AFLOAT
We rode into Diarbekr on Christmas Day, arriving just in time to share
the plum-pudding at the house of Major Anderson, the Vice-Consul.
They say of Diarbekr that its houses are black, that its dogs are
black, and that the hearts of its people are black--and they say so
truly. The first moment that one catches sight of it in the distance
one is impressed by the blackness of its walls, built of a black
volcanic stone. When one gets inside, the people look dourly at one,
and the Zaptiehs ride closer together. But this may be because they
have no other choice, the streets being often only four feet across. It
is quite easy to cross a street from on high by jumping from one roof
to another; and it is certainly cleaner, for down below we are ankle
deep in mud, in which great boulders are embedded--relics, presumably,
of ancient pavement or fallen houses. If you want to take the air at
Diarbekr you walk round and round the flat roof of your house and watch
the life of your neighbours on adjoining roofs; or else, closely
accompanied by armed cavasses, you ride out into the bleak, stony
country, and follow up some mud stream in the hopes of getting a shot
at wild duck and snipe.
* * * * *
A week later we sat on the banks of the Tigris by the Roman bridge
which spans the river just below the black walls of Diarbekr. The raft
on which we were about to embark was moored to the shore and the men
were loading our belongings. A dancing-bear stumped about to the tune
of a bagpipe made of the skin which answers so many purposes in the
East. When inflated they can be used either for carrying water for
people inside, or for carrying people on water outside. We were using
260 of them in this latter way. They were tied on to two layers of
poplar poles put crossways, forming a raft about eighteen feet square.
At one end were two small huts made of felt stretched across upright
poles; the fore end was weighted down with bags of merchandise laid
side by side across the poles to form a rough floor.
The two kalekjis (raftsmen) waded in and out with a great seeming sense
of hurry but without appearing to accomplish anything.
"Can't you hurry the men up?" said X.
"No," I answered, "we are in the East."
"You might try," she said; "you always leave me all the talking to do."
"They do not understand my Turkish," I said apologetically.
"It would not take you long to learn enough for that," went on X.
"I do know the swears," I answered humbly, and I stood up amongst the
men and delivered myself of them.
"Quick! quick! the Pasha is angry!" said the men.
Our crew had assembled; there were our two personal attendants, Hassan
and Arten. Hassan was now our interpreter, for, although he could only
talk Turkish, he could interpret our signs to other Turks until we
learnt the language. Arten, we found, was more Armenian than cook, and
sang us Christian hymns in his native language when we felt low after
meals. Then there were two kalekjis in charge of the raft; they were
Kurds; we had yet to discover their qualifications. Two Zaptiehs
forming our escort made up the number. We did not yet look upon them as
individuals, but as part of an abstract regime in the country with
which we now felt tolerably familiar; the outward aspect of it was a
ragged uniform and an antiquated rifle, which served many useful
purposes but had forgotten how to eject bullets.
"Hazir dir, hazir" (Ready, ready), shouted the kalekjis. The owner of
the dancing-bear hurriedly thrust his fez under our noses.
"Don't give him anything," I said, "a bear has no business to be
dancing in this country; he ought to be trying to eat us in a cave."
"The demoralisation of the bear comes from the West," said X, who was
studying the primitive habits of the natives, "we must pay for it."
"Does this abuse of the hat emanate from the same source?" I inquired,
as she dropped a coin into the fez.
"That would be an interesting point to inquire into," said X, and she
made an entry in her notebook.
The worst of X was that you never knew whether she was laughing at you.
It is a most uncomfortable position, which men as a rule resent. But I
was another woman, and took it philosophically, especially as X accused
me of the same failing, and we never see ourselves as others see us.
We boarded the raft: the coil of rope which had fastened it to the
shore was hauled in, and we drifted slowly out into the centre of the
muddy stream. We were followed by another raft, laden up with bags of
merchandise, which was coming with us to share the protection of our
escort.
We went into the sleeping-hut to ascertain the length of its
possibilities. Boards had been nailed across the poles to form a floor,
and on this was spread a thick native felt mat. Dwellers on land little
know the feeling of luxury recalled to my mind in writing these
words:--the luxury of being able to drop all the things addicted to
dropping, especially when dressing, with the knowledge that they would
not disappear for ever in the depths of the Tigris waters; the luxury
of being able to walk in the ordinary biped method of placing one foot
in front of the other.
This was not the case in the open part of the raft, where the floor,
formed of poles and sacks, exhibited a network of rounded interstices.
The water gurgled and spluttered below them: one's foot invariably
slipped into them when cautiously manipulating a journey across the
raft by hopping from a slippery pole to a sliding sack; and unattached
articles dropped through them on to the skins below, and were
occasionally rescued in a dripping condition before they were washed
away altogether. The water showed spiteful discrimination in its
washing-away proclivities. I recall certain chinks in the more roughly
boarded floor of the hut where we had our meals, through which the cook
had a habit of brushing his cooking refuse, and where, if one was rash
enough to look, there could be seen an accumulation of tea-leaves and
bones and bits of decaying delicacies which one associated with meals
of past ages.
The felt walls of the hut were lined on the inside with white cotton
tacked on the poles. There were two small glazed windows, one of which
opened. The door was a single width of felt tied with tape. There was
just room inside for our two camp-beds--with a space between, which
would admit of one of us occupying it at a time. At the foot of each
bed stood our two Eastern sacks, which contained all our worldly goods.
I feel constrained, on mentioning this form of luggage, to say a word
of warning concerning it. In one sense it is easy to pack, because you
need not fold anything up, but can simply stuff it in and give the bag
a shake; and it is easy to unpack, if you do it in a wholehearted
manner--standing in the centre of a large room or a vast desert where
you can turn it upside down and spill everything out on the ground. But
under ordinary circumstances the bundle of hay with the needle in it is
nothing to this sack with your clean handkerchief in it. X and I had a
mutual understanding owing to which we never attacked a sack while the
other was within hearing; but whenever she appeared in a half-fainting
condition and asked the cook why on earth tea was so late, I knew what
she had been doing. She had asked me, as a personal favour (the only
one I've ever known her ask) not to attack my sack in the morning,
because it was a pity to have the whole day spoilt, and if I did it in
the evening to go to bed before she did.
But to return from this digression. Having examined our quarters, I
arranged a rug on the open part of the raft and sat down to take in the
surroundings.
Arten was unpacking cooking-pots in the second hut, and the other men
sat about on the sacks smoking silently. The boatmen sat on a pile of
sacks in the middle and manipulated the oars which served to steer the
raft and keep it in the fast part of the current. The oars consisted of
single young willow-trees, with short strips of split willow bound on
one end with twigs, forming the blade; they were tied on to rough
rowlocks made of twisted withies wound round heavily-weighted sacks.
The Tigris at this point is singularly hideous. There was not a single
blade of vegetation to be seen anywhere; the country was a stretch of
mud hills and stony desert, and the mud banks of the river were only
relieved by the hosts of water-birds that darted in and out or waded in
the shallows. The high black escarpment, crowned by the massive black
walls of Diarbekr, and fringed by a swampy tract of willow gardens,
rose up sharply above the mud flats. As we were carried along the
winding course of the sluggish river a higher mud bank shut it
altogether from our view, and I felt we had severed that link with the
world which one feels so strongly on arriving in any town of a distant
uncivilised land, where a European mail occasionally arrives and a
telegraph wire eliminates the isolation of its natural position.
We were drifting into an unknown world at the mercy of these unknown
Kurds. We were alone with the birds and the mud banks and the rippling
waters.