My companions and servants being much in want of rest, I stopped a day at Bash-Kalah. On resuming our journey we took a direct though difficult track to Wan only open in the middle of summer. Following a small stream, we entered a ravine leading into the very heart of the mountains. Three hours' ride, always rapidly ascending along the banks of the rivulet, brought us to a large encampment. The features of the women and of the men, who came out of their tents as we rode up, as well as the tongue in which they addressed one another, showed at once that they were not Kurds. They were Jews, shepherds and wanderers, of the stock, may be, of those who, with their high priest, Hyrcanus, were carried away captive from Jerusalem by Tigranes in the second century of our era, and placed in the city and neighbourhood of Wan. Their descendants, two hundred years after, were already so numerous that Shapour (Sapores) II. destroyed no less than 10,000 families in Wan alone. We encamped near the Jewish nomades, and I visited their tents, but could learn nothing of their history. They fed their flocks, as their fathers had done before them, in these hills, and paid taxes to the governor of Bash-Kalah. We had now reached the higher regions of Kurdistan.[162] Next morning we soon left the narrow flowery valley and the brawling stream, and entered an undulating upland covered with deep snow, considerably more than ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. On all sides of us were towering peaks, and to the west a perfect sea of mountains, including the lofty ranges of Hakkiari and Bohtan. Far away to the north was the azure basin of Lake Wan, and beyond it rose the solitary white cone of the Subhan Dagh. Descending rapidly, and passing, near the foot of the mountain, one or two miserable, half-deserted Kurdish hamlets, we entered a long narrow ravine, shut in by perpendicular cliffs of sandstone and conglomerate. This outlet of the mountain streams opens into the valley of Mahmoudiyah, in the centre of which rises an isolated rock crowned by the picturesque castle of Kosh-Ab. We pitched our tents on a green lawn, near the bank of the foaming stream which sweeps round the foot of the castellated rock. Soon after our arrival a Kurdish Bey, of venerable appearance, a descendant of the hereditary chiefs of Mahmoudiyah, called upon me. He had once been the owner of the castle, but it had been wrested from him by two brothers, named Khan Murad and Khan Abdal, mere mountain robbers. In this stronghold the brothers long defied the Turkish government, levying black-mail upon such caravans as ventured to pass through their territories, and oppressing with fines and forced conversions their Christian subjects. It was but the year before our visit that they had yielded to the troops sent against them, and had been sent into banishment, with the rest of the rebel chiefs, to Candia.