The “old books” which they had promised to show us proved (as we had more than half expected) to be only the usual Church Service books.[95] They had kept them jealously hidden in an underground cave in a vineyard; knowing vaguely that they were somehow sacred, but otherwise quite ignorant of their contents, for, of course, not a man in the village could read. The cave must have been quite a dry one, for the books had not suffered in any way; and we cannot doubt that on our departure they were again committed to the cache.[{155}]
The church was a well-built stone edifice, dating possibly from the sixteenth century; and though disused for so long a period, it was kept clean and in good repair. Within it that Sunday evening we recited our English Evensong; the villagers standing round reverently and joining in the Amens, the only word they could understand. The “Sheikh Birader Effendi” must confess that this strange little service was to him one of the most impressive in which he has ever shared.
The wild rough life of the villagers was reflected in the supper that they provided for us. Where else might one dine on ibex collops and bread made of acorn meal? The latter sounds somewhat unpalatable, but was in fact not at all bad eating. The queer little oaks which grow in Kurdistan bear very large acorns almost as big as small walnuts; and these are not nearly so bitter as English acorns but rather like chestnuts in taste. Often they are roasted and eaten as we eat chestnuts in England; but generally they are ground to meal for breadmaking, and mixed with an equal proportion of barley meal. The natives grow a little wheat likewise, so wheaten bread is not quite unknown to them; but of this, as is to be expected, they get only a very small supply.
It was while we were breakfasting next morning that Erdil produced its final originality in the way of diet. Some hunters had come in overnight, and had brought with them the carcass of a boar. They had cut him up for convenience of transport; but his huge hoofs (as big as a cow’s) and his bristly iron-grey hide proved that he must have been a truly formidable monster: and for five piastres (ten pence) they sold us a big chunk of the meat. His hide was the most valuable part of him, and for this they hoped to obtain as much as two mejidies (eight shillings), since it made such excellent shoes. It seemed little short of a crime to allow so magnificent a pelt to be so ignominiously disposed of; but we did not see, if we purchased it, how we were to carry it away.
Mindful of the difficulties we had found in bringing our beasts up to Erdil, we determined in taking them down again[{156}] to try and lighten their loads. Our own personal belongings were consigned to two stalwart porters, who undertook to guide us by a short cut, practicable only for pedestrians; while our beasts were to make the long circuit and meet us at the mouth of the gorge.
A few weeks later, on the Flushing packet, the steward eyed that baggage dubiously, and opined we should need “two strong porters” to carry it up to the train. At his words there arose in our minds a vision of two grizzled Syrians carrying all that baggage on their shoulders, for three hours, with scarcely a breather, across the face of a precipice which would have made the steward’s hair stand on end! As a matter of fact each load (though it certainly looked overwhelming) totalled up to about sixty pounds, which is the load of a porter on the Alps.
Half an hour we ascended gradually and slantingly along the face of the mountain; and then the ground vanished from under us with a suddenness which took away our breath. The cliff broke away from our toes sheer down to the river beneath us, a drop (to compute it by guesswork) of something like two thousand feet. It was a grand, if somewhat a dizzy, spectacle; but our guides never checked for an instant. They skipped over the lip of the precipice, and went tripping along a ledge on the face of it, as if they considered such travelling the most ordinary thing in the world. This then was the real “three hours’ route” which led from Erdil to Suryi, the path where “horses couldn’t go, and mules couldn’t go, and Englishmen couldn’t walk.”
With regard to the horses and mules we endorse the description most cordially; but for ordinary capable pedestrians it was not so very terrible after all. True, it looked rather a fly-on-the-wall business when seen from a little distance; but the ledges, if narrow, were firm, and there was generally plenty of hand hold. Moreover the rocks themselves, though they had looked absolutely vertical when seen from below the previous morning, all proved to be more or less sloping and not quite destitute of brushwood; so it is possible one might have recovered[{157}] oneself even had one slipped from the path. The worst bits were at the beginning and end of our traverse, where the track led over steeply tilted slabs. Here our European nailed boots refused to bite on the surface, and the porters in their hempen brogues got across much more happily than we. These hempen brogues are almost universally worn by the hillmen, and are admirable footwear for rock work; but they need patching every evening to be ready for the journey next day. Even English boots, however, cannot long stand this sort of travelling. Let them be made ever so strongly they are cut to pieces in three months.
Half way across the face of the precipice, while pausing to rest a few minutes, we were able by means of our glasses to see our horses coming on behind. They were then just turning into the main valley, having accomplished about half their journey; and though we had given them an hour’s start at Erdil, we had fully two hours to wait for them at the mouth of the Oramar gorge.[{158}]