Buying anything at first was rather an ordeal, for Sulaimania has retained the Persian currency, though it is many a long year since it belonged to that nation, no Turkish coins except the mejidie being accepted. Thus old names and coins remain, while the names of Turkish coins are applied to the currency as well, resulting in confusion. There are three actual tokens: the copper “pul”; the silver “baichu,” or Persian “panj shahi”; and the ordinary two-kran piece of Persia, here called “tihrani.” But we encounter such names as “charkhi,” “jout,” “deh para,” “ghazi,” “qamari,” “qran,” and “qran-i-rash,” besides these. Everything is reckoned in “qamari,” and this imaginary coin is worth four “pul,” and the “baichu” (which being the actual token must be handled) is worth seven pul. For larger amounts the tihrani is quoted, consisting of five baichu and one pul, or nine qamari; and the stranger plunges about in despair, not lessened by the fact that in Kirkuk they call the baichu a qamari, and the tihrani a qran. I quote an example of the working of this system, which, it is to be hoped, is not more confusing than the unexplained situation. When I would go to where fragments of a sheep suspended from a pole constituted a butcher’s shop, to ask the price, I was informed “thirty-two.” I must know that this means thirty-two qamari, or three qrans and five qamaris, which is in tokens, three qran and two baichu and six pul. This is the price of a Sulaimania “oke,” or as the Kurd calls it, “huqqa.” Every town in the East fixes its own scheme of weights; and being asked, the Sulaimanian will, with excess of lucidity, explain that the local huqqa is four-fifths of the Panjwin huqqa, five-fourths of a Tabriz “man,” two-fifths of the Halabja “man,” and will not, till the last moment, give the information that it equals two and a half of the Stamboul “oke,” which passes as a base for calculation throughout Asiatic Turkey. Thus, receiving the reply “thirty-two,” one arrives, or is expected to arrive, at the knowledge that the amount of meat necessary, usually a quarter of a huqqa, costs eight qamari, which must be paid for by four baichu and four pul. At the same time is discovered the fact that the huqqa--like a Persian “man,” which it really is--misnamed, is divided into four hundred dirhams, and that all fractions of the huqqa must be expressed in Turkish and not in the native Kurdish. It was a great relief to find that nearly all the population knew some Persian, for the northern and eastern Kurdish I knew was not current here, and to the population less comprehensible than Persian. At first, and before I became recognised, the fact of my wearing a fez gave everyone to think that I was a Turk; and those who possessed any would air their little Turkish upon me, and, it must be said, show considerably more gratification at the opportunity of talking Persian.