rooms with glass windows, for the wives of wealthy travellers, opening on to a little fenced space of roof where they might promenade. The “khanchi” or keeper of the serai pointed to this with pride. The rooms, he informed us, were special accommodation for travelling pashas and such great game, and the chicken-run of a promenade was considered to be absolutely the last word in the progress of architecture. [Sidenote: BAB] The first experiences of travelling in native guise reveal many little things one never thought of before, when, as Europeans, we arrived at a stage, had our room quickly swept and carpeted, camp tables and chairs set out, and steaming tea swiftly produced. Certainly I did not have to sweep my room on this occasion, though subsequently I learned to wield the three blades of grass they call a broom in these parts. Water, too, the khanchi fetched. But my small belongings, which it was not safe to leave in the carriage, I had to bring up, and made several journeys up and down the narrow steps from courtyard to roof, laden with mattress, quilt, blanket, and the bags and bundles without which one finds it impossible to travel in the East. Then I discovered that I needed tea very badly, so I had to go downstairs with my tin samovar, draw water from a well, fill it, and beg the lighted coal from a coachman whom I saw smoking a hubble-bubble. This done, I retired to my heights again, and after some time enjoyed a glass of tea and some dry bread. At this juncture my coachman appeared, and expressed his astonishment that I had not followed the custom of travellers arriving in a strange place--to visit the bazaar. This I had omitted to do, in fact had not thought of it. Now it was just sunset, I had no dinner to eat, the bazaar was closing; and worse, there was nothing, not even bread, in my bags for to-morrow’s twelve hours in the desert. By this time I could get on fairly well with Turkish, but suddenly my coachman exclaimed, in a fit of geniality, “Az kurmānjī dazānam” (“I know Kurdish”!), and I found in a moment a new means of communication, for though I did not know the Kermanji dialect well, it is sufficiently near some others I did know, to be intelligible. I found afterwards that from the fact of my hailing Kurdish as an old friend, my coachman, who had been at some pains to find out my native place, a point always to be settled with one’s travelling companion in the East, had at once registered me as a native of Persian Kurdistan. So with status as a Haji of Kurdistan conferred on me, I was introduced as such by my friend the coachman to all and sundry.