Our day's stage ended at Akra; a considerable mountain township and the seat of a Turkish _kaimakam_, a departmental governor, subordinate in the present instance to the _Vali_ of the province of Mosul. Akra displays itself most imposingly to a traveller approaching from the westward, and indeed forms a striking spectacle from whatever point it is viewed. Behind it a group of steep-pitched ridges are gabled out from the main mountain chain like a range of gigantic dormers, and drop down in rugged hipped ends to the level plain far below. Their crests are hacked and indented like the "dissipated saw" of the Bab Ballads, and the intervening gorges are half choked with the avalanches of boulders which have cascaded down their flanks. The lower portions of these gorges are filled with trees which grow in the terraced garden plots alongside the little rivulets, but the upper slopes are all bare and tawny like broken craters of half-baked clinker brick. [Illustration: ORAMAR. Looking northward across the gorge towards the crags of Supa Durig between Jilu and Baz. No. 6] One of the most prominent of these ridges breaks down into a sort of saddle, and surges up again into a rocky knoll before its final descent to the plain; and across this saddle are hung the houses of Akra, with the ruined fragments of its ancient citadel crowning the highest point of the rocky ridge above. The bulk of the town overflows into the ravine on the western side, where the houses are ranged round the sweep of the hollow like the stepped seats of an amphitheatre. So steep are the slopes on which they lie that the roof of each house serves as a front yard to its next door neighbour, or perhaps one should say to its neighbour on the next story; and the streets are all so narrow that they are quite undiscernible from a distance, though one of them is in fact wide enough to accommodate a rudimentary bazaar. Akra does not boast a _khan_, but our _zaptiehs_ had already decided for us at what house we were to spend the evening. We were to put up with the _malmudir_, the departmental treasurer;[77] and one of our escort had already spurred ahead to inform that worthy functionary of the treat that was in store for him. This seemed rather an arbitrary proceeding, but the _malmudir_ quite acquiesced in it. We met him at the entrance to the town, walking out to make us welcome; a young and pleasant looking man, who greeted us in French very hospitably, and guided us up the steep stepped streets to his house on the saddle above.