A Yezidi crossed our path some five or six miles from Mosul. He gave us a very wide berth, keeping quite a hundred yards away. But it chanced that his line lay to windward; and our escort rode at him furiously, fairly bellowing with indignation. How dared he have the effrontery to intrude his unclean carcass "betwixt the wind and our nobility?" And presently another Yezidi actually tacked himself on to our party, following us (at a very humble distance) for two or three hours along the road. "It would be a good deed to kill the dog," was our _zaptieh's_ muttered comment; "but while he is under the _Effendi's_ shadow, I suppose I must let him alone!" Yet withal there is a spice of fear in the contempt which is felt for the Yezidis. They are "ower sibb" to the Devil to be quite safe subjects for abuse. They seem to be regarded in much the same light as witches used to be by our own seventeenth-century ancestors. It is virtue to revile and maltreat them: and by daylight, with a sufficient mob to back you, you may feel secure from their resentment. But it is another matter altogether to pass their door alone after dark! The Yezidis form a considerable community numbering in all some 150,000; for about 500 villages own allegiance to their _Mira_,[42] and there are many detached colonies residing in alien towns. These villages are widely distributed--isolated for the most part singly among the surrounding Kurds and Christians. Some are as far west as Aleppo; some as far north as Tiflis (where all the town scavengers are Yezidis); some as far east as Teheran. Their nucleus is in the Sinjar mountains, in the desert south-west of Mosul; where they are secured from invasion by the barricades of rock, and the waterless wastes which environ them. But the central shrine of their faith, the Jerusalem of their vows and offerings, is the cryptic Temple of Sheikh Adi, hidden just within the fringe of the northern mountains which overlook the great Mosul plain. It was late on an autumn evening that we neared the last stage of our journey thither. We had quitted the plains about mid-day; and our course had lain for some miles along a sparsely cultivated valley, tucked in behind the outermost ripple which the mountains fling down upon the wold. On our right lay this barbican ridge, from the crest of which one might look forth across all the plain of Tigris; while on our left the hills rose higher, more rugged and more precipitous--a second, but still a subordinate, breastwork of the lordly Oberland behind.