In all his dealings he was just, nor would he favour the Musulman more than the Christian in a matter of business.
He had a habit of dropping into deep meditation. One night he asked me my name; hearing Ghulam Husain, he repeated several times:
“Ghulam Husain, Ghulam Husain,” he murmured, “The Slave of Husain, may I be his sacrifice! Ah! Husain, Husain, shall we not rise up and smite the Sunnis, for that they slew him, him the pure, the sinless, betrayed, and murdered by the evildoer—ah, what a name, The Slave of Husain, and what a life to live up to, Husain! Husain!...” and he would drop into a reverie murmuring now and then “Husain”—reviewing doubtless the details of the tragedy of that holy man, whose character bears comparison with that of any Christian saint, and whose self-sacrifice and resignation was no less heroic.
A Kurd himself, he deplored the levity of the Kurds, who are much given to dancing and singing. Each night the Kurdish muleteers would collect on the roof of some rooms in the courtyard, and chant their interminable “Guranis” or folk songs, dancing hornpipes of ever-increasing fury and joining in roaring choruses. Sometimes they would engage in wrestling matches, and cast one another about the yard, the exercise often terminating in a display of hot temper, when knives would be drawn, to be sheathed as an onlooker made a jest that called forth laughter from all.
We were hopelessly detained in Kirkuk. Behind, on the road we had come, the Hamavands had closed in; towards Bagdad it was the same, and to the east where our course lay was their own particular country, across which not even companies of soldiers would dare to go.
Every day it was announced that a certain army accountant, whose presence was needed in Sulaimania, would attempt the passage with a hundred soldiers, armed with Mauser rifles, and a number of mules were engaged; but the good man never seemed to make up his mind to go. Rashid, my muleteer, had engaged all his spare mules to the Government for this purpose, and a daring Chaldean merchant prepared fifty loads of sugar for isolated Sulaimania. Sixteen days we waited, and at last the order came to load at midnight, and collect just outside Kirkuk—that is, to join the main caravan and the guard. The leader was one Shefiq Effendi, a Kurd of the Shuan or “Shepherds,” a large tribe inhabiting the hill country south of the Lower Zab River. By his influence and that of the hundred soldiers, we hoped to pass safely these terrible Hamavands.
By law they were outlawed, and orders existed that any entering the town were to be shot on sight; but such was their reputation for daring, that I often saw them strolling in the bazaar of Kirkuk, caring nothing for a knot of Turkish soldiers, who followed them round, afraid to molest them, for the people of Kirkuk, armed though they were, and protected by a regiment of soldiers, feared a sudden raid of revenge from this intrepid handful of Kurds.
Hearing that I was resolved to go, Haji Rasul did his utmost to persuade me to stay. For they were Kurds, he said—Kurds, more savage than the Jaf, or the Guran, more daring even than the Mukri themselves. He took me by the hands, beseeching me to stay, nor risk the life God had given me for a mere mundane consideration of time.
“Time,” said he, “is long, and your life is young; what matter if you stay another month, two months, nay a year, if you are enabled to preserve the body God has entrusted to your care. Have I not been twenty years wandering, and do I complain that I have not yet got back to my native place?”
We were seated round a mess of a kind of porridge at the time, in which we dipped our bread, eating it with our fingers.