However, we were trying to coax them to sit in such positions as would not endanger the raft’s equilibrium, when upon the ruined wall above two uniformed persons appeared, and a third, who came aboard with a confidential serious air, told us the police required us. Haji, the Arab merchant, the soldier, and myself, climbed the wall and were ordered in a surly manner to produce passports. The others had not theirs with them, but mine was ready, and I produced it, hoping that affairs would pass off as easily as at Diarbekr.
Not so, the policeman read the whole thing, then turned sharply upon me, and informed me that I had stolen an English tourist’s passport, that I was obviously an Oriental, or why this method of travelling, this dress, this acquaintance with Kurdish. In vain I protested, and he asked me my name. With horror I heard the voice of Haji, just arrived, answer:
“This is Musa Effendi, a Persian gentleman, for whom I vouch; my very good friend and comrade, a good companion, and a devout Muslim.”
The policeman folded up the passport with a triumphant air, and directed his two men to take me to the police office. A sudden thought helped the situation. “I am a British subject,” I exclaimed; “touch me at your peril; thank God we have a consul in Mosul who awaits me. If I do not arrive, there will be the devil to pay.”
And heartily glad I was that the passport supported the statement of British subjectivity.
“Then how comes it,” said the policeman, who never doubted that I was a Muslim, “that you do not bear a Muhammadan name? and are described as Protestant? which all know is a kind of Christian?”
MORE PASSPORT DIFFICULTIES
The feeblest bluff saved me; perhaps they distrusted the truth of the details written there.
“As to the name,” I said, “the English law recognises only surnames; if you are a native of Mosul, are you not called a Mosulli wherever you go? are you not known among strangers as ‘the Mosulli’? so I am described as of ‘Elisun,’ which is my native place. As to Haji’s assertion that I am Persian, why, that is right enough, are there not thousands of Persians born British subjects? and God knows why the Kafir, the heathen Armenian clerk of the passport department in Constantinople, called me Protestant, except that seeing I was an English subject, imagined that, as the English nation is Protestant, I must be also of that schism.”
The chief policeman thought it all strange, but I received unexpected assistance from his lieutenant, who had apparently been to Constantinople, and, to air the fact, asserted that he knew well the English habits and laws, and that what I said was quite possible. My now almost silenced assailants had yet one more kick left, and it was obviously quite his trump card.