We were now entering the country which is the head-quarters of the Yezîdîs, who, from their desire to conciliate or to propitiate the Spirit of Evil, are known to Moslem and Christian as Devil Worshippers. By Moslem and by Christian they have been placed beyond the bounds of human kindness, and while the Mohammadan has been unremitting in his efforts to bring them, by methods familiar to dominant creeds, to a sense of their short-comings, the Christian has regarded the wholesale butchery which has overtaken them from time to time as a punishment justified by their tenets. I had journeyed before among Yezîdî villages, in the mountains of north Syria, and had been struck by the clean and well-ordered look of the houses, and by the open-handed friendliness of the people, as well as by their courage and industry. The Mesopotamian Yezîdîs I knew only through the descriptions contained in Layard’s enchanting books, but I carried a letter to ’Alî Beg, the head of the sect, and proposed to visit him in his village of Bâ’adrî and to see, if he would permit, the most sacred of all Yezîdî shrines, Sheikh ’Adi. ’Abdullah, when he learnt my intention, expressed his entire approval of ’Alî Beg as a man, but he would hear nothing of his religious convictions because they were not founded upon a book. “Effendim,” he said, “Moslems and Jews and Christians have a book; it is only the infidels which have none, and the Yezîdîs are infidels. They worship the Sheitân.” “You must not speak of him while we are at Bâ’adrî,” said I, for the Yezîdîs never take the name of the Devil upon their lips and to mention him in their presence is a shameful insult. “God forbid!” replied ’Abdullah. We rode over flowery foot-hills that were bright with hollyhock and gladiolus, borage and mullein, and in an hour and a half from our camping-ground we reached the village of Jezarân. “These are Shabbak,” observed ’Abdullah. “What are Shabbak?” I asked. “They are not true Moslems,” he replied. “God knows what they believe. They resemble the Shî’ahs. Effendim, they came with the armies of the ’Ajam, and after the ’Ajam departed, they remained.” The ’Ajam are the Persians, or, roughly speaking, any barbarians.[160]