But the very magnitude of these Greek gifts aroused the distrust of the majority. They knew well that Turkish promises were apt to prove so much "hot air." The arms and salaries were things that could never be expected to materialise. They doubted even the immunity which all these lavish promises implied. _Jehad_ had been proclaimed, and they were Christians in a Moslem country. Could the Turks guarantee them from the attacks of their turbulent Kurdish neighbours--attacks from which they had never been wholly exempt even in their most tranquil periods, and to which the proclamation of _Jehad_ would now give sanction and cohesion? Could they even rest assured that the Turks themselves would not attack them as soon as their hands were freed from the embarrassments which now beset them? They saw the fate that had overtaken their co-religionists, the Armenians and Jacobites; the fate that had befallen their own fellow-tribesmen in the outlying districts to the East. Every night brought their Patriarch news (for now none dared travel by day) of some fresh massacre perpetrated in some of their isolated villages. One night came five successive messengers from five different villages; and all closed their tidings with the same refrain, "I only am escaped to tell." Would it not be better to trust to their own right arms? To the chance of help from Russia, to the fainter chance of help from England? These nations had always befriended them, and with them their real sympathies lay. Yet the peril was great and obvious. They were in the very jaws of the wolf, and who could blame them if they elected to play for safety? They could rest assured at all events that England and Russia would not. They might argue, with their Yezidi neighbours (and with a good many other more enlightened folk in less remote districts than Sheikh Adi) that it was safer to offend a good God, who might forgive, than a malignant Devil who assuredly would not. Meanwhile the war was still distant, and no final choice was forced on them. Through the winter the nation wavered. But it was significant that the Patriarch quitted Qudshanis (which lay on the outskirts of his territory, and close to the Turkish garrison at Julamerk), and withdrew across the Zab into the rugged mountain fastnesses of Diz. This seemed to portend rejection of the Turkish overtures, yet in truth under what other conditions could he continue to negotiate with a Government which had just inaugurated the Armenian massacres by treacherously kidnapping and assassinating their chiefs?