The Erzeroum massacre started at the office of the Vali in the government building. An Armenian priest of Tevnik was in the building endeavoring to gain an audience with the Vali, when he was shot down by Turkish murderers. Then followed a horrible saturnalia of carnage, during which over one thousand Christians were slaughtered. After the butchery, the dead victims were dragged by the neck and heels into the cemetery and cast into a long, deep trench, not unlike the death pit of Geliguzan--the murdered fathers, mothers and sweet, innocent babes, all calm and peaceful in the sleep of death, flung down like carrion. Nothing more horrible or more pathetic could be imagined than that scene at the cemetery two days after the massacre. The spaces between the poor dead bodies were filled with the skulls and thigh-bones that had been taken by the sacrilegious Moslems from the old, upturned graves and then all were covered up together out of sight. The survivors dared not even express their grief. Not less shocking was the news that came from Kaisarieh in that part of Asiatic Turkey known as Cappadocia, where a frightful massacre of Christians took place, accompanied by the outraging of women and the looting of the shops and houses. This was done in obedience to orders from Constantinople. Over one thousand were killed and the fury of the Kurds, not satiated with slaughter, vented itself in the mutilation of the inanimate bodies. An extract from a paper on "The condition of Armenia" by E. J. Dillon will fitly close this chapter. "The stories told of these Koordish Hamidieh officers in general, and of one of them, named Mostigo, in particular, seemed so wildly improbable, that I was at great pains to verify them. Learning that this particular Fra Diavolo had been arrested and was carefully guarded as a dangerous criminal in the prison of Erzeroum, where he would probably be hanged, I determined to obtain, if possible, an interview with him, and learn the truth from his own lips. My first attempt ended in failure; Mostigo being a desperate murderer, who had once before escaped from jail, was subjected to special restrictions, and if I had carried out my original plan of visiting him in disguise, the probability is that I should not have returned alive. After about three weeks' tedious and roundabout negotiations, I succeeded in gaining the gaoler's ear, having first replenished his purse. I next won over the brigand himself, and the upshot of my endeavors was an arrangement that Mostigo was to be allowed to leave the prison secretly, and at night, to spend six hours in my room, and then to be re-conducted to his dungeon.