“Whence do you come? whither going? what nationality? why travelling?” which were answered by the responses I had resolved to adhere to.
“From Aleppo to Persian Kurdistan, a Shiah Musulman travelling back to my country.”
This I said in Kurdish, for the man was ignorant of Turkish, which became less known as we went farther east.
Himself he was an Arab, a native of Mosul. In the lands of Islam, where knowledge and religion are inseparable, it is the divinity student that becomes the doctor, the lawyer, the judge. This priest was by profession a petty lawyer, and gained a kind of livelihood by settling disputes. To this he added the profession of healer of scorpion bites, which he remedied by applying to the wound the oil extracted from the black scorpion. Conversing pleasantly of this science, he produced a cigarette box and played with the lid as one who waits to finish speaking before taking a smoke. He ceased his dissertation upon scorpions, and nonchalantly opened his box, to display two large scorpions writhing within and scraping their horny legs and claws against its tin sides. He lifted one out, disregarding its furious blows upon his fingers, let the reptile crawl up his arm, picked it off, replaced it in the box, smiled at me a toothless and sinister smile, slipped off his seat and left the café.
My coachman had watched the performance. He knew the man well, he said; he had practised his trades in Diarbekr for years, always a buyer of good black scorpions at fourpence each, and a seller of the oil at a mejidie for ten drops. His remarkable performance with the live scorpions was possible owing to his practice, when catching scorpions, of nipping off the sting of the tail with a pair of scissors.
There was a fresh briskness, a hearty feeling in the air of Diarbekr, that took the fancy. The new springtime exactly achieved that mean of temperature wherein man feels at his best in the Mesopotamian plains, that scorch the life out, and make the strongest languid during the long summer.
The place was crowded and busy; the Kurds, released from their snow-bound mountains, were coming in to buy summer clothing; the Armenians, who are the craftsmen of Diarbekr, were enjoying a period of immunity from the terror in which they often exist.
The broad street of the town, that lets in the breeze and the sun, gave it a cheerfulness in that season that many another town, whose winter mud is just beginning to congeal in dark alleys, lacks.
I took the earliest opportunity to get outside the north gate, which was but a few yards from the caravanserai door, to inspect the curious stones that are embedded in the walls, stones bearing images of birds and beasts, relics of a wall that perhaps encircled the city during pre-Christian times. Yet with all the evidence of importance, with its old church towers turned to minarets, where the bells that called to the worship of the Trinity are replaced by the call of them that cry to the Indivisible Unity, where Roman ruled later than in any other city of the East, and where the Christian was predominant till Islam, borne upon the shoulders of Arabs from the south, drove him out and subdued him: with all this, Diarbekr has figured less in the ancient annals than many a village and mound that to-day passes unnoticed.
DIARBEKR