[57] The duty of hospitality is incumbent upon all Eastern monasteries; and often where the monastery has become extinct this duty has passed to the present tenants of its lands.
[58] From the days of “the Great Elchi” onward the English Ambassadors have interfered occasionally, and with some success, in favour of the persecuted Yezidis; and this fact explains their gratitude towards the English race.
[59] “Divine right” is an axiom in the East; and the Khalifate soon became hereditary, though at first it was endeavoured to make it elective. To this day at Constantinople, though a Sultan may be deposed or murdered, it is always a member of the House of Othman who is appointed in his room.
[60] Not the same nephew that we had met at Sheikh Adi.
[61] This was really rather a bit of cheek. It would be thought presumptuous even in a Kurd.
[62] A coarse local kind of Anise
[63] See, for instance, the head on the title-page—a portrait of a Syrian priest, the late Qasha Khoshaba, who might have been a reincarnation of Sargon.
[64] These caps are precisely of the shape which we see on Assyrian bas-reliefs.
[65] A clean-shaven man in the East is regarded as something emasculate, and in order to escape reproach one must wear at least a moustache. Laymen often shave the beard and whiskers, but a bishop or priest never shaves; and to shave a priest is esteemed as practically equivalent to unfrocking him.
[66] Gibbon takes the “six-score thousand persons who could not discern between their right hand and their left” as referring only to the children, and thus calculates the total population of Nineveh at 700,000 souls. Taking a line from Mosul we might estimate that about 150,000 could actually be housed within the walls.