“O Brother, what is your trouble?” said the sympathizing lady.
“I am broken-hearted,” sobbed the poor fiend; “I have been trying to sow strife in this village for seven years and have not raised a single quarrel in that time; I must give it up.”
“Cheer up! let me try my hand;” said the lady; and the couple went together to the village, where they found a bridal party just leaving the church. What measures were taken by the woman history (prudently) sayeth not; but within half an hour bride and bridegroom were pulling one another’s hair, and the friends of each were taking part in a very pretty fight.
“Now you can stay here and be happy,” said the woman of Sat to her friend.
“Thank you,” said Satana, “But while you are here, I really think my presence would be superfluous.”
One is completely outside the power of the Government in the Barzan-Neri district, but not quite out of touch with its officials notwithstanding. In one of the remotest of villages, in a deep gorge running up into the Sat range, and called Bi-Kar, we actually found a Government mudir. It is true that he had no power; and any collecting of taxes that took place in the neighbourhood was done by wholly unauthorized agencies; but there he was, presumably as a testimony to the existence of the Hukumet.
Like most Ottoman officials, he was delightfully courteous to the chance visitor; and in this case perhaps the welcome was not mere politeness, but real joy in speaking to an educated man once more. For years in that remote glen, he had enjoyed no conversation with any but policemen and Kurds. His story was typical of those of a good many of the young Ottoman official class. Educated at Stamboul, in the college for Government servants, he had (like most of the younger men of his day) been attracted by the “Young Turk” propaganda, and its hopes for a reformed and revived[{162}] Ottoman Empire. Something brought his reforming sympathies to light; and a prompt order from Abdul Hamid dispatched him to this corner of the earth, with a black mark against his name, and no chance of promotion, or any sort of career.
Three years passed in that exile, and then the revolution gave him some hope of a change. But the years that had elapsed since then had only been evidence that he was forgotten by the new régime as thoroughly as the old one could have wished; and here was he, an educated and capable man, settling down while still under thirty as a soured, disappointed minor official. He was one of the many tragedies of Ottoman rule.
Laboriously enough, we pushed on for three days’ travel, a daily ascent and descent of 3000 feet marking our progress. The tracks were always feasible enough for mules, though as viewed from a distance they had a painfully dizzy aspect; and the deep gorges between each pair of ridges were places of marvellous beauty. The valley of Heriki lives in our memory as perhaps the most exquisite of all. We descended the crags and steep slopes of the mountain side—coming down 2000 feet in half an hour on foot, though of course the animals might take four times as long—to a glen that was one garden, thick with walnut and poplar trees, interspersed with figs and with vines trained from tree to tree, all in the glory of their best foliage. Trees flourished here luxuriantly from the soil and climate, and were respected for the one reason that makes a Kurd respect anything; for the whole glen is one great cemetery. As its name implies, it is the original home of the nomad tribe with whom we had just been journeying. From this spot there set out the five eponymous ancestors of the five septs that make the tribe to-day; and hither every man of name and fame is borne for burial among the great ones of his house. There is much romance about this most turbulent of nomad tribes; and it is not diminished by the fact that (if legend tells true) they were Christians once; in the days when Nestorian bishops, nomad like their flocks, had for diocese “the tents of the Kurds.” One relic of their ancient[{163}] Christianity they are said to bear with them still (we follow the account given by old Nestorian priests), namely, the head of a Christian martyr, one of the several saints George of Eastern legend. This is the palladium of their tribe, and is borne about in a chest either by the principal chief among them, or by some holy mollah in the clan.
A three days journey from Barzan takes the traveller to the domain of the great rival of the chief of that ilk, viz. the Sheikh of Shamsdin, who has his palace at Neri. This man is at least as powerful as his neighbour; and indeed Obeid-Allah of Shamsdin, grandfather of the present Sheikh, had thoughts of carving out for himself a separate principality, a buffer between Turkey and Persia. He was able to invade the latter country in force, and to besiege the city of Urmi for some weeks in the early “seventies.” He failed, however (though the success of the Sheikh of Koweit in an analogous scheme shows that it was not impossible under favourable circumstances); and he and his son Abd-l-Kadr were removed to Constantinople as state prisoners, while his second son, Saddik or Zadok, was left as head of the tribe. Shrewder than his father, Saddik was content with the reality of power, and accumulated wealth by tobacco smuggling on the most magnificent scale. His caravans went down to Persia, often 100 mules strong, in open defiance of the “Regie” officials; and a large portion of the proceeds was invested in rifles, smuggled from Russia to Urmi. If the troops in Trans-Caucasia were not much libelled, many of them came from their barracks, in exchange for vodka!