His melancholy, he averred, was due to his separation from his own hills, and his wife and family, and the loss of loot that he suffered by his absence from the tribe. He drew a pathetic comparison between himself scorching in the heat of Shahr-i-Zur, while his wife sat upon her roof in the hill village, clad in silk and satins, under her the finest of Persian rugs, round her a wall of rolls of cloths and stuffs from which she chose new garments, the while she listened to the hissing of the tea samovar and held her face to the cool breeze. By such talk we whiled away the time, and made Sulaimania in one stage, halting during the night for a few hours to rest the animals, and snatching a nap on the hard ground. A little excitement was caused during the afternoon, by a skirmishing party from a tent village discovering our presence and mistaking us for robbers, and we saw the spectacle of village Kurds calling to horse. We saw the village calm and quiet in the heat of the afternoon, and next instant, men--a moment ago asleep--darting forth at a gallop in twos and threes upon horses kept ever saddled and bridled, to take up positions around us and prevent attack. Rasul Ahmad was able to convince them at a distance that we were but the Pasha’s people, and they came down and invited us to tea. As Lady Adela had put me in the charge of Rasul Ahmad, I was fain to bide by his counsel for a resting-place in Sulaimania during the night, and adopted his suggestion of staying at the house of a woman, Piruz, a relation of his, who possessed a small house. This, too, was conveniently placed upon the edge of the town, and afforded a resting-place for him when in Sulaimania. As this was a type of the humbler houses of Kurdistan, it may be well to describe it briefly here. Round three sides of an irregular square courtyard were built rooms of mud, three of which had no wall on the courtyard side, making a shady, cool place to sit in the summer. The winter rooms, with doors opening from these chambers, possessed each but a single glazed door barely five feet high. One of these, the best, was whitened with gypsum, and the rest plastered with the mixture of chaff and mud that is the chief ingredient of the mason’s trade in the Middle East. The floors were of unmixed mud, smoothed as well as the stamping of bare feet could do it. In the midst of the yard a stream of cold, clear water bubbled up from a hole, filling a cistern of plaster and brick nearly level with the ground, under a large willow-tree that made a shady place to drink tea in the morning and afternoon. The landlady, as owner of this mansion, worth fifty pounds, was reckoned wealthy according to the Kurdish idea. She let the rooms to a couple of families for a total of half a crown a month, and having relations and friends who kept her supplied with flour and oil, lived comfortably. Here, where bread is made in the house, and is the main article of food, living comes cheaply enough.