The _rais'_ house was a typical sample of the ordinary mountain cabin; walled with rough stone rubble, and floored with beaten earth. The low, flat, smoke-blackened ceiling was formed with unsquared poplar stems, upon which was spread a bed of brushwood[93] roofed over with a thick layer of mud. The mud of course cracks in dry weather and the roof becomes very leaky; but it can be quickly consolidated with the little stone roller which is kept on the roof for the purpose, and thus be made once more watertight as soon as the rains return. The _tanura_, or fireplace, is a beehive-shaped hole dug out in the centre of the floor,[94] and the smoke finds an exit (eventually) through a hole in the roof above. There are no windows whatever, and the doorway is a very low one; and thus in most cases the smoke-hole serves the inmates for skylight as well. Poor Erdil! Forgotten and isolated, and steeped in poverty and ignorance, it supplies an apt illustration of the conditions of life which prevail among the Kurdish-owned Christian villages in the mountains. Conditions which were commoner still before the advent of the Archbishop's Mission, and which are still all too common in certain outlying districts like Bohtan. Indeed, in many respects Erdil deserves to be congratulated. Politically, as the inhabitants themselves admitted, they have no great cause to complain. Their owner is the Agha of Suryi; and consequently their over-lord is the Sheikh of Barzan, who is nicknamed "the Sheikh of the Christians," because he treats his Christian vassals so well. His tolerance secures them from persecution, and his vigorous rule from raiding; and they gave him the same testimonial that was given in old days to King Brian Boru in Ireland, that you "might safely leave a gold bracelet on a bush by the road in his domain." But religiously they were left destitute. Their Patriarch seemed to have forgotten them. All the surrounding villages were Moslem, and their nearest co-religionists were a long day's journey away. They had their church and their service books, and a parson's glebe and cottage; but thirty years had elapsed since last they had a priest of their own in the village, and it was but seldom that even a wandering deacon had visited them during all that time. For thirty years they had no one to celebrate their services, no one to marry them, no one to baptize their children, no one to bury their dead; and one of the first requests that they proffered to "Rabbi Mr. Wigram" was that he would at least recite the Church of England burial service over the graves of those who had died within the last few years. Surely it is no small credit to them that under such circumstances they remained even nominally Christian; and we feel some satisfaction in recording that a little time after our visit their Patriarch found himself able to send them the priest whom they desired.