In this gloomy vault-like building prayers are said, as in all Nestorian churches, at sunrise and sunset by the priest in his ordinary clothing, the villagers being summoned by the beating of a mallet on a board.[41]
The church is a place of refuge when a Kurdish attack is expected. Nine years ago the people carried into it all their movables that they valued most, believing it to be secure, but the Kurds broke in in force and took all they wanted. The few sacred treasures of the village and the Eucharistic leaven are hidden in an elevated recess in the wall. The graveyard, which contains only a few flat slabs imbedded in the soil, is the only possible camping-ground; but though it is clean and neat, it looked so damp and felt so cold that I preferred to accept a big room with walls six feet thick in the priest's house, even though it overhangs the torrent with its thunder and clash.
Many a strange house I have seen, but never anything so striking as the dwelling of Qasha Ishai. Passing through the rude verandah, and through a lofty room nearly dark, with a rough stone dais, on which were some mattresses, and berths one above another, I stumbled in total darkness into a room seventy feet by forty, and twenty feet or more high in its highest part. It has no particular shape, and wanders away from this lofty centre into low irregular caverns and recesses excavated in the mountain side. Parts of the floor are of naked rock, parts of damp earth. In one rocky recess is a powerful spring of pure water. The roofs are supported on barked stems of trees, black, like the walls, wherever it was possible to see them, with the smoke of two centuries. Ancient oil lamps on posts or in recesses rendered darkness visible. Goat-skins, with the legs sticking out, containing butter, hanging from the blackened cross-beams, and wheat, apples, potatoes, and onions in heaps and sacks, piles of wool, spinning-wheels, great wooden cradles here and there, huge oil and water jars, wooden stools, piles of bedding, ploughs, threshing instruments, long guns, swords, spears, and gear encumbered the floor, while much more was stowed away in the dim caverns of the rock.
I asked the number of families under the roof. "Seven ovens," was the reply. This meant seven families, and it is true that three generations, seventy-two persons, live, cook, sleep, and pursue their avocations under that patriarchal roof.
The road is a bad one for laden beasts, and very dangerous besides, and the few travellers who visit Kochanes usually take the caravan route from Urmi viâ Diza, and the fact of an English person passing through Marbishu with a letter to the Turkish authorities was soon "noised abroad," and I was invited to spend the evening in this most picturesque house. All the inmates were there, and over a hundred of the villagers besides; and cooking, baking, spinning, carding wool, knitting, and cleaning swords and guns went on all the time. There were women and girls in bright red dresses; men reclining on bedding already unrolled on the uneven floor, or standing in knots in their picturesque dresses leaning on their long guns, with daggers gleaming in their belts; groups seated round the great fire, in the uncertain light of which faces gleamed here and there in the dim recesses, while the towering form of Qasha Ishai loomed grandly through the smoke, as the culmination of the artistic effect.
The subject discussed was equally interesting to the Syrians and to me,—the dangers of the pass and the number of guards necessary. We talked late into the night, and long before I left the female and juvenile part of the family had retired to their beds. Again I heard of Hesso's misdeeds, of the robbery of 1400 sheep; of the driving off on the previous morning of thirty sheep which they were about to barter for their winter supply of wheat; of the oppressive taxation, 100 liras (nearly £100) on 100 houses; of the unchecked depredations of the Kurds, which had increased this summer and autumn, leaving them too poor to pay their taxes; of a life of peril and fear and apprehension for their women, which is scarcely bearable; of the oppression of man and the silence of God. Underlying all is a feeling of bitter disappointment that England, which "has helped the oppressed elsewhere, does nothing for us." They thought, they said, "that when the English priests came it was the beginning of succour, and that the Lord was no longer deaf, and our faces were lightened, but now it is all dark, and there is no help in God or man."
I now find myself in the midst of a state of things of which I was completely ignorant, and for which I was utterly unprepared, and in a region full of fear and danger, in which our co-religionists are the nearly helpless prey of fanatical mountaineers, whose profession is robbery.
