To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

A turn behind a rock, and we left it all out of sight, and below our feet lay the narrow valley of Bazian, stretching right and left. Opposite it was bounded by the Bazian range, not high, but rising in a sheer cliff of several hundred feet, shutting in the land and giving the place an air of peaceful seclusion in the bright morning light, which changed to a gloomy prospect when the sun, going west, threw the cliff’s shadow across the plain, and its face appeared a frowning wall, under whose lee the Hamavands had encamped, and from their camps watched the passage of caravans—and victims.

Now it was deserted, no smoke curled up quietly in the morning air, no horse neighed, and we had not heard the report of a single rifle since daylight. So, having nothing to apprehend, we picked our way leisurely down the slope, and at the bottom turned to the right along the valley, gradually making our way to the other side towards the pass of Darband-i-Bazian. We passed, as we went along, many a little garden that the Hamavands had left, little neat patches of cultivation on the hill-sides and in the bottom of the valley, which were now bearing fruit, and of which the travellers of another small caravan we had overtaken were busy cutting and carrying away the deserted produce.

BAZIAN

About eleven o’clock, when we were well on the way towards Darband-i-Bazian, some alarm was caused by the sight of a small band of horsemen coming from behind us, along our road, and some were for getting their arms ready. But the general run of the passengers shared the opinion that if the approaching riders were Turkish irregular soldiery, there would be nothing to fear, and if they were Hamavands it would be useless to resist, so that our pace did not alter and we proceeded in the jogging way of caravans, apparently unconcerned. Nevertheless the relief was general when the riders were seen to be two irregular Turkish “mule-cavalry” and a handful of shaikhs’ men. These, on coming up with the caravan, proceeded to scrutinise all very carefully, as if in search of someone, and one more officious than the others gave me a fright by holding the bridle of my steed the while he called his comrades, shouting:

“Amma niyya? piaeki bash nabi am kabra.” (“Is this not he? this fellow appears not to be a good man.”)

But my muleteer affirmed so loudly and strenuously that I was a trader, a friend of the Mosul traders, that they raised a laugh at the horseman’s expense; so, changing his tone, he asked for a cigarette, and having obtained it, rode on with the others, and they passed ahead bound for Chemchemal. It is a long stretch from Baba Murda to Darband-i-Bazian, or it seemed so, for it was already noon—we had started at four in the morning—when we veered to the left, where the hills receded in a kind of bay, and crossed a large patch of cultivated land, where we threw the loads to give the beasts a rest.

This was where Rich, the East India Company’s gifted resident at Bagdad in the early part of the 19th century, passed, and noticed in passing, that in 1808 there had been a Turkoman village named Derghezeen. There is nothing now but a little cultivation belonging to Bazian village; nor is there any sign of the ruins Rich mentions, and which he opined to be of Sasanian times; though, in view of the fact that this district was upon the borders of a province which in Sasanian times enjoyed great importance (Holwan), and in which there are still many relics of the Persian occupation of that period, there is every probability that Rich was perfectly right in his surmise.

The flanking wall of the valley here broadened greatly in depth from east to west, and became broken into spurs. This affords a passage westwards to get out of Bazian valley, and a long rising approach ends by passing through a neck, not twenty yards wide, whence one emerges as from a door, the hills finishing abruptly at the ridge in which the neck occurs, and which is left, as a wall, by the westwards bound passenger.

From the spot where we now rested to the neck was the danger place in times of peril, for the Hamavands had made this at once the impregnable gate of their secluded country, and the trap for those who would enter it. Upon these hill-sides and behind the rocks and boulders they had waited for their prey, and darted down and out upon the unfortunates; those who had entered the neck from outside and found themselves cut off from retreat, and those who would pass out and found themselves driven into the narrow funnel of the pass and assailed from all sides. Even now, when we could see in the distance the tent of the “bimbashi,” who had pitched it by one of the streams that watered the Hamavand cultivations, we could not stray from the vicinity of our loads, for behind lay the folds of the hills where the Turks had not dared penetrate, and they might yet contain Hamavands.

At this neck of Darband-i-Bazian, Abdurrahman Pasha, one of the old Baba pashas of Sulaimania, made a brave stand in 1805, during the war by which he hoped to make this part of Kurdistan independent. He built a wall across the neck—the ruins of which are visible to-day—and fought there against Kuchuk Sulaiman Pasha of Bagdad, being defeated in the manner related by Rich.