It is a five-hours’ ride from Baviân to Bâ’adrî, and during the course of it I began to learn something of the terrible lawlessness which turns the beautiful Kurdish mountains into a hell upon earth. We passed upon our way a small Kurdish settlement, of which the houses burrowed into the hill-side like the lairs of wild animals. It is the winter quarters of one Ḥassan Jângîr, a robber chief of the Kochars, the nomad Kurds. Two days before it had been raided by the government, in retribution for innumerable outrages, and such of the population as yet lived had fled into the hills. The feudal lord of Ḥassan Jângîr is Sheikh Ḥajjî, who was at that time, to the satisfaction of the whole country-side, imprisoned in Môṣul, but his liegeman had joined forces with another redoubted malefactor, Sheikh Nûrî, and it was rumoured that the pair with their followers had been encamped the previous night on the heights above Baviân. It was not without reason, as I now perceived, that the Vâlî of Môṣul had insisted on providing me with four zaptiehs instead of the customary two. The village of Bâ’adrî clings to the green slopes of the foot-hills, and ’Alî Beg’s whitewashed house stands over it like a miniature fortress. The beg, who is the descendant of the other ’Alî to whom Layard stood godfather (with some misgivings as to what might be the duties of the sponsor of a devil-worshipping baby), received me in his divan with the utmost cordiality. He is a man of middle age with a commanding figure and a long beard, light brown in colour, that curls almost to his waist. He was dressed from head to foot in white, and as we sat together in the divan, I thought that I had seldom drunk coffee in more remarkable company. I told him that I knew his people in the Jebel Sim’ûn and that they had spoken of him as the ruler of all. “The ruler of us all,” he replied gravely, “is God.”