ON THE TIGRIS
The stream carried us under the great red bare rocks of the mountain, and from behind them sprang out a score of Arabs, who ran along the bank shouting to us to stop. One, stripping, swiftly dived and swam off to us. He was a savage-looking creature, and swimming with a strong, determined stroke, he overtook one of the rafts. Naked he sprang upon it, and—like all the robbers of the East, in a terrible hurry—he demanded tobacco and bread. These were given him and he pushed off to another raft, taking toll again, when finding it drifting afar he sprang off, and holding his spoil above his head, swam rapidly to shore. Meanwhile his mates continued to threaten, and our Arab kalak-men, intimidated, propelled their clumsy craft near the side, and to satisfy the shrieking Arabs, collected a little tobacco from each of us and swam ashore with it, considering themselves fortunate to be allowed to go on without suffering further loss. These same Arabs had and have a bad reputation, and will fire upon a kalak till the craft comes alongside, when they will strip it, carrying away even the skins and poles of which it is made.
The current took us away gradually from them, and the last we saw of them was a fight going on for shares of the tobacco.
We had taken as a passenger at the Kurdish village a queer old man, wizened and bent, clad in curious garments, flowing and old, who carried a little bag and a tin water-pot. He had appeared on the beach that evening when we had first halted, and announced himself a native of Samarqand. In truth, he had a Mongol appearance. His little eyes went up at an angle from the bridge of his flat nose, and his beard grew in that straggly, meagre way typical of the Turkoman and Mongol races. He spoke Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic, but was so old that he had forgotten which was which, and, mixing them up, was utterly unintelligible to the Arab kalak-men. All day he muttered to himself, fingering his water-pot, or mending ancient garments with a wooden needle. He had no bread, and ate sparingly of what we gave him. He made this out to be his fifteenth journey to Mecca, but had quite forgotten the pilgrim season. His talk was of many people and places, jumbled together. Relics he had of each: a penknife from Meshed, a piece of wax from Aleppo, a knob of some aromatic gum from a village in the remoter wilds of northern Kurdistan.
“That,” he would say in his mouthing way, “is what they call in my language a knife—‘buchaq,’ or Arabic ‘sikkin’—those Kurds call it ‘kiard.’ It is a good one, and I bought it for two metallik (a small Turkish coin) in Meshed bazaar, near the Imam Reza mosque, of a good Musulman that never let pass a day but he gave bread to such as myself. It was here in this Bagdad I bargained for the knife of him, a tall Kurd of Diarbekr, when—” and he would break off, and in the middle of the morning, having forgotten his ablutions, stand up—back to Mecca, instead of face to it—and say afternoon prayers.
On being addressed, he would give an answer to some thought in his reminiscent brain, as like as not in Turkish, and finished in Kurdish, which he spoke often enough—the rough Kurdish of Bayazid that we southerners hardly understood. He reckoned to get to Mecca in a year’s time, begging his way from serai to serai, or perhaps getting a passage from Busreh to Jedda by a pilgrim ship. “Oh,” he said, “I found my way from Bagdad to Palmyra and Medina twice, perchance I may do it again, who knows?”—and he would ramble off into reminiscences of thirsty days in the Arabian desert, mixed with the memory of the defiles of Kurdistan and the freezing winter plains of Turkistan, lapsing now and again into a queer dialect we could only suppose to be that of his native place.
So this strange company floated to where a cliff cropped out of the flat desert, and we came to dirty Tekrit, upon a slope under its lee, a desert town, isolated in a barren stretch of nothingness upon the loneliest river surely that ever ran. Filthy Tekrit, with its thirteen shops which it calls a bazaar, and its two coffee-houses, one full of Turkish parasites, who sit upon a little verandah high on a rock to catch the warm evening breeze.
TEKRIT
Hideous straight-sided houses, a town of ugliness, full of well-dressed Arabs sitting in the shade doing nothing—the favourite pursuit of all Arabs—their women filing down in strings to fill the narrow-necked, big-bellied water-pots the Arabs use from Mosul to the Gulf. Pretty girls some of them were, that stopped carefully to wash their feet and the water-pot before carrying it back. The young bride might be seen there, soon entered upon the life of drudgery that would age her at twenty-five, bearing gold ornaments hanging about her; and the hag, who lived upon the charity of an idle and arrogant son, and gathered her dirty rags about her shrivelled and blackened limbs. Essence of barrenness, this Tekrit, a scorpions’ nest of venomous Arabs, a city of dust built in the dust. Not a blade of grass, no sign of a green leaf. Yet from somewhere came one selling fresh dates, and we bought the sticky, half-ripe things as a luxury, while we crouched among the Arabs under a falling wall to get away from the sun’s rays.
It has a kind of history, and its antiquity is undoubtedly great, like that of most of the Mesopotamian towns. Persian and Arab historians tell that it was built by Ardashir Babakan, the Persian king who ruled in the 3rd century of the Christian era, and founded the great Sasanian dynasty that ruled till Muhammad upset the growth of Christianity and spread of civilisation, under the Persians. Others say that the founder was a niece of that Bekr that built Diarbekr, but this can be little but a fable.