The fight was desperate; but it could have but one ending. The houses were fired; and though the defenders cut their way through the walls from room to room hoping to escape under cover of the smoke, they had finally to choose between suffocation and coming out into the open. And there the little band were shot down to the last man.[{194}]

And so died Ablahad the deacon, surely by as good a death as a man need wish to die.

Bedr Khan Beg reported the facts himself to the English in Urmi; pointing out that really under the circumstances he could do no otherwise than stand by the faith of Islam in the fight; “but you will understand that my heart is the same as ever, and there is no breach of friendship between me and you.”

Picturesque and grand as the fighting days were, they came to an end shortly after this episode. In 1906 the Persian Government determined to make an effort to reduce the Kurds to order; and some sort of force was sent up to the mountains for the purpose, the Christians being called on to assist the Persian Government in the work. Unfortunately the Turkish authority took this opportunity to intervene, and to secure (as they hoped) a border province which they coveted. A small Turkish force was sent for the purpose, probably in response to some appeal of the Kurds for help; and at its appearance the Persian army fled to Urmi in the most absurd panic. As for their allies, the Assyrians of the Tergawar villages, whom they had called to arms on their side (and who alone had behaved decently on that day of shame), nobody gave a second thought to them. So the villages they had defended so long and so gallantly were plundered by the Kurds at last, the Turks making no effort to prevent so ordinary an incident of war. After the Persian army had fled, it was the men of the villages who, under their own leaders and against heavy odds, covered the retreat of their women and children.

For some time the Tergawar men were refugees in Urmi plain; and some of them were accommodated there in villages built by local notables, who were glad of the opportunity of securing that valuable economic factor, a good head of labour for their estates. When the Ottoman occupation of the border province seemed to be assured, many of them ventured back to their homes, and reoccupied some at least of their villages. But with the evacuation of the disputed territory by the Ottomans, as a consequence of the need of all possible troops in the Balkans, the face of events was altered once[{195}] again. However, in the interval, Urmi had become to all intents and purposes Russian territory; and if the province is nominally Persian, it is practically under Russian rule. The rule of the Muscovite may not be all that one would wish, but at least he is not likely to sanction open war between the tribes; and if only order is guaranteed, the Christians may hope to be able to live in the future more tranquilly, if less picturesquely, than they have done in the past.[{196}]

CHAPTER X
TWIGS OF A WITHERED EMPIRE
(URMI)

ON their eastern side the Hakkiari Mountains subside into the plain of Urmi, and the journey down to that town from Tergawar is quite a tame affair after such wild experiences as are furnished by Jilu and Baz. We have merely to cross the last two down-like ridges of mountain, and then the country changes, with the startling suddenness induced by irrigation, to a fertile crop-covered plain, plentifully chequered with trees.

Ten years ago Urmi town was but an overgrown village, crowded with mean houses of sun-dried mud brick, and girdled with crumbling mud walls. Only occasionally did a gateway of burnt brick, with some pretensions to architecture, usher one into the courtyard of some notable; into a garden constructed exactly on the lines depicted in the Assyrian sculptures, and a house in a state of more or less disrepair. Within the walls the city remains thus to this day; though recent changes have promoted the growth of a suburb with an air of “underdone Tiflis,” where Persians have produced a bad imitation of the Russian imitation of European style.

By far its most picturesque feature (not excepting even the mosque courtyards) is its great Bazaar. This is a good specimen of the usual Persian type, which is far more ambitious than the Turkish. It is a maze of ill-lit corridors, roofed with domical brick vaults, and lined on either side with the booths of the merchants and artificers. It will be long ere a visitor’s eyesight can accustom itself to the darkness, and longer still ere his “bump of locality” can[{197}] master the intricate windings of the passages. He will enter in to explore them joyfully, for they are a perfect feast of Oriental genre subjects depicted in the richest of subdued harmonious colouring; but if he wishes to emerge again, he had better charter a guide!

The alleys are lit only by small holes pierced in the crowns of the vaulting; and so solid seem the beams of light that fall athwart the dustladen gloom, that the passenger instinctively checks his pace before he ventures to breast them.