From all sides flocks of goats and sheep were coming in and filled the narrow streets, sharing the homes of their masters as a protection against the raids of Hamidieh chiefs. It was a partly Kurdish, partly Arab village, and the inhabitants mingled their curiosity at my appearance with fright at that of Ali's. Long experience had taught them that a visit from a Turkish Zaptieh meant extortion of some sort. A child in our path screamed aloud, rooted to the spot with terror. Ali's bright, laughing face clouded over.
"That is what the children are taught to think of us," he said, "and I have my own little ones at home."
Our demands for milk were received with sullen grimness, until the sight of the unwonted coin caused the faces to clear, and a further present of tobacco established quite a friendly footing. I sat down inside an enclosure of maize stalks at the door of a larger hut, where the cows were being milked, and the natives, clustering round, plied Ali with questions. One of the villagers offered to walk back with us and carry the milk. It was dark before we reached the edge of the tableland again, and I shouted down in the hopes of getting an answer which would guide us to the encampment below. The village boy held up his hand with a scared look: the call was only answered by its own echo, and the stones, slipping under our feet, rattled noisily down the steep slope.
"Hush!" said Ali, "who knows but what Ibrahim Pasha may hear you," and we slid silently down the slippery banks in the darkness, until the light of a camp-fire gleamed out a welcome signal.
CHAPTER XIV
THE EVIL ONE
At noon on the tenth day after leaving Diarbekr and the fourth from Jezireh we caught sight of the minarets and cupolas of Mosul, and floated for a couple of miles under the chain of limestone cliffs on the end of which the town is built. We had hardly got within sight of the town itself when a fearful cannonading met our ears, accompanied by piercing screams and savage yells. It sounded as if the walls were being attacked by battering-rams, and all along the shore line at their base we could faintly distinguish a seething line of human beings brandishing some form of weapon. We were evidently going to be eye-witnesses of a tribal disturbance which would cause diplomatic unrest in Europe, and who knows but what our participation in it would not brand us with fame for the rest of time. I determined to make full use of the opportunity and prepared my camera and notebook.
The Zaptiehs, however, seemed quite unconcerned, and we understood from them that there was no cause for alarm, and that this sort of thing was of weekly occurrence in Mosul. On floating up to the scene of action we realised that it was indeed only Mosul's washing-day. All along the shore, as far as we could see, under the walls of the town stretched a continuous line of women beating clothes with flat sticks on the stones at the water's edge; and the screams resolved themselves into the ordinary sounds usually emitted where women congregate in large numbers. Truly, the men of the East are wise in their generation. They had thus solved the problem of washing-day and all its horrors, and were left in peaceful and undisputed possession of their hearths and tempers. The women were there in their hundreds, and, as we approached the bridge of boats which crossed the river lower down, we floated past a small army of them on the opposite shore, where a flat stretch of mud was covered with gaudy rags laid out to dry. Mosul, I believe, derives its name from the manufacture of muslin carried on there, and the guide-book informs us that it is chiefly remarkable for the Assyrian mounds found near it. I am bound to confess, however, that it is indelibly impressed on my mind solely in its connection with the vulgar art of washing.
We had to wait several days at Mosul while a new raft was being constructed, on to which our huts were bodily transferred. The skins on which we had floated so far were deflated and the kalekjis would return with them to Diarbekr by land on donkey back.