T HE first sixteen chapters of this book were given to the public in the spring of the year 1914. Since that date the country has acquired an additional interest for Englishmen, owing to the British acceptance of a “mandate” for its supervision and also to the picturesque and heroic part played in the Great War by the “Assyrian” mountaineers. While no attempt has been made to tell the full tale of “England in Irak,” it has been thought well to take the opportunity given by the appearance of a se

I t requires at least four persons to compound a salad sauce, say the Spaniards. The requisite incompatibilities can never co-exist in one. A spendthrift should squander the oil, and a miser dole out the vinegar. A wise man should dispense the salt, and a madman should do the stirring. Similarly, it has been stated that it takes two people at least to write a book of travel; a newcomer to give the first impressions and an old resident to reveal the true inwardness of things. Though the quality o

T HE belated Jinn who emerged out of Suleiman’s Brass Bottle into twentieth-century London found there, amid much that was strange to him, some beings of his own kin. These were the railway locomotives, obviously Jann like himself, but yet more oppressively treated; bound by spells of appalling potency to labours more arduous and wearisome than Suleiman had ever conceived. And truly his blunder was plausible: for if Jann be extinct nowadays (which one doubts after visiting Asia), then assuredly

D UE east and west, from the Gulf of Iskanderun almost to the heel of the Caspian, there stretches a range of lofty mountains—a sort of natural bulwark, fencing off the high rugged plateau of Asia Minor on the north from the low level plain of Mesopotamia on the south. At its western extremity this range is known as the Taurus, but further east it appears now to possess no generic name; yet it well deserves so much distinction, for it is here that the peaks attain their highest altitude, and hol

F ROM the eastern gate of Mardin the road decants itself plainwards in a skein of curves and zigzags—a vertical descent of 2000 feet, spinning out its gradients to a length of five or six miles. It is not at all a bad road. One could easily bicycle down it—and perhaps even bicycle up it if in specially strenuous mood. But it is, as it were, the swan-song of the modern Ottoman Telfords, and as soon as it reaches the level it reverts into a sheaf of footpaths. Henceforth to the end of our journey

T HERE are more pleasant places in the world than the city of Mosul. Hot, white, and dusty, it lies on a rather “hummocky” site along the right (or western) bank of the Tigris, looking across to where the mounds of Nebi Yunus and Koyunjik mark the site of Nineveh. It boasts a population of about eighty thousand souls, of whom perhaps a fourth are Christians, and five thousand Jews: and the whole is surrounded by a wall and moat which enclose rather more than a square mile of ground—an area about

W E have long been partial to pilgrimage. Partly because we love all old habits. Because “it was so our fathers did in the days of old;” and because, quite apart from that intrinsically “excellent reason,” we have yet another reason which may well be thought “good enough.” We have found that the original promoters of that pastime were people of singular discrimination, and endowed with a positive genius for exploiting attractive resorts. The shrines to which they sent their penitents are so many

O NE may go to Aleppo by train, and by carriage one may get on to Mosul; but he who would penetrate further must adopt more primitive means. Nothing that runs upon wheels can enter the Kurdistan highlands. And the “heir of all the ages,” travelling there in A.D. 1900, finds himself no better off than his forerunners of B.C. 1100, whose Great King recorded amazedly on slabs of imperishable granite the fact that “I, Tiglath-Pileser, was obliged to go on foot!” Accordingly our Dramatis Personae had

“I T is real rough travelling in the mountains,” says the Mosul resident casually; and the traveller just arrived from Europe hears that innocent observation with dismay. He has undergone a fortnight of arabas and khans and chóls and zaptiehs , and lo! that purgatorial experience is dismissed as a holiday jaunt. It is therefore with some misgiving that he enters those formidable mountains where he has been promised enlightenment as to what “real rough travelling” means. Let it be recorded for hi

T HE valley in which Barzan lies is a great fold in the earth’s surface, running due east and west from Jezireh on the Tigris past Amadia to the mountains on the Persian frontier; a distance of about 120 miles. It forms a sort of huge natural moat to the mountain citadel of Hakkiari; and the counterscarp is represented by the series of lower parallel ridges which rise behind Akra, Sheikh Adi and Rabban Hormizd, overlooking Mosul plain. This great trench appears continuous, but is, in fact, occup

J ILU , take it all round, is the most savage bit of primæval chaos in all the “ ashiret ” districts of Kurdistan; yet a short journey beyond it brings us to a district which is in a much more advanced stage of geological development, the strange plain of Gawar. Starting in the morning from one of the glens which lie absolutely under the peaks and crags of Galiashin, our caravan has to traverse one of the grandest, narrowest, and rockiest gorges even in this land of wild ravines—the magnificent

O N their eastern side the Hakkiari Mountains subside into the plain of Urmi, and the journey down to that town from Tergawar is quite a tame affair after such wild experiences as are furnished by Jilu and Baz. We have merely to cross the last two down-like ridges of mountain, and then the country changes, with the startling suddenness induced by irrigation, to a fertile crop-covered plain, plentifully chequered with trees. Ten years ago Urmi town was but an overgrown village, crowded with mean

T HE 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

W E enter a new world as we come up from the south to the land which is never called Armenia officially, but where the Armenians dwell. The great plain of Mesopotamia, the wild gorges of the range of Taurus, are left behind; and the traveller emerges on to a lofty plateau, averaging 6000 feet above the sea, and dotted with the cones of one of the great volcanic fields of the world. Sipan and Ararat are both magnificent peaks, though the crater of the latter has been weathered away. Nimrud Dagh o

M OST of us have some recollection of the legend of “Prester John,” particularly in the version given in “Ariosto”; the legend of a Christian king ruling his people in the midst of infidels; a king who was yet a priest and who celebrated Mass regularly; who had a kingdom in the midst of wild inaccessible mountains, girdled by cloud and storm; and who was tormented by the harpies that came daily and snatched the food from his table. We read, too, how he was visited by the wandering English knight

Q UDSHANIS is probably a spot that is unique on the world’s surface; but on leaving it for the south, the traveller soon finds himself in a land that is fascinating enough, though plenty of parallels might be found for it, even in the present orderly world, and numbers in the history of every nation in the past. This land is the country of the Nestorian “ ashirets ” of Tyari, Tkhuma, Diz, Baz, and a few other wild mountain cantons; men who live under the peculiar conditions described in an earli

T O the south of the Christian cantons of Tkhuma and Salabekan, and separated from them by a series of high rocky ridges, lies the long trough-like valley of Amadia, which is here known alternatively as the Sapna. At its eastern end, as already related, dwell the Sheikhs of Barzan and Neri; but the western portion is divided among a group of petty Kurdish Aghas, who are of course ashiret in status like their neighbours, and who occupy both the main Sapna valley itself, the Ghara ranges which for

T HE road from Amadia to Mosul is tolerably easy, by comparison, as the successive ranges sink gradually toward the Mesopotamian level. We had timed our journey craftily; it being now fairly hot in the lowlands; for we wished the moon to be full on the night that we emerged from the mountains, so that we might travel by her light across the plain to Mosul. A journey by day across the Mosul plain is not to be undertaken too lightly in summer, when the thermometer registers 120° in the shade. By n

N INE years have elapsed since the last chapter was written, and the hope with which it ends has been most tragically deferred. Nearer Asia has been swept by another of those great cataclysms with which its past history has rendered it but too familiar—in this case a back-wash only of a yet more worldwide catastrophe, but scarcely less devastating than the ravages of Genghis or Timour. Of those mentioned by name in our earlier chapters a large proportion have perished. Nay, whole communities and

T HE tale of the British administration of Mesopotamia (or Irak) is the familiar one of magnificent work done by men on the spot, which is yet hampered by the feebleness and indecision of “statesmen” at home, coupled with the activities of newspapers interested mainly in what an expert of old time, George III., called “that damnably dirty business, party politics.” The tale, however—though one that is well worth the telling—is too long a one to be put in at the end of a book dealing with only a