To-day its most uncharitable detractor cannot say that. Despite its filth, the meanness of its bazaars, its unpleasant climate, and the Turks, it is a very important place, and a populous one, counting 90,000 souls, by a late and reliable computation. If the purpose of this book were to talk trade, it were possible to descant upon its leather craft, its cigarette-paper manufacture, its carpenters and masons; and it is but due to the Christians to say, that whatever commercial importance it possesses is due to their efforts, and to their efforts alone.
MOSUL
Here, of all the cities of Syria and Mesopotamia, the Christians enjoy more freedom from persecution than any other population of the same persuasion forced to live side by side with Musulmans. They themselves attribute this desirable state of affairs to the fact that both Muslim and Christian are Arab in language and sympathy, and above all are bound together by the bond of fellow-townsmanship that is often so strong a consolidating feature of isolated towns in the East. At all events the statement is supported by the immunity they have enjoyed from molestation during all the massacres of Christians that have occurred within the last two centuries.
They affirm that on one such occasion the Turks endeavoured to rouse the Musulmans of the surrounding districts to enter the town and slay the Christians, and did their utmost to incite the Muslim townspeople to assist in the massacre, but so far from their proposals being met with consent, they were warned that any attempts of the kind would see Christian and Musulman combined.
Nowadays, when Mosul is a city fairly well kept in order, when street murders are of not more than weekly occurrence, the place is full of the Turk, who seeks a post in a city where the hostile Kurd and nomad Arab cannot offend his dignity by their disrespect, nor menace his person with their ever-ready rifles. The language of the place is Arabic, but Turkish is understood, as is also Kurdish, for Kurdistan is not far away, and the wild characters one meets sometimes in the bazaars tell of the proximity of the tribes.
Bad government and continual insecurity of the country have done their best to restrain the people from any attempt at permanent buildings, the result being that every bazaar, mosque, and caravanserai is broken down and ruinous; in fact, Mosul strikes the stranger as a squalid city on the verge of disintegration. A few moments outside the city one steps into the Mesopotamian desert, and Mosul, standing there, a mound in a desert, looks every bit what it is reputed among the Western peoples, a city buried in a remote and unmerciful wilderness. To approach it from any side except Diarbekr, by river, one must pass several days of the almost waterless desert road. Only to the south-east is the land fertile, and one understands why it is in that direction that Assyria proper lay. To-day the distant Zagros Mountains and their unknown and feared Kurds form a barrier as unconquerable as ever the ancients found them; and to them it was my purpose to go.
We put up in an upper room of a khan or caravanserai called Hamad Qadu, and as our ways lay together, at least as far as Erbil, we thought to continue in companionship. But Haji found a cousin, who dragged him off to his house, and so we settled up our accounts and parted. The old man seemed to have conceived a great affection for me during his journey. “I never had a son,” he said, “for never did I take to myself a wife, for women are affliction and tribulation; but now I am old, I realise what it might have been to have had a son, and I curse the stiff-neckedness that ran me counter to the infallible laws of the Omniscient,” and he wept awhile, embraced me, and departed.
Left alone in my stone cell, I bethought me of finding a muleteer to take me to Sulaimania, and as the café is the advertisement medium of the East, I betook myself there, inquired for a “qatirchi,” as the Turks call a muleteer, and found myself immersed in local politics. The bearing of them upon my need of a mule appeared at the end of the story, and may as well do so here.
There are in Mosul a number of Sulaimanians engaged in trade, besides the inconsequent people who in the East travel from place to place apparently for the love of it. There are also soldiers galore—creatures dead to any feeling of self-restraint, decency of behaviour and manners, who are a curse to the place they pollute. A brawl occurred, owing to an assault by a drunken soldier upon a Kurdish woman of Sulaimania, and as Kurdish blood, even the vitiated blood of Sulaimania, is hot, it boiled, and many Mosul people were killed.
A FEUD