“Che voulez,” he commenced, “un ... un ... wurd, petit, peu de nitrate d’argent pour des darman ... medecang, c’est très nécessaire.”
This I understood to be a request for nitrate of silver for medical purposes, but I speedily assured him that I had none, and he as quickly passed over what had evidently been an excuse for coming. Drawing his cloak close about him, he leant forward to where I sat upon my carpet, and lowering his voice, in halting phrases told me the subject of what I put down here.
“You are, sir, a civilised man; I too am a civilised man, for I was not always thus;—my father was a distinguished doctor in Constantinople, and I was his eldest son, educated in the best schools and colleges. It was ill-fortune that sent me to the East, and an execrable stroke of bad luck that landed me here among the savages of Kurdistan. It is now thirteen years that I languish here, and I have lost the power, did I possess the means, to go back to Europe, which I have forgotten, and whose customs and language I only remember as one remembers a beautiful dream. Ah, sir, what folly induced you to leave civilisation and comfort and trust yourself among these cut-throats, these brigands?”
“Why,” I said, “my country lies much farther yet, this is but a stage upon the way, and I am well content to stay awhile where I find kindness, as I do from those whom you call barbarians.”
“Have a care,” he whispered, “you know not the depths of duplicity and insincerity in which the life of this place is sunk. Even now those who smile upon your face, frown at your back and seek to destroy you, and it is for that that I am come to warn you. There is a rumour, spread by I know not whom, that you are a Persian of the revolutionary party, seeking to spy out the land here, and disaffect the chiefs against the Turks. And with such they have a short way here. There was last year a foreigner who came from Sina, and he told us all he came to collect the ancient dialect of Aoraman. He was, he said, a Dane, but I tried him, and he could not speak German. But not desiring to be a party to his discomfiture, I warned him that he was upon dangerous ground, and that I knew him for a Russian, for he had books in that language in his possession, and I saw maps in his tent; for he was very friendly, and invited me to sit with him. So I warned him, but he persisted in his assertion of innocence. Well, one morning he was looking at a distant hill through a pair of field-glasses, and I was struck by their strange appearance, and taking an opportunity to examine them found a small camera concealed within. At this time Tahir Beg began to be suspicious, for he more than any of the chiefs resents the appearance, nay the very name, of a Ferangi, and he communicated with Uthman and Mahmud pashas. These each gave the traveller a note which he might show to the head-men as he passed their villages. It permitted him to stay half an hour in any spot, but upon the thirty-first minute he was to be shot. In one day he was out of our lands and far away. Now, I would not draw any comparison between yourself and that spy, for I am convinced of your bona fides; but Tahir Beg has suspected you, and has advised Lady Adela to keep a watch upon you. There is a feeling against you, and I warn you that the consideration would not be granted you that was accorded to the Russian, for you are but a Persian, and a bullet would settle all affairs simply and quickly. This morning Tahir Beg was for having you examined and shot; but I, knowing your excellence, and weeping inwardly for you, pleaded and gave my own guarantee that you were but what you professed to be, a perfectly innocuous person. Till at last I so prevailed that he relinquished the subject; but if you will take my advice you will not extend your stay.
THE RENEGADE’S TALE
“Ah, sir, you know the old German proverb, ‘The mountain looks fine from afar, but how disappointing when under it.’ Such is but too true of this place. From afar, where the traveller talks of the hospitality of Lady Adela, the great houses, the gardens, the bazaar of Halabja, he forgets the savageness, the incredible treachery and insecurity which makes life here a tremulous fear. Ah, these people, they but seek to squeeze out of a man what he has, and then kill him. Think not that they will give you anything here, nor treat you kindly except you pay for it tenfold. Take my advice, my friend, flee from this nest of scorpions before yet they sting you to death, quit this town of hungry vultures while the flesh remains upon your bones and before it grows on theirs. Look at me, what do I possess? I walk about in these wretched clothes seeking only to protect even them from the rapacious appetite of some predatory Kurd.”
“Yet,” I said, “it seems to me that since the day you arrived from Bagdad, a fugitive, possessing less even than this, you were worse off then than now, when by the Pasha’s beneficence you possess house, clothes, wife, children, and the wherewithal to keep them all.”
“Ah, you do not understand,” he protested feebly, and was silent for a while. Then once again he took up his tale of alarm and warning, but I had had enough, and to get rid of him began to ridicule him for a European turned Musulman, and to ask him where the sect of the Sunnis was a whit better than us of the Shi’a—questions he funked—and departed.
It had not sufficed to alarm me, all this rigmarole, but I was made aware of the existence of a mean and cowardly enemy at Halabja, whose favourite weapon was obviously slander. Fortunately this was that Kurdistan where it is the habit to shout one’s affairs upon the house-tops and bill-sides, and slander has a short life, usually terminated by an unexpected bullet.