“These are men of Ḳaisarîyeh,” said Fattûḥ. “I know them by their dress.” And as the first string of camels drew near, he shouted to the man sitting half-asleep upon the leading animal: “Are you from the port, the port of Beilân?” “Evvet, evvet,” he answered drowsily, and his body rocked with the long rocking of the camel’s stride as they plodded past. “Nasl Kirk Khân?” cried Fattûḥ. “How does Kirk Khân?” Kirk Khân is a Christian village at the foot of the Beilân Pass, between Aleppo and Alexandretta. The next cameleer had come up with his string and he answered the question. “The giaour are all killed,” he answered, taking Fattûḥ for a Moslem. “And how are the houses, the houses of the giaour?” Fattûḥ called out. The leader of the next string answered-- “They are all burnt.” “Praise God,” said Fattûḥ, and the zaptieh laughed. When the camel-train had passed I said: “Why did you call the people of Kirk Khân infidels?” “Because the camel-driver called them so,” Fattûḥ replied. “And why did you praise God?” “Effendim, they praised God when they saw Kirk Khân in ashes, and they rejoiced to tell the tale--what else should I say?” He rode on silently for a few minutes, and then he added: “All the men of Kirk Khân were my friends. Every time I drove my carriage from Aleppo to Alexandretta, I stopped to eat with them, and they, when they were in Aleppo, came to my house. Now they are dead--God have mercy on them.” His sorrowful acceptance of an outrage which the Western mind, accustomed to regard the protecting of human life as the first obligation of society, refused to contemplate, revealed to me the magnitude of the gulf which I had been attempting to bridge, and as I followed the channel of Fattûḥ’s thought, I saw Fate, in the likeness of a camel-train, moving, slow and heavy-footed, towards the inevitable goal. Our road climbed over a bluff and dropped again into a ravine at the lower end of which stands Kömür Khân, an old, red-roofed caravanserai, stately in decay. Near to it flows the Murad Su, which is the Euphrates, and though we were now far from its Mesopotamian reaches, it was already a great river whose waters had received the tribute of many snows. Below Kömür Khân it enters a narrow gorge where the hills fall sheer into the water, and above the khân, carved upon a slab of rock, a Vannic inscription bears witness to the high antiquity of the road.[215] The ferry is a couple of hours further up stream, but we reached it late in the afternoon and were too weary to cross that night. We pitched our tents on the bank--it was our last Euphrates camp--opposite the village and great mound of Iz Oglu.