"In raiding the villages the Hamidieh cavalry not only destroyed the houses, drove off the sheep and cattle and removed every portable piece of property, but actually stripped the villagers of the clothes on their backs. The unfortunate peasants, men, women and children, were thrust out into the wilderness of snow-covered mountains without clothes to cover them or food to eat. How many of these poor creatures left bloody tracks on snow and ice; how many dropped by the wayside to go down to death in a shroud of snow and a tomb of ice no man may know. The snow will not give up its dead for long months to come. "Are the Christian people of America willing that this thing shall continue?" CHAPTER XIV. THE REIGN OF TERROR--HARPOOT AND ZEITOUN. The Harpoot massacre was another butchery carried out under orders. Sixty Christians fled to a church in the vain hope that its walls would furnish them a shelter against those who were crying for the blood of Armenians. They were permitted for a time to believe themselves secure, but suddenly the church was surrounded by a great number of Kurds. The doors were then blown in, and the Christians thought that they would be massacred within the sacred structure. They were not. Their captors took them one at a time outside the church, and there, heedless of the cries for mercy from women and children, killed them, either by shooting or stabbing them. The first victim was the Protestant pastor of the church, who, as he was dragged out, bade the others, if they had to die, to die as Christians. He met his death like a martyr. Some of the refugees, in a very agony of terror, offered to abjure their faith and accept Islamism, thinking thus to save their lives. The offers availed them nothing, for their insatiable enemies, after accepting them, dragged the converts out and killed them one by one. The Armenian Church was turned into a mosque, and the Protestant Church into a stable.