Next day we set out for Kirind, about fifteen miles from Surkhidizeh, where a platoon of the Hants held an advanced post. After passing Sar Mil and its ruined fort, we dipped down into a valley bordered by high hills, where grew dwarf oaks, with a background of mountains whose snow-topped peaks glistened in the warm spring sunshine.
Our way lay over a black cotton-soil plain, and the road looked as if it had recently been furrowed by a giant plough. It was hard going for the Ford cars, and our difficulties were increased when rain presently overtook us. Half an hour's downpour will convert any Persian road into a morass, and that between Surkhidizeh and Kirind is no exception to the rule. The Fords for once were baffled. The leading car could get no grip on the slippery soil; its front wheels revolved aimlessly, then by a mighty exertion moved forward a few yards, only to come to an abrupt stop, up to its front axle in a slimy mud-hole. We temporarily jettisoned everything, and pulled it out with a tow rope and the united efforts of a dozen friendly natives who were not averse from a little physical labour for a pecuniary reward. There was no getting rid of the glutinous mud. It adhered to one's boots and clung to one's garments with a persistency that was irritating and ruinous to the temper. The fifteen miles' journey occupied four hours, and we were "bogged" seven times before the cars finally got clear and gained the roughly paved causeway which, skirting Kirind village, led to the British military post.
TYPICAL PERSIAN VILLAGE.
Kirind itself is a straggling and typical group of Persian mud-houses. It clings haphazardly to both sides of a steep, narrow gorge, closed at one end by a perpendicular wall of jagged limestone rock, which rises sheer for a thousand feet. Beneath this frowning rock-barrier nestles a village abominably and indescribably filthy, inhabitated by an elf-like people in whom months of semi-starvation had bred something of the sullen ferocity of a pack of famishing wolves. There was in their eyes the glint of the hunted wild animal. They fled at our approach—men, women, and children—diving into dark, noisome, underground dens which exhaled a horrible effluvium, or else bolting like so many scared wild-cats for some lair high up amongst the limestone ridges. Some of the fugitives whom we rounded up and spoke to compassionately answered with a terrified snarl, as if dreading we should do them injury. Yet it was chiefly the Turk, that zealous propagandist of the tenets of Islam, whose rapacity and cruelty had driven this fellow Moslem race to the borderland of primitive savagery.
Amid all the horror and misery of this desert of human despair we found a Christian angel of pity, isolated, working single-handed, striving to alleviate the terrible lot of the starving people. The angel was an American woman, Miss Cowden, of the Presbyterian Mission. Years before she had given up home, country, and friends in obedience to a higher call, and was devoting her life and her energies to the betterment of the temporal lot of the unhappy, underfed, Persian children. She had learned their language, and moved from village to village alone and unattended, carrying out her great work of charity, and content to live in some dirty hovel. A vocation surely demanding sublime self-abnegation, and calling, I should think, for the highest attributes of faith and courage! I hold no brief for foreign missionaries in general. I know that their proselytizing methods have been the subject of severe criticism in the public press and on the lecture platform. All the more reason, therefore, why I should tell of a work which is being done so unobtrusively, without hope of earthly recompense, and well beyond the range of the most powerful "Big Bertha" of the cinema world.
The Kirindis for the most part belong to the curious religious sect called Aliullahis, about whose beliefs and rites many strange legends circulate.
One of these concerns their immunity from injury by fire, and recalls the "fire walkers" of the Tongan Islands. Aliullahian devotees, it is said, will enter a kind of oven and stay there while fire is heaped around it, making it red-hot. Then, covering their heads with the burning cinders, they cry, "I am cold," and pass out unhurt. Another ceremony consists in lifting bars of red-hot iron out of the fire with their bare hands, their skin showing no signs of burning.
Their religion seems to be a strange mixture of Mohammedanism and Judaism, with doctrines from various other esoteric faiths grafted on to it. Thus they number amongst their prophets Benjamin, Moses, Elia, David, and Jesus Christ, and they have also a saint of peculiar efficacy in intercession named Ali. Some investigators into their creed maintain that Ali and Daoud (David) are one and the same person; others think that Ali is so high up in the spiritual hierarchy as only to be invoked through Daoud. In any case, their prayer before battle is, "O Daoud, we are going to war. Grant that we overcome our enemy!" They then sacrifice some animal, usually a sheep, which is roasted whole. The High Priest prays over the carcass and distributes the flesh in small portions to those present. Communion in this sacrament appears to inspire the Aliullahian with absolute confidence in the success of any undertaking it precedes.