“God is great,” he assented. “The world changes.” And he rolled another cigarette.[159]
We ran down the path in the dusk and found my dinner-table spread under the moon. Round the camp-fire sat ’al ins w’al jins w’al jami’ and watched the boiling of Ḥâjj ’Amr’s rice-pot.
However many countries there may be in the world there are none so rich in faiths as the mountain frontiers of eastern Turkey. Beliefs which have been driven out with obloquy by a new-found truth, the half-apprehended mysticism of the East, echoes of Western metaphysics and philosophy, illusive memories of paganism—all have been swept together into these hills, where creeds that were outlined in the childhood of the world are formulated still in terms as old as themselves. Islâm, with the lash of its simple, clear-cut doctrine, has herded them into remote places. Cowering there under centuries of persecution they have hidden their sacred things from the eyes of the spoiler, in silence they endure the reproach which dogs the most innocent practices of a secret cult, and each sect awaits, through ages of misery, the reward and the redeemer which its peculiar revelation has promised. These outcast communities make a potent appeal to the imagination and to the sympathy. I have no desire to pry into that which they choose to conceal, neither have they any wish to take me into their special confidence; but their hospitality is unfailing, and whenever I find myself among them I find myself among friends.
We were now entering the country which is the head-quarters of the Yezîdîs, who, from their desire to conciliate or to propitiate the Spirit of Evil, are known to Moslem and Christian as Devil Worshippers. By Moslem and by Christian they have been placed beyond the bounds of human kindness, and while the Mohammadan has been unremitting in his efforts to bring them, by methods familiar to dominant creeds, to a sense of their short-comings, the Christian has regarded the wholesale butchery which has overtaken them from time to time as a punishment justified by their tenets. I had journeyed before among Yezîdî villages, in the mountains of north Syria, and had been struck by the clean and well-ordered look of the houses, and by the open-handed friendliness of the people, as well as by their courage and industry. The Mesopotamian Yezîdîs I knew only through the descriptions contained in Layard’s enchanting books, but I carried a letter to ’Alî Beg, the head of the sect, and proposed to visit him in his village of Bâ’adrî and to see, if he would permit, the most sacred of all Yezîdî shrines, Sheikh ’Adi. ’Abdullah, when he learnt my intention, expressed his entire approval of ’Alî Beg as a man, but he would hear nothing of his religious convictions because they were not founded upon a book.
“Effendim,” he said, “Moslems and Jews and Christians have a book; it is only the infidels which have none, and the Yezîdîs are infidels. They worship the Sheitân.”
“You must not speak of him while we are at Bâ’adrî,” said I, for the Yezîdîs never take the name of the Devil upon their lips and to mention him in their presence is a shameful insult.
“God forbid!” replied ’Abdullah.
We rode over flowery foot-hills that were bright with hollyhock and gladiolus, borage and mullein, and in an hour and a half from our camping-ground we reached the village of Jezarân.
“These are Shabbak,” observed ’Abdullah.
“What are Shabbak?” I asked.