“The women and children escaped death, their beauty and youth saving them from massacre. They were, however, to be delivered over at once to the outrageous assaults or to be reserved for the shameful fate of the harem. They were led off in long troops; they were put on the market and sold in the bazaars of Smyrna, Constantinople and Brousa.”[121] Large numbers also suffered death or the worst form of slavery, by the hands of the “unspeakable Turks,” who were neither Greeks nor belonged to the same church, and their only crime also was that they, too, were Christians. During the war between Russia and Turkey, the Kurds, finding the country in a disturbed condition, plundered many a village and massacred not a few Armenians. But the Turks seem to vie with the Kurds in cruelty. An Englishman, writing of the war between Russia and Turkey, says: “The Turks with their usual ferocity, commenced a system of carnage at Akhalzik in 1829; every Christian inhabitant was slain.” In 1843, in the southern mountains of Armenia and Kurdistan, ten thousand Nestorian and Armenian Christians were massacred by the faithful Moslems of Mohammed’s type, and as many women and children were taken captives and sold for slaves. The great explorer, A. H. Layard, three years after this fearful carnage, describes it in the following language: “When the salughter of the people of Ashita (9000) became known in the valley of Liza, the inhabitants of the villages (1000) took refuge on a lofty platform of rock, where they hoped either to escape notice or to defend themselves against any number of assailants. Bedr Khan Bey (the officer of the sultan, who had charge of the massacre) surrounded the place and watched until hunger and thirst, in hot sultry weather, had done their work. After three days a regular capitulation was signed and sworn on the Koran; their arms were delivered up; the Kurds were admitted on the platform. Then did the slaughter begin. To save the trouble of killing them, they were pitched into the Zab (river) below. Out of about one thousand only one escaped from the massacre. The face of the rock below is still covered with scattered bones of the dead, bleached skulls, long locks of women’s hair, and torn portions of garments they had worn.”[122] In regard to the massacre of the eleven thousand Christians in Syria in 1860, a very trustworthy writer states: