Certainly one poor Englishman had a painful experience, when he, a newcomer to the country, took a walk down the valley of Tyari on a Saturday afternoon. Turning a corner abruptly, he found a fair maiden sitting in all innocence in her bath. The Englishman had been properly brought up, so he averted his gaze, and passed by, as far away as the narrow limits of the path allowed. However, the damsel had been properly brought up too, but in a rather different school; and seeing that it was a qasha (Priest), who was passing, she sprang out of her bath and came to kiss his hand as politeness dictates. Saint Anthony fled, totally misunderstanding her purpose; and the damsel followed after, ejaculating plaintively “Rabbi, Rabbi, what have I done that you will not allow me to kiss your hand?” It is said that he ultimately covered his eyes with his left hand, and extended his right at arm’s length for the salute. However, a very few weeks’ experience gave him perfect indifference to the spectacle.
Old chivalrous rules of the obligation of hospitality still hold in the mountains; and a conspicuous instance of this was given by one of the Nestorian maliks in the January[{296}] of 1907. As a general rule, no effort is made to march troops through these hills, for it is at once toilsome, useless and dangerous. In that month, however, a company of infantry were sent through the gorge of the Zab, with orders to report at Julamerk, a seat of government to the north of it; the object probably being to show that the thing could be done.
Being at best but half-trained men of Kurdish blood, and knowing that they had been sent where no troops had gone before, they naturally got more and more “jumpy” as they penetrated the gorge, and began to see an ambush behind every rock. Thus when they met a party of four Tyari men descending the road, they opened fire on them and shot down the lot!
This was not, we believe, the cold-blooded murder that it seemed, but a pure fit of nerves on the part of undisciplined men. However, having done it, they were naturally more frightened than ever at what they had done; and fairly ran for it (so far as anyone can run on those roads, which is not very fast), to the house of a prominent Christian malik of Tyari, Ismail of Chumba. They crossed the bridge to his house; and so demoralized were they that they did not even secure safety by breaking it down behind them, a result that could have been secured by ten minutes’ work with a pocket-knife. They told the chief that they had killed his own clansmen without provocation, and asked him to protect them! It says much for mountain chivalry that he recognized the claim of the suppliant without hesitation, and promised to do his best, if it was in his power to control his own tribesmen under the circumstances.
Those tribesmen gathered very soon for their revenge, and came up the valley towards Chumba in force; and then the malik went out and met them at the bridge, to urge that the thing had been after all an accident, so to speak, and not a butchery, and that it must be judged as such. A long and hot discussion followed; the tribesmen saying, with some force, that they did not care whether the thing was an accident or not; their men were dead, and they would have blood for blood. All arguments were tried[{297}] in vain, till at last the mountaineers summed up, “It is no good, malik; you have done your best, but we must have our revenge, and that is our last word. Stand out of the way.”
At that Ismail took his stand on the bridge and used his final argument. “If that is your last word, now hear mine. These men are my guests now, and have eaten my bread and are in my house. What they did before is nothing to me; and if it were my own brother they had killed I would guard them now. If you dare to attack, I and mine will defend them; and you will have to kill your own chief before you lay hand on any one of his guests.” At that the avengers held back and hesitated till night fell; and under that cover, Malik Ismail and his son Shlimun escorted their guests into safety by the tracks over the hills, and led them unharmed to Julamerk. The whole was as fine an act of chivalry as these days can show.
With their chivalry goes as is often the case with mountaineers, a vein of what we can call nothing but school-boyishness. The pure lark of a fight appeals to them irresistibly. In the spring of 1912, the men of one particular Christian district known as Salabekan contrived to carry out a most successful raid against their neighbours over the hill, the Kurds of Châl. It was only an episode in a feud that had dragged on for many years, but was executed with some skill; the raiders securing 500 sheep without even waking their late owners! When they were well on their way home, however, it occurred to some young hotheads that there is really no satisfaction in lifting your enemy’s sheep, unless you know that he knows who has scored off him!
Now Simmy, Simmy of the side,
Come out and see a Johnstone ride!
sang the old moss-trooper who had looted Crichton’s stable; so, agreeably to “the Galliard’s” principles, they went back again to the village, there to fire shots and shout contumely till the Kurds were awakened and came out. Then of course a fight resulted, in which three or four men[{298}] were killed. This excited our wrath; not because we grudged them a Kurd or so; still less the sheep that they had fairly earned, and which were very likely theirs originally anyhow; but because among the Kurdish dead was a policeman (the Agha of Châl being a Government mudir among other things), and we feared that a dead policeman would take a great deal of explaining! However, it all ended happily, the officer not being missed! Still, we thought it only our duty to urge the desirability of making up the feud upon Mar Shimun; and asked him if he could not use his patriarchal influence in that direction. His Holiness quite agreed with us that it was most desirable. “Really, the Christians ought to make peace now. They are three corpses and four guns to the good!”
With their “larkishness” goes also a boy’s touchiness and sensitiveness to a slight. The writer once went down through the district of Tkhuma, having as companion one of the chiefs of the canton, whose guest he naturally was when passing the man’s village. A few weeks later he returned; to be met at the border of the district by another chief, one Yalda, of almost equal influence with his previous host.