“Yet, had I known it before, how much more help I would have given you, for what I have done has been nought but the calling of mere courtesy, and the hospitable spirit incumbent upon all to the stranger, of whatever faith or race he be. Now, if you are resolved to go, I will give you letters to Khwaja Salim, my agent in Kirkuk, and to Matlub in Bagdad. But I place upon you an obligation, by your soul! that you will not, with the European clothes, put off the thoughts and remembrances of Kurdistan, nor let our names slip from your memory. For we are rough and savage, our ways are not yours--though you know ours, and follow them here like ourselves--what we deem comfort you deem savagery, and the European (I know this, for I have been in Beyrout and Aleppo and met the European) ever scoffs at the Eastern land; but we are still men, and if our lives are spent in a gloom of uncivilisation, it is not because we have refused to emerge from it, but because we cannot; perhaps we should lose our few good points in the strong light of Westernism, and, taking to its comforts, spurn its obligations and become worthless--as I have seen so many become, who have been to Europe and returned. So you have taken us all by surprise; like an enemy in disguise you have penetrated the walls of our strongholds, and I for one am not going to tell the bazaar who has been amongst us.” [Sidenote: BURIAL OF MUSTAFA BEG] Then he went on to ask details of my former life in Persia, and the way I had acquired sufficient knowledge of the land and life to pass in bazaar and mosque as I was doing. During this conversation, one came to inform us that they were about to inter the body of Mustafa Beg. So, following him, we went outside to the graveyard on the southern hill, where on a bare stony slope three or four mulberry trees, bent double by the fierce “rashaba,” find a footing among Sulaimania’s dead. Here we met the coffin-bearers, who brought the coffin and without ceremony laid it in a shallow grave, covering it with stones and earth. There were but a few of us present, the master of the Military School, Matti, and myself, besides the people hired to bury him; nor could we stay, for the Hamavands were circling about on their ponies not far away. The town surgeon had paid for his funeral out of the various almost worthless odds and ends he had possessed, together with his clothing, so that all that remained of the estate of the old Mustafa Beg was the four liras he had entrusted to my care. These I guarded, and would take to Bagdad, whence I could send them safely by postal remittance to Tripoli, and be reasonably certain of their getting to their proper destination.