Had it not been that among us were a number of people of the Jaf tribe, into whose lands we were entering, the riders would have now left us, and entrenched among the hillocks farther on would have attacked and looted the caravan. Fortunately their anger soon subsided, and the remaining soldiers, bruised, torn and pitiful, once more resumed their slouch towards Halabja, keeping as far as possible from the rest of us. Under the mounting sun we put the hillocks and gullies of Sulaimania behind us, till ascending a last long slope the plain of Shahr-i-Zur lay before us, a broad valley dotted with the black tent encampments of the Jaf tribe, and the many mounds that stand there, relics of ancient inhabitants and recent villages destroyed by the order of a famous shaikh, a Sulaimanian saint and notorious scoundrel. [Sidenote: HALABJA] The eastern edge of this mountain-bound plain lies under the shadow of the great mountain wall of Aoraman, frontier of Persia, a wall bounding the countries of the most secluded and perhaps mysterious of the tribes of Kurdistan, Aorami and Rizhoi, and of those worshippers of the Muhammadan saint Ali, who call him God. Halabja, or Alabja, as it is written, a speck on the far-rising slope of the plain, was perfectly visible thirty miles away, and between us and it was the perfect desolation beloved of the Turk. His hand here nowadays is but feeble, and this district, once a fertile and prosperous Persian province and still Persian in everything but name, is entirely under the control of Uthman Pasha, head of the Jaf Kurds, who own little or no subjectivity to the Turkish Government, and with the worst possible grace tolerate the presence of the few Turkish officials at Halabja. Post and telegraph they abolished long ago, refusing to pay money for patches of paper to stick upon letters they could carry themselves, and finding a use for telegraph wire in the manufacture of chains and bullets; so that now, while Halabja possesses a full-blown post and telegraph master, the office is as much a sinecure as that of the tax collector, who sits in Sulaimania and begs crumbs of pay from Uthman Pasha. This Shahr-i-Zur, whose mounds are full of the coins of Sasanian Persia and the tokens of Assyria, was till a few decades back the old sub-province of Gulambar,[60] “The Amber Flower,” from all reports one of the most beautiful of all the beauties of Kurdistan. Thickly inhabited by Aoramani tribesmen and Chaldeans, it possessed innumerable fruit and flower lands, had, and has still, a fine supply of sweet water, and cool breezes from the high mountains to temper the heat of the plain.[61]