These queer creatures, when in their carriage, spent a great part of their time chanting in Gregorian tones in a language neither I nor the coachman could make out. Now and then they would sing a Kurdish song or a little doggerel in Turkish. Their conversation was carried on in Arabic and Kurdish, which two of them spoke equally well; only the middle man, who appeared so Kurdish, confined himself to that language. At night, now, in the caravanserai, I had a chance of listening to the crew, and heard them talk in the Kurdish called Kermanji, in Arabic, in Turkish, and then in this dialect of theirs which contained a good many Kurdish words. This was distinctly tantalising, and next morning I made the acquaintance of the one I set down as pure Kurd. He was very hearty; we spoke in Kurdish, and I found that they had already ascertained from my driver that I was a southern Kurdish Haji. I now learned that they, too, were returning from Mecca, and were natives of Sert, a small town south of Lake Van. No sooner had I heard this than the secret of their dialect was out. I remembered tales the Chaldeans of Urumia and Dilman in Persia tell of the mysterious “Gavarnai,” who come from inaccessible passes among the Kurdish mountains, Gavarnai calling themselves Christian, but often fleeing from Gavarnai who were Musulman. The solution of the Gavarnai question is as follows:-- [Sidenote: MYSTERIOUS COMPANIONS] The district of Sert and the Gavar (or rock) district of Kurdistan is one of the most inaccessible of the many sealed corners of this mountain country, and it was here that the descendants of the Chaldeans and Assyrians fled before the hordes of the Tatars in the early fifteenth century, finding an asylum among the Kurdish tribes. Here in the beautiful valleys of Sert they settled, and many became Musulman among the Kurds. Others fled from Sert before the blood-feuds of their own kinsmen, who gradually learned from the Kurds a hardy recklessness and bravery unknown of their ancestors of the towns and plains, and pushed farther into the mountains. In quite recent times the village of Khusrava, now a considerable town, was founded by a Chaldean fugitive or explorer from the Sert valleys, named Nicolai, about 1780. This statement I put here upon the authority of a native of Khusrava, and leave it as it stands, not without remark, however, that the neighbouring town of Salmas was in pre-Muhammadan days a Chaldean bishopric, where there were undoubtedly a large number of Chaldeans among--but not intermarried--with the Armenians of that region. The language of these Assyrians, sometimes called Neo-Syriac, or Aramaic, has remained and is spoken, though now known as a language of the Christians, by a great part of the sedentary Musulman population of the Sert plain, who, though calling themselves Kurds, are of Chaldean descent.