For three days we rode on the outskirts, now climbing gentle, wooded slopes, now winding round a stony valley path; every evening we found ourselves at a higher altitude. We were getting into the Kurdish country. Their handsome women sat on the wide doorstep, which often formed the roof of a house beneath, grinding corn between two flat stones, or baking flat cakes of bread. They wore huge white headdresses, spotlessly clean, covered with silver ornaments, and short crimson zouave jackets. They were disposed to be very friendly, and used to come into our tent with offerings of oranges and eggs. At one small village we came in for a Kurdish wedding. We happened to arrive just as the bride was being torn, struggling and weeping, from her father's house by the bridegroom and his friends. At first we imagined ourselves witnesses of some domestic tragedy, but we were informed that the display of grief and resistance was part of the ceremony. The bride was plastered over with ornaments and her head was bedecked with a great crown of feathers. She was put, still sobbing, on a white horse, and led away to the bridegroom's village, to the sound of bagpipes and flutes and the shouts and laughter of a hundred brightly dressed natives.
Then we had a precipitous ride up to Avjila, a wild, Kurdish village, 3,000 feet above sea-level. Hidden away amongst the rocks, a few score of shepherds tended their mountain flocks. From Avjila the road wound round grassy hills and through richly wooded slopes, where the crimson berries of the carob-tree hung over our path and the leaves of the golden plane dazzled our eyes in the sunlight. The woodman would be busy too, and we would hear the sound of his axe in the pine-trees, or brush past a mule loaded with long, scratching bundles of firewood.
The Amanus range slopes very abruptly to the plain on the opposite side. It was not till the tenth day after leaving Adana, owing to our delay at Hamidieh, that we reached the gap in the trees at the summit of the pass which gives you one short glimpse of Aintab on the plain below. The muleteers stopped here to throw stones on a cairn beside the track and greeted the town with expressions of endearment and praise.
"Give us a coin for luck, Pashas," they said, "and that no evil may befall us in the place."
We rode straight into the Mission compound at Aintab, and found ourselves at once in a very academic atmosphere. The mission has been established here over sixty years and has a brave show of buildings: a college with five professors, a hospital, an orphanage, a girls' and a boys' boarding school, and a church. The women missionaries are mostly graduates of some American University, and one feels rather behind the times in conversation. Their work fills one with respect: there is no proselytising about it; their idea is to civilise by education.
From Aintab it is two short days' journey to the Euphrates. We were now in a country of rich red soils covered with olive groves and vineyards. Near the villages small sized black and yellow cattle, brought in from the pastures, munched maize straw in the rough enclosures of reed or straw round the houses. The road was lined with signs of primitive cultivation and luxurious crops, evident even in these winter months. But the peasants seemed miserably poor. They were partners mostly of city men, who provided the seed and the stock and took two-thirds of the produce in payment.
The Euphrates is visible a long way ahead as it winds southwards. At first you see it as a streak of light across the plain; then slowly you differentiate the banks, the alluvial shores, the flow of the waters. Then Birejik appears on the opposite side. Its houses, built on a limestone cliff four hundred feet high, rise up above the river tier upon tier; then the black marks on the face of the rock below the houses take on the shape of rock tombs. We descend a long, gentle slope towards the ferry, and find a few buildings on this side also. We wait while great herds of oxen and sheep going to the market at Killis are ferried across in the great, clumsy, flat-bottomed, flat-sided boat, whose one end rises up in a high, curved keel. Then our turn comes, and one by one our horses plunge into thick mud and up the slippery end of the boat, which lets down to form a gangway. Surely they are not going to take us all at once? Our horses get jammed up tighter and tighter at the far end as each animal enters the boat; they begin kicking and biting at one another. We draw our feet out of the stirrups and hunch them up on our horses' necks to be out of harm's way. There is no room now for the horses to kick—they are wedged too tight—but they struggle hard. We are shoved off the mud with long paddles, the cranky old boat lurches and wobbles, and we seem horribly near the water. The stream catches us and we are wafted down to a lower point on the opposite shore. Hassan, his great legs stretched up high and dry on his mule's neck, fumbles in his pouch and brings out the little bit of paper on which he writes down our expenses. He slowly puts on his spectacles and proceeds to write, holding the paper on the top of his thumb, and apparently oblivious of the struggles of his steed to kick the horse who is biting his flank behind. Then the gangway is let down and a terrific pandemonium ensues as each animal strives to get its saddle disentangled from the pack saddle of its neighbour and jump ashore. The hindmost land on the first, who have stuck hopelessly in the mud, the muleteers hit and shout, and we climb slowly on to firmer ground and wind up the steep path to the street at the top.
The next day we ride slowly out of red soils and cultivation. The road is dangerous here, we are told; two extra Zaptiehs and a Yuzbashi are sent with us. We are in a desert plain again. A fearful storm of wind gets up and howls weirdly round us; the sun is getting low, and we have somehow missed the village where we should camp. The small cluster of huts that we pass or see in the distance have no accommodation for the horses, and the muleteers will not let them stand out on such a wild night. The Yuzbashi, who is a mysterious Kizilbash with a long black beard, gets anxious and makes us push on hard. At last we reach another cluster of huts, where the shepherds are calling in the flocks. It is nearly dark and we can go no further that night. The muleteers are sulky about the shelter for their horses, so we take a house for the purpose and the family cram in somewhere else. The tents are pitched with difficulty in the teeth of the wind. All night long the Yuzbashi, apart from the other men, walks up and down and round and round our tent, muttering in his black beard.