Chapter XIII: The Creed of the Koran

We left Jezireh early next morning. The scenery was now much tamer; the banks of the river were low; stretches of conglomerate and red rocks were interspersed with grassy slopes. The river was no longer disturbed by rocks and rapids, and our two kalekjis had been replaced by a bright-faced youth who was going to take us single-handed as far as Mosul.

"Am not I a good kalekji?" he kept on saying to us, "see how quick I make the raft go. When you get to Mosul you will remember what a good kalekji I was," and, standing up on the raft, grasping the two oars, he would throw himself right backwards, causing the raft to shoot on through the sluggish stream. Then when we had got into a faster bit of current he would lean on his oars and roll up a cigarette, talking all the time.

"The ladies like me, do they not? They see I am a good kalekji. They surely like me better than their other kalekjis?"

Six rafts laden with merchandise had followed us from Jezireh, and one with a hut similar to ours, and flying the Turkish crescent, was conveying a Turkish Yuzbashi with his harem to Mosul. The women were shut inside the hut the whole time, and occasionally, when the rafts drifted alongside, we caught glimpses of them peering shyly at us through the little glazed window. Did they envy us, sitting boldly outside, unveiled, open to the stares of all this crowd? Or, knowing no other lot, did they merely regard us with astonished curiosity, these so-called women from a strange land, who dressed like women but went about like men?

The fat little officer in his smart uniform sat outside most of the day, smoking with Oriental listlessness or playing with his little fat boy, a miniature counterpart of himself, dressed in uniform with a toy sword.

On some of the merchandise rafts the kalekjis were accompanied by their families. The sacks were piled up to form a rough shelter, under which the women and children crouched all day and cooked their masters' food. More rafts joined on to us further down, until we numbered thirteen. All day we floated in and out amongst each other, the rafts twisting and turning with the vagaries of the current. The kalekjis yelled and shouted at one another; they raced for the fast bits of current ahead where only one raft could pass at a time; they jostled one another or got entangled in shallow places, and the other rafts passed them with jeers.

Our little kalekji put forth all his skill.

"See, Pasha," he would say, excitedly, "see how we leave them behind! You have the best kalekji; do you see I always have the best of the river? Yah, yah, yah," and he roared derisive laughter at his pursuers.

At night we all moored together and the kalekjis would land and sleep in the caves under overhanging rocks, or light a fire on the banks and stretch themselves out round it, taking turns at the night watch.

No sooner was the raft drawn up along the banks than X and I would land to get as much exercise as possible in the remaining hour of daylight. The Zaptiehs, who were obliged to accompany us, wrung their hands over this display of energy.

"Aman, aman. These English have strange habits. They land all in a minute, and before you know what they are doing one has rushed in one direction and one in another, and perhaps both are lost in the darkness, and we have orders from the Government never to lose sight of them. If the Government only knew what they were asking!"

The first evening after leaving Jezireh, Ali and I climbed to the highest point near the river, from where I obtained a good view of the surrounding country. The top of the hill on which we stood was a mass of stones and bulbous plants with withered leaves and tufts of rough grass. The country stretched away all round in strong, firm undulations to a distant horizon. To the west was the full glory of an Eastern sunset, intensifying the reddish hue of the rolling hills until they merged into blackness in the shadows. To the east the terminating range was snow-clad, and the setting sun, casting a pink glow over the white peaks, gave a gradation of colour which caused them to melt imperceptibly into the sky and mingle with the pale reflection of the sun's setting rays on the opposite horizon. What villages, what life lay concealed in the hollows of these rolling hills I do not know. To the eye there was nothing visible but the hill-tops in their naked immensity and intense desolation; on one side the flaming colours of the setting sun, on the other its pale reflection on the snowy peaks, and over it all the vast, inscrutable sky. We were alone, Ali and I, with "that silence which some call God." I liked Ali's companionship on these evening walks; his nature, truly Eastern, was in keeping with the country. He had been chatting away merrily all the way up, trying to teach me Turkish words; and now we both lapsed of one accord into silence and his merry face took on something of the sternness of the surroundings. He laid his rifle on the ground, and moving away a little distance, went through the evening prayer. Now upright, now bending, now on his knees, a misty black form in the dazzling red light, he murmured inaudibly the prescribed words, words which at that same hour were being uttered alike by so many thousands in the fevered rush of busy towns, on the house-tops, and in the crowded chambers. A form, a ritual of empty words this prayer may be, but up here, in Nature's loneliness, the prayer and the man seemed strangely relevant.

Was it not in such a place as this, alone with the great forces of Nature, that Mahomet formed his conception of God as an Irresistible Power?

"Has there come to thee the story of the overwhelming?" he cries out at one time, and again: "Does there not come in man a portion of time when he is nothing worth mentioning?"

The great need of man is for expression; in places such as these his own insignificance is forced upon him by the overwhelming might of primeval forces. Alone with the great silence which his voice cannot fill, with the great space in which he, as a physical being, is lost; with the great mountains against which to measure his strength, with the stars which he cannot reach, and the floods which he cannot stem, his own personality seems so trivial that he doubts its very existence, until a strong feeling of participation in the forces themselves, of his own share in them, gives a truer sense of his own proportion; and the reaction of feeling, from this realization of his own impotence to that of his own magnificence in being part of them, produces an overwhelming desire for utterance.

Was it under such influences as these that Mahomet's longing, awe-struck soul first heard, "Cry, what shall I cry?" and subsequently gave forth that long blazonry of Nature's beauty in the Koran? There is something in the grand simplicity and childish acceptance of the unspoilt Eastern character at its best which seems to be a counterpart of the feeling inspired by Nature in this Eastern land itself. That it should be so seems natural when we remember how Mahomet was continually conjuring his followers to look at Nature and understand great things.

"Look at the heaven how it is reared, and at the mountains how they are set up, and at the earth how it is spread out...."

"Verily in the creation of the heavens and the earth are signs to you if you would understand...."

"Lift up thine eyes to the heaven; dost thou see any flaw therein? Nay, lift up thine eyes again; thy sight returneth dim and dazed...."

The murmuring words of Ali's prayer had stopped; the sun sank behind the distant line of hills; a breeze sprang up and stirred the tufts of withered grass, whispering in the "still of night."

We retraced our steps to the edge of the hill and dropped into the hidden valley, where the Tigris rushed along unheeded and unseen from above.

Arten's voice rose with the sound of the waters, singing the well-worn words of an Armenian Protestant hymn.

The kalekjis had lit fires at the mouth of the caves, and crouched round the black pot which contained the evening meal. From the far corner of one cave came the wail of a new-born infant.

Under "the splendour of the Night Star" we too retired to rest.

* * * * *

We were already afloat when I woke next morning. From my bed I could see the banks shooting past the little window of the hut. The reader must not imagine a continuous view, such as one would get through the window of a more civilized vehicle of locomotion. The banks at one moment would move straight past the window in the orthodox way; then they would be suddenly shooting past in the opposite direction, or we had a view of the river behind. It requires in many ways a certain amount of practice to live in a state of equilibrium on a raft. One is constantly being made aware of the truism that there are two sides to everything. First of all there are, as one would expect, two sides to the river; and owing to the particular method of our progression we were always being reminded, in a most irritating way, of this purely geological fact. No sooner had we become aware of the scenery on one side, and had decided that it was the right bank, than--swish--round went the raft, and the whole length of the right bank would be shot before our view like a circular panorama, and before you could take it in you were looking at the left bank; moreover, you would be looking at it moving past you upwards, though you were perfectly certain the raft could only be floating downwards. There was hardly time to reason this out when--swish--round you go the reverse way again, the left bank swings past you downwards and you are travelling up the right bank, although the raft, you are persuaded, is still pursuing its downward course. If you stood outside and fixed your eye with strenuous determination on some fixed and immutable spot of heaven or earth you might be able to keep your bearings with a strong mental effort. But when you observed the features of the landscape through the small window of your hut you gave it up--and simply gazed at the view as you would at a magic-lantern slide being slowly withdrawn through the porthole of an undulating steamer.

It was equally difficult to look steadily ahead from a mental point of view. Travelling by yourself you might be able to arrange your own philosophy, but it is upsetting when the other person sees the side which at any particular moment you do not happen to be looking at. When, for instance, we were delayed later that morning repairing burst skins, X was perfectly happy dwelling on the romance of navigating this noble and ancient river in the same way as those heroes whose feats were recorded on the tablets of Nineveh, until I unwittingly disturbed the harmony of these thoughts by complaining that I was unpleasantly reminded of a punctured bicycle on a lonely road of civilisation.

"How delightful this is," I said, in exuberant laziness, when we were floating on once more, "to be able to lose all conception of time and float on, as it were, to eternity."

"Personally," said X, "I find myself counting the days with a most unpleasant conception of the lapse of time, for we have only food enough for one day, and owing to this delay there is no possibility of renewing our supply for two."

I felt an injury had been inflicted on me by being reminded of absence of dinner when I had been inflated with great thoughts. But I had not long to wait for my revenge.

"What a picturesque man the kalekji is," X exclaimed suddenly. "I take such a delight in watching him shaking out his flowing garments and folding himself up in such graceful attitudes."

"Personally," I said, with some malice, "it gives me no pleasure since I became aware that he is only engaged in hunting for fleas."

X made no answer; I felt we were quits. She would have to think of the presence of fleas while I thought of the absence of dinner.

We floated on very quietly that day. The banks were flatter and the patches of grass became more frequent. At long intervals we passed villages of mud huts built on the sides of the river where the banks rose to a higher point. Towards evening we swung round under a rocky prominence, on the top of which stood the village of Hassoni. There was no possibility of mooring the raft anywhere near it for the night. The banks rose up in a straight wall of rock, of such a height that the inhabitants of the village, peering down at us from above, seemed like pigmies on the sky-line. We floated on until the hills curved and the banks sloped down to a muddy flat. The other rafts were already moored along the shore and we drifted alongside of them. Ali and I landed, and we set off to walk back to the village in the hope of getting some eggs and milk to eke out our supply of provisions. We had some difficulty in scrambling up the wet, grassy places between edges of rock where the water oozed out and trickled down to the river below; and on reaching the top we found ourselves on the edge of an extensive tableland which ended abruptly in the escarpment under which we had floated. Below us we could see the river winding ahead through a low-lying country to the east. We walked for half a mile across the flat table-top towards the village; a long procession of black and yellow cattle were sauntering along in front of us, lowing quietly in answer to the shrill calls of a boy who stood motionless on a little hillock, a weird figure in the straight, square-cut sheepskin cloak of the natives.

From all sides flocks of goats and sheep were coming in and filled the narrow streets, sharing the homes of their masters as a protection against the raids of Hamidieh chiefs. It was a partly Kurdish, partly Arab village, and the inhabitants mingled their curiosity at my appearance with fright at that of Ali's. Long experience had taught them that a visit from a Turkish Zaptieh meant extortion of some sort. A child in our path screamed aloud, rooted to the spot with terror. Ali's bright, laughing face clouded over.

"That is what the children are taught to think of us," he said, "and I have my own little ones at home."

Our demands for milk were received with sullen grimness, until the sight of the unwonted coin caused the faces to clear, and a further present of tobacco established quite a friendly footing. I sat down inside an enclosure of maize stalks at the door of a larger hut, where the cows were being milked, and the natives, clustering round, plied Ali with questions. One of the villagers offered to walk back with us and carry the milk. It was dark before we reached the edge of the tableland again, and I shouted down in the hopes of getting an answer which would guide us to the encampment below. The village boy held up his hand with a scared look: the call was only answered by its own echo, and the stones, slipping under our feet, rattled noisily down the steep slope.

"Hush!" said Ali, "who knows but what Ibrahim Pasha may hear you," and we slid silently down the slippery banks in the darkness, until the light of a camp-fire gleamed out a welcome signal.