could get no grip on the slippery soil; its front wheels revolved aimlessly, then by a mighty exertion moved forward a few yards, only to come to an abrupt stop, up to its front axle in a slimy {83} mud-hole. We temporarily jettisoned everything, and pulled it out with a tow rope and the united efforts of a dozen friendly natives who were not averse from a little physical labour for a pecuniary reward. There was no getting rid of the glutinous mud. It adhered to one's boots and clung to one's garments with a persistency that was irritating and ruinous to the temper. The fifteen miles' journey occupied four hours, and we were "bogged" seven times before the cars finally got clear and gained the roughly paved causeway which, skirting Kirind village, led to the British military post.

Kirind itself is a straggling and typical group of Persian mud-houses. It clings haphazardly to both sides of a steep, narrow gorge, closed at one end by a perpendicular wall of jagged limestone rock, which rises sheer for a thousand feet. Beneath this frowning rock-barrier nestles a village abominably and indescribably filthy, inhabitated by an elf-like people in whom months of semi-starvation had bred something of the sullen ferocity of a pack of famishing wolves. There was in their eyes the glint of the hunted wild animal. They fled at our approach--men, women, and children--diving into dark, noisome, underground dens which exhaled a horrible effluvium, or else bolting like so many scared wild-cats for some lair high up amongst the limestone ridges. Some of the fugitives whom we rounded up and spoke to compassionately answered with a terrified snarl, as if dreading we should do them injury. Yet it {84} was chiefly the Turk, that zealous propagandist of the tenets of Islam, whose rapacity and cruelty had driven this fellow Moslem race to the borderland of primitive savagery.

Amid all the horror and misery of this desert of human despair we found a Christian angel of pity, isolated, working single-handed, striving to alleviate the terrible lot of the starving people. The angel was an American woman, Miss Cowden, of the Presbyterian Mission. Years before she had given up home, country, and friends in obedience to a higher call, and was devoting her life and her energies to the betterment of the temporal lot of the unhappy, underfed, Persian children. She had learned their language, and moved from village to village alone and unattended, carrying out her great work of charity, and content to live in some dirty hovel. A vocation surely demanding sublime self-abnegation, and calling, I should think, for the highest attributes of faith and courage! I hold no brief for foreign missionaries in general. I know that their proselytizing methods have been the subject of severe criticism in the public press and on the lecture platform. All the more reason, therefore, why I should tell of a work which is being done so unobtrusively, without hope of earthly recompense, and well beyond the range of the most powerful "Big Bertha" of the cinema world.

The Kirindis for the most part belong to the curious religious sect called Aliullahis, about {85} whose beliefs and rites many strange legends circulate.

One of these concerns their immunity from injury by fire, and recalls the "fire walkers" of the Tongan Islands. Aliullahian devotees, it is said, will enter a kind of oven and stay there while fire is heaped around it, making it red-hot. Then, covering their heads with the burning cinders, they cry, "I am cold," and pass out unhurt. Another ceremony consists in lifting bars of red-hot iron out of the fire with their bare hands, their skin showing no signs of burning.

Their religion seems to be a strange mixture of Mohammedanism and Judaism, with doctrines from various other esoteric faiths grafted on to it. Thus they number amongst their prophets Benjamin, Moses, Elia, David, and Jesus Christ, and they have also a saint of peculiar efficacy in intercession named Ali. Some investigators into their creed maintain that Ali and Daoud (David) are one and the same person; others think that Ali is so high up in the spiritual hierarchy as only to be invoked through Daoud. In any case, their prayer before battle is, "O Daoud, we are going to war. Grant that we overcome our enemy!" They then sacrifice some animal, usually a sheep, which is roasted whole. The High Priest prays over the carcass and distributes the flesh in small portions to those present. Communion in this sacrament appears to inspire the Aliullahian with absolute confidence in the success of any undertaking it precedes.

{86}

Another of their beliefs is that of a successive incarnation of the Deity in the greatest of their spiritual guides, seven of whom are clubbed together under the name of "Haft-Tan."

When in Mohammedan cities, they outwardly conform to the tenets taught by the Prophet of the Crescent, but secretly they continue the practice of their own mystic rites. They bury their dead without prayer (after keeping the unembalmed corpse six days), but turn his head to face Kerbela, as do the Mussulmans.

They are recognizable from their long moustaches, since the Shiahs are not allowed to have hair so long as to pass the upper lip.

Some authorities proclaim them the remnant of the Samaritans who, as related in 2 Kings xvii. 6 and 7, were carried into captivity by Hoshea, King of Assyria; and Rawlinson, in his writings on Persia, speaks of a rock-tomb which they regard as a place of special sanctity. They call it, he says, Dukka-ni-Daoud (David's shop), because they believe that the Jewish monarch was a smith by trade.

We stayed two nights in Kirind village. Our quarters were a couple of rooms above a stable which sheltered a sundry collection of goats, sheep, two consumptive donkeys and their charvadars, some stray hens, and two or three pariah dogs. Crossing a dirty courtyard, where filth had accumulated for years, we climbed a broken stairway, and were at home. The flat roof of the stable was our promenade; {87} but, since it was full of holes, which were generally concealed by a thin layer of sun-dried mud, great caution was needed to prevent a sudden and undignified descent into the menagerie below. Our rooms opened on to the roof of the stable. We slept on the floor, and, as it was cold, our Persian servant bought some green wood and made a fire in the only fireplace available, which consisted of a small cavity in the mud floor. A hole in the upper roof supplied ventilation, and served the purposes of a chimney.

It was here that the Governor paid an official call upon General Byron. He sent a servant to announce his coming, and presently arrived accompanied by a retinue of unkempt, hungry-looking officials, all wearing the chocolate-coloured sugar-loaf hat peculiar to Persians. The Governor himself was a fat, pompous individual, with a drooping moustache, unshaven face, and no collar. We wondered at first whether the stubble on his chin was due to slothfulness, or was a sign of mourning. We discovered it was the latter, a brother of his having died recently through over-participation in food at some local festivity. To look at the portly form of the Governor made it quite evident that everybody was not going hungry in Kirind. As he sat cross-legged on the floor, his fingers interlaced in front of his breast, and twirling his thumbs, he looked exactly what he was--the personification of hopeless incapacity and lethargy. "What ashes are fallen on my head!" he moaned aloud, by way of expressing sorrow for the {88} death of so many of the villagers from starvation. Yet he himself had done nothing to lessen the ravages of famine in the district, and was content to see the wretched inhabitants die, without moving a finger to help them.

His attitude was typical of officialdom throughout this starving land. The Governor was a landowner, and probably, like others of his class whom I came across later in Kermanshah and Hamadan, had plenty of grain hidden away waiting for the day when the British Commissariat, in order to feed starving Persians, would come and buy it at inflated prices, thus enriching a gang of hoarding, avaricious rascals.

When General Byron spoke of what the British were doing elsewhere in the way of feeding the famine-stricken, the Governor's eyes brightened, and scenting the possibility of an advantageous commercial deal in cornered wheat, he replied with a fervent "Mash-allah!" (Praise be to God!) The suggestion that thieving local bakers who had been profiteering at the expense of the starving population might be taught a salutary lesson by having their ears nailed to their bakehouse doors, or otherwise dealt with under some equally benign Persian enactment, seemed to find favour in the eyes of the Governor, for he answered, "Inshallah!" (Please God!)

This Governor, who had so suddenly developed a keen interest in the local food problem, was afterwards present at a full-dress parade of Miss Cowden's {89} starvelings. The recipients of mission charity were of both sexes, and varied from toddlers of three to their elders of ten or twelve years. All they had in the way of clothing was a piece of discoloured rag, or a section of a tattered gunny bag, fastened round the loins. Physical suffering long endured was indelibly stamped on their shrunken features and on their emaciated frames. Each was given a substantial chunk of freshly baked chipattee, or unleavened bread, and they were desired to eat it then and there to prevent its being pilfered from their feeble hands by hungry adult prowlers outside the mission buildings. They made no demur, and ate ravenously. Bread is the staple diet, and generally the only article of food, of the Persian poor; and this daily free distribution must have been the means of preserving the lives of many hundreds of Kirind children. Charity in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word seems to find no home in the breast of the average Persian; and each day there was a fight between local cupidity, as represented by the Kirind bakers, and foreign generosity as exemplified by the American Mission, which was spending its funds freely in order that these unhappy children of an alien race might have bread and live. Here, as elsewhere during my wanderings through Iran, I was painfully impressed by the appalling callousness and indifference exhibited by the ordinary Persian towards the sufferings of his own people. He would not lift a hand to help a dying man, and dead, would leave {90} him to the tender mercies of the dogs and vultures rather than trouble to give him burial.

One morning, while preparing for a further move eastward towards Kermanshah, a wireless message, transmitted in haste from Surkhidizeh, ordered us to sit tight and await developments and reinforcements. We were warned that the Senjabis were restless, and might any night swoop down on our slenderly-garrisoned post. Ali Akhbar Khan, who was the Pendragon of the Senjabis and various stray allied bands of nomadic robbers in these parts, was said to be watching us from his eyrie up in the snow-capped hills. His martial ardour had been stimulated to the verge of action by German gold and German rifles, and the promise of much loot when our weak force had been duly annihilated. To the careful, calculating Akhbar, and to the wild tribesmen who had flocked to his standard at the very first mention of the word "unlimited loot," the capture of the Kirind post must have seemed the softest of soft things. To look our way and resist temptation was like flying in the face of Providence. How that dear old bandit's mouth must have watered in anticipation of securing a fine haul of rifles, ammunition, and transport animals!

All that stood between Akhbar Khan and the realization of his project was a platoon of the 14th Hants under Lieutenant Gow, a Lewis gun, a dozen Persian irregulars of doubtful fighting quality, and a very unformidable barrier of two rows of {91} barbed wire. The camp was on the edge of a narrow plateau facing the road. In the rear, where this latter became merged in the hills, the smooth slope was like a toboggan run, and the alert Senjabis, if they so wished, might have slid from their hill-top sangars down on to the field of battle. But they held aloof; their day was not yet.

We spent an anxious night. Everybody was under arms waiting for the threatened attack. Morning ended our period of suspense and brought the looked-for reinforcements--a squadron of the 14th Hussars under Captain Pope, a couple of guns, an additional platoon of the Hants, as well as the Dunsterville contingent which had originally set out from Baqubah.

The "mountain tiger," as Ali Akhbar Khan was called in the imaginative and picturesque vocabulary of the district, had hesitated, and missed his chance. The reinforcing party was very much disappointed at Akhbar's display of irresolution and his reluctance to fight. Some amongst the bolder spirits contemplated calling upon him in his mountain lair. But that was not to be. When the "tiger" did spring later on, and sought to cut up a British column, he received the lesson of his life. But our party was not there to share in the glory of his undoing.

{92}