Having locked up our purchases and tied up our goods, ready to be taken away next morning, we went out for a last look at Diarbekr; but the old man, sick of bazaars, surprised me by a request, unlike what one would expect from one of a people that usually expresses so little regard for the aspect of things natural, and the beauties of the world we live in.
Taking my arm, he said:
“Musa, my son, after the day’s toil, let us go outside the gate to a quiet spot among the trees upon the cliff, where we can sit and look upon the view.”
So, very gratefully, I consented, and we took our way by the gate, turned to the right, and passing the hideous military school, came to the cliff that overhangs the Tigris. We descended a little by a footpath, and found a clump of trees on a narrow ledge, whence, sheltered from the view of passers above, we could look out northwards, across the plain, and to the ever dark hills of Kurdistan. The old man sat silent for a long time, but at last expressed his sentiments in one long “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great”).
And then he pointed out to me the beauties of the great rushing stream, the vivid colouring of its yellow banks, and the light green of the groves of trees that sprang with a new year’s life far below us.
Again he sat silent, and gazed with narrowed eyes at the far mountains, and when he spoke again, it was the soul of the Kurd and of the mountaineer that threw the harsh words of his dialect from his tongue:
“God! and God! and God! He, the Indivisible, His glories are manifest to our eyes, and His mercies to our hearts and minds. Yet my son, think not that these mountains—upon which the body roams, while the soul, soaring above, meets the Unknown in a medium pure[7] as the snow-field that stretches above—are His masterpiece. For verily, as these mighty hills are the greatest of His works here, yet they are but as the pebble upon their flanks compared to His works in Heaven.
“See this work, how it exists. Who are we to boast of the power He gave us, Who takes it away after our four days of transition? See these city walls, the great among us made them, and they shall fall in a space of time incalculably small in His sight, yet the stones of them are His handiwork, and long enduring, have endured, even as those hills. And when the walls shall sink, one, building the sign of his ambition with the ruin of another’s, shall use these same stones, remembering the former builder of walls.
“Ah! that he forget not the Maker of the stones that last, and the hills that endure.”
The old man spoke quietly, yet as he spoke, the blue eyes dimmed and the voice shook—indeed there are anomalies in this world, dual personalities, among the sons of the East that one never suspects.