From Urfa the road to Diarbekr keeps a mean way between ranges of mountains, the Karaja in the south-east and the high Kurdistan ranges to the north-west, called in ancient times Masius and Niphates respectively by the Romans. In many places the track brings one near the Euphrates, and traverses a number of ravines carrying down tributary streams. The general aspect of the country all the way is great rolling uplands, across which wind and rain come with express velocity and piercing cold. I believe the road from Severik to Diarbekr is impassable from December to February. Certainly when we passed in early April, snow was lying in patches not far away. The prospect is always immense, always dreary, for, though there is water to be got in any one of the innumerable gullies of these immense plains, and though the soil is fertile enough, the Turkish blight is upon the land. In the distance, more particularly to the north, are the sullen, frowning masses of the Kurdistan mountains, at this time of the year half hidden in black clouds, and before and behind apparently limitless plains rising gradually to the east, till at the highest point one looks down over the undulating desert with a curious feeling of being left out in the desolation of utter abandonment, unsheltered from wind, rain, and snow, and lost in the immensity of a silent death-like solitude of infinitely sinister aspect. And these plains and mountains have from immemorial time been the boundaries, natural and political, of the south and north lands. The high dark range over north--Niphates we must call it, since to-day it has lost its general name--gives birth to the Tigris, the “Arrow.”[6] It was also the northern boundary of Assyria under the first great Assyrian monarch, Tiglath-Pileser I. (1100 B.C.). Behind its frowning walls lay the mysterious lands of the Nairi, whom the Assyrian monarchs, greater than any of their descendants, succeeded in subduing, or found necessary to keep chastised periodically. The proudest boast of the Assyrian monarchs was ever that they had penetrated the lands of Nairi and subdued their petty kings. And afterwards, the lands of Nairi were called “Gordyene,” which is “Kurdian” or Kurds, no more and no less, a fact which supports the Kurdish claim to possession of the land ever since the first Aryan in the birth of time came forth from central Asia to people the West.