While he was at supper, one of the Kurdish servants came to him to say: “Sir Priest, if you have finished, the Lady would wish to speak to you.” “The Lady?” said the deacon, in natural wonder at the Lady of a Mussulman house asking to see a Christian guest who was not even a Frank doctor. “The Lady. Our Christian Lady,” said the Kurd; and in absolute bewilderment the deacon allowed himself to be led to the women’s part of the house, and to a private room in it. Here an aged woman rose to greet him, saying: “God has given me my prayer at last, and, after sixty years of captivity, I see a Christian priest before I die.”
Her story was as follows: When a girl in her ‘teens she had been carried off from her home as part of the spoil in some raid, like the little maid who waited on Naaman’s wife; and had been assigned as a portion of his share to the grandfather of the then Agha of the village. The date was fixed in her mind, by the fact that the first task given her in her captivity was the baking of bread for the Kurds who were going on a great raid against her own kinsfolk—the raid of Bedr Khan Beg in 1845, which is an episode from which men date still.
Since then, she had been a captive and slave in the Mussulman house, the only Christian in the place. She had begun, as might be expected, as the fag and drudge of all the other servants; but had raised herself by sheer force of character and her own integrity till she was now manager of household and farm: and she had been, by the Kurds’ own admission, “a blessing to the house” since the day that she entered it. Further (information again volunteered by the Kurds themselves) she had not only kept her Christianity in her solitude, but in a household where all lived in common nobody had ever known her to neglect her daily prayers or her Friday’s fast, or to do needless work on the Sunday.
One request only she made of the deacon. Finding that he was not the priest she had thought, and therefore was not able to give her the “qurbana” she had hoped to receive, she asked him to give her some of the “blessed bread” which her memory told her he would be likely to have with him. This is bread blessed, but not consecrated, at the Eucharist, and often carried with them by Nestorians on a long journey. This he was able to do, and she declared that she would keep it to be her “viaticum” when the time of her release should come.
Surely one may seek through a good many of the “Acta Sanctorum” before finding a nobler confession of Christ than that made by this nameless Nestorian woman.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GRAVES OF DEAD EMPIRES
(MOSUL TO BAGHDAD)
THE road from Amadia to Mosul is tolerably easy, by comparison, as the successive ranges sink gradually toward the Mesopotamian level. We had timed our journey craftily; it being now fairly hot in the lowlands; for we wished the moon to be full on the night that we emerged from the mountains, so that we might travel by her light across the plain to Mosul. A journey by day across the Mosul plain is not to be undertaken too lightly in summer, when the thermometer registers 120° in the shade. By night it is comfortable enough, and the moon makes the journey easy; though we own that it is very sleepy work at times. On this occasion the writer accomplished a feat that had previously been always beyond him, viz. that of sleeping in the saddle as the horse walked on. The nap can hardly have been a long one, but he achieved a real dream, and it was not terminated by a collapse into the dust.
By day, the heat is very trying, and there is a real danger occasionally in that strange phenomenon the “Sâm.” This is apparently a very small whirlwind, akin to those which cause the “dust-devils” common enough in the land at all times, but composed of intensely heated air, flavoured often with sulphurous fumes. A man struck by it simply collapses, and unless prompt attendance can be given him he dies in a few minutes. The face is “blackened,” and decomposition sets in very speedily. The natives not unnaturally refer to it as a “Poison wind.”
The phenomenon wanders about in the freakish fashion that we associate with the American tornadoes, though it[{340}] never is dangerous, like them, from its mere pace and power. It will take one man out of a straggling party, or even a man on horse-back, while leaving his horse and his companion on foot unscathed.