We had evidently to deal with a man of civilisation and luxury, for the old Kurd shortly returned followed by numerous attendants, bearing sherbets and various Persian delicacies, in china bowls. Mousa Bey himself came to us in the afternoon, and his manners and conversation confirmed the impression that his breakfast had produced. Intercourse with Persia, beyond whose frontiers his own tribe sometimes wandered, had taught him the manners and language of his neighbours. He told me that he was descended from one of the most ancient of Kurdish families, whose records for many hundred years still exist; and he boasted that Sheikh Tahar, the great saint, had deemed him the only chief worthy, from his independence of the infidel government of the Sultan, to receive so holy a personage as himself after the downfall of Beder Khan Bey. This Sheikh Tahar, who as the main instigator of many atrocious massacres of the Christians, and especially of the Nestorians, ought to have been pursued into the uttermost parts of the mountains by the Turkish troops, and hanged as a public example, was now suffering from fever. He sent to me for medicine; but as his sanctity would not permit him to see, face to face, an unbelieving Frank, and as he wished to have a remedy without going through the usual form of an interview with the Doctor, I declined giving him any help in the matter. Mousa Bey was at this time almost the only chief in Kurdistan who had not yet made a formal submission to the Turkish government. His territories were, therefore, a place of refuge for those fugitives who, less fortunate than himself, had been driven from their strongholds by the arms or intrigues of the Porte. He bewailed the discords which severed the tribes, and made them an easy prey to the Osmanli. The Turks, wise in their generation, have pursued their usual policy successfully in Kurdistan; the dissensions of the chiefs have been fomented, and, thus divided, they have fallen one by one victims to treachery or to force. We rose early on the following day, and left Nera long before the population was stirring, by a very steep pathway, winding over the face of a precipice, and completely overhanging the village. Reaching the top of the pass we came upon a natural carpet of Alpine flowers of every hue, spread over the eastern declivity of the mountain. Leaving the caravan to proceed to our night's resting-place, I turned down the valley with my companions to visit the bishop of Shemisden at his convent[158] of Mar Hananisho.