To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

Kurdi guzi kara;”

a doggerel signifying,

“Arabic is sonorous, Turkish an achievement, Persian is sugar—and Kurdish an unpleasantness.”[30]

The darvish and myself became so engrossed in the reminiscences of Persia in which we indulged, that we quite forgot the presence of the two Kurds. Our conversation outlasted the candle, which guttered out on its end in the mud wall, and by the light of a burning stick the darvish spread our bedding, and we retired, to the sound of a chant which he murmured under his cloak, till he fell asleep, mainly consisting of “Bismillah ar Rahman ar Rahim, al Hamdu’l illah Rebbu’l ’alemin ar Rahman ar Rahim.”

He woke me next morning by murmuring gently, “Agha! Agha!” in my ear. To rouse a sleeper noisily is a breach of etiquette among Persians.

It was just dawn as we crept along the stony road leading out of Altun Keupri to Kirkuk. There are three roads between the two places, and the condition of the country determines which one the caravan takes. This time we were to take the longest; for to our left, the east, lay the Hamavand country, distant certainly, but whence roving bands of Kurds emerged, raiding. By turning to the right, about ten miles outside Altun Keupri, we should pass through a long range of low hills which runs between the two places, and have their protection on our left as we went south to Kirkuk. These are almost the last of the ranges, which, rising higher and higher as the Kurdistan highlands are approached, are the sentinels of the Zagros range, which itself is the rampart of the Persian plateau. All along this road, till we put the hills between ourselves and the east, we could see far-away snowpeaks beyond Rawanduz, that were on Persian soil. We found a way through the range, which is not more that 500 feet high, and came out into a broken place of foothills, where were a few Kurds grazing sheep, and lower down some Arabs cutting green barley that would have yellowed and scorched if left longer. For here is the hot region; Kirkuk is on the same plain as Bagdad, and suffers from an even worse climate, the hot winds scorching it during several months of the year. Clear of these hills, we came out to the flat desert that stretches away west to the Tigris, and beyond to the Euphrates, and beyond again to Syria, a dead level over which the hot wind of summer blows, or where in later spring the air, getting stagnant, grows hot, and one bakes in the shadowless waste. Four hours from Kirkuk, whose gardens were visible as a dark line on the horizon, we passed a ruined caravanserai, which a native of Kirkuk, jogging along on an ass, assured me was the remains of a caravanserai built by Shah Abbas of Persia, some 300 years ago.

Wheat was growing in some places along the roadside, but a swarm of small black locusts covered the road with their hopping millions, which were making havoc among the young stalks. Farther on, we were alarmed by the sight of some black tents, the abodes of nomads, and we were not reassured when two horsemen cantered up from behind a fold in the plain. They were Kurds in dress and appearance, but persisted in talking Arabic as they rode along, probably to conceal their dialect. Our suspicions of course at once made them Hamavands, and the one or two of us who possessed rifles slipped a cartridge in. But they either heard or saw a signal in the hills we had crossed, for leaving us suddenly they put their horses to a gallop, and soon disappeared among the hillocks. We were quite close to Kirkuk, where the roads, short and long, converged, and as we came to the junction, an Arab, who had come from Altun Keupri by the short route, told us that our horsemen were two of a gang which had looted a caravan that morning in the hills. It appeared that this band, an outlying one of the Hamavands, patrolled the long road one day, and the short one the next. Our luck had sent us along while they were engaged elsewhere.

ARRIVAL AT KIRKUK

Kirkuk, which lies at the end of this range, is invisible till nearly approached, for, forced by the necessity of getting near the water-supply, it has taken a position by the river-bed (which is dry half the year), and is quite hidden by the hillocks around, except from the east side, where the ground slopes gradually down to it. It possesses a mound, upon which part of the town is built, the remainder being round the south of its base.

We entered an outlying village, passed between gardens to a huge barrack where the garrison is quartered, then by a line of coffee-houses full of idle, uniformed creatures, over a long stone bridge, and turning to the right, plunged into the gloom of a short arched bazaar of extraordinary height and width, and out again along a busy street to a clean, new caravanserai.