However, the climate of Constantinople had done sufficient to disgust them with the place, and the Shaikh announced his intention of leaving by the first steamer for Beyrouth, and returning to a place called Halabja, on the Persio-Turkish frontier, in the Southern Kurdish country. Not unnaturally I was curious to know, first, the reason for his leaving Kurdistan; and second, why he did not propose to return there, stopping short on the frontier at the nearest spot. Tentatively I put a question or two, but he evidently had a suspicion of all strangers, and I had to be content with my own theories, which could evolve nothing more probable than classing him as a political refugee; at any rate, he seemed pretty miserable in these strange and squalid surroundings, and, bearing in his language and manner the strong reminiscence of Persian Kurdistan, seemed terribly out of place in this town that aped Europe and all its meanest features. In all, I had three interviews; he would not be induced to come over to Pera, which he had heard of as a town full of European women and shops “à la ferangi,” where he considered his priestly turban and flowing garments very out of place. So each time I found him under the quilt with his companion, much depressed, very silent, sighing heavily, and talking of nothing but places and people he had left behind in his native mountains. My acquaintance with him, though little enough, was the cause of ripening an idea which ever since I had arrived in, and disliked, Constantinople, had gradually been springing up in my mind. Though no Kurd, nor separated from kin and custom, yet as a former dweller in the east of Persia, I yearned for the freedom of plain and mountain, the slow march of the clanging caravan, the droning song of the shepherds on the hills, the fresh clean air, and the burning sun. His talk was of all this, and my thoughts of it too. His dialect and his rough Persian recalled too vividly scenes of a year before. Irresistibly pictures arose of the plain and hill of Kurdistan, the glorious sunsets over plain and on snowy peak, and the more I gave way to these day-dreams, the more I let the rude accents linger in my ear, the stronger grew the attraction of the road. The Shaikh left and I heard no more of him, but I missed him and his little room, a corner of Kurdistan in Constantinople, with occupants whose home habits remained unassailed by all the temptations of the city’s coffee-houses and comforts, and daily I could not help picturing his progress across Syria, and gradually to the borders of Kurdistan, the Tigris lowlands. I even hailed the day he should have got to the first Kurdish town as notable, little dreaming that he had been robbed and nearly killed before he got there--by Kurds. [Sidenote: DISGUISED AS A NATIVE]