We camped near the small village of Grê Pahn (Arabic: Tell’ Arîḍ = the Broad Mound), where we found our tents pitched. It had taken us three and a half hours to reach it from Alḳôsh, but the caravan time had been somewhat longer. Upon the following day we had a hard march; the caravan was ten hours upon the way and I, with ’Abdullah and Jûsef, considerably more, for we began the day with an excursion from the road to the Assyrian reliefs above Malthai. We turned to the right, up the valley that leads to Dehûk, and leaving our horses at the foot of the hill under the care of Jûsef, ’Abdullah and I climbed up and sought for the sculptures. It was rough going and we had been insufficiently directed, so that for long we sought in vain. At last in despair I sent ’Abdullah back to fetch a guide and sat down to wait for him under a rock. Clumps of flowering saxifrage covered the stones; campanula pyramidalis lifted its tall spires out of the crevices, the wide green valley lay below, its sparsely scattered villages each clustering about an ancient mound, and beyond it rose the mountain chains of Kurdistân. The air was full of the fragrance and the freshness of the hills and alive with the sound of their waters. To all the high places of the world I have given allegiance--all exercise a like authority and confer like privileges, and in these distant solitudes I claimed and was accorded an old-established right of mountain citizenship. ’Abdullah’s mission came abruptly to a successful termination. We had climbed high above the reliefs, and his keen eye espied them as he made his way down. They are four in number, and on each precisely the same scene is depicted. A king stands in adoration before a procession of seven gods, six of whom are mounted upon the backs of beasts, while one is seated upon a throne borne by a lion. Another, or perhaps the same, king follows the company of gods on foot. A tomb or cell has been broken through one of the reliefs, as at Baviân. In subject and in style the reliefs in both places are closely alike, and though there are no inscriptions at Malthai, the learned have concluded that the work there must be of the same epoch as that at Baviân, and have dated it in the reign of Shalmaneser II (860-825 B.C.).[172] They have yet to solve the difficult problems connected with the interchange of religions and artistic conceptions between the Assyrians and the Hittites, whose sculptures show, at a far earlier date, the same strange motive of a divinity standing upon the back of a wild animal. For the rest of the day we journeyed along the foot of the hills by the Môṣul high road. In the middle of the afternoon ’Abdullah observed conversationally: “That is the house of a bandit,” and he nodded his head towards a small white fort under the hills. The bandit was at that period imprisoned at Môṣul, but his empty dwelling served ’Abdullah as a peg whereon to hang a denunciation of the Kurds, root and branch.