A small skylight sufficiently illuminated the place, and at once its arrangements stamped the occupants as natives of Persia. Opposite me, a tin road-samovar sang behind a row of little tea-glasses. Upon the samovar head sat a squat little teapot, and the Kurdish servant was filling a Persian hubble-bubble beside a brazier. Three or four Persian wooden boxes ornamented with brass-headed nails were by the walls, and in a corner were the necessaries of the road, earthen water-pots, tin “af tābeh”--a kind of jug for ablutions--tin wash-basin, and other articles with which every traveller in Persia is familiar. Commencing half-way and covering the floor to the farther end was a gilīm, a kind of carpet, woven in Persian Kurdistan, and seated facing one another, their legs concealed under a quilt apparently supported upon a stool, were two men. Him I sought was a black-browed and bearded priest, an individual surly looking enough to scare away any uninvited visitor. His companion was but an older edition of himself. Their heads were covered by small white turbans, but whether they had changed their native dress for that of Constantinople I could not see, as they both wore heavy overcoats. [Sidenote: A CURIOUS INTERVIEW] The stool under the quilt covered in its turn a brazier of charcoal, and formed the “kursi,” which is the Kurdish method of keeping oneself warm. Obviously the heat, which is considerable, is confined to the space under the quilt and does not escape into the room, which in this case was bitterly cold. The Shaikh had been informed of my coming, and welcomed me in Persian, with just enough Kurdish accent to be perceptible; and I squeezed my legs under the quilt, which he pulled up to our chins, and spent a few minutes exchanging compliments with him and the older man. The situation might have struck an outsider unused to a “kursi” as absurd: the spectacle of three men apparently sitting up in a kind of a huge bed, for the quilt was an ordinary bed-quilt, and pillows supported our backs--nodding gravely over the top of the bed-clothes at one another. They were much depressed by the weather, but on my telling them that I had been to their Kurdistan and knew their country and language they revived somewhat, and with tea and cigarettes became jovial and communicative, supplying me with a great deal of the information upon tribes, that I had come to seek, but had not hoped to acquire in the first interview.