Bad government and continual insecurity of the country have done their best to restrain the people from any attempt at permanent buildings, the result being that every bazaar, mosque, and caravanserai is broken down and ruinous; in fact, Mosul strikes the stranger as a squalid city on the verge of disintegration. A few moments outside the city one steps into the Mesopotamian desert, and Mosul, standing there, a mound in a desert, looks every bit what it is reputed among the Western peoples, a city buried in a remote and unmerciful wilderness. To approach it from any side except Diarbekr, by river, one must pass several days of the almost waterless desert road. Only to the south-east is the land fertile, and one understands why it is in that direction that Assyria proper lay. To-day the distant Zagros Mountains and their unknown and feared Kurds form a barrier as unconquerable as ever the ancients found them; and to them it was my purpose to go. We put up in an upper room of a khan or caravanserai called Hamad Qadu, and as our ways lay together, at least as far as Erbil, we thought to continue in companionship. But Haji found a cousin, who dragged him off to his house, and so we settled up our accounts and parted. The old man seemed to have conceived a great affection for me during his journey. “I never had a son,” he said, “for never did I take to myself a wife, for women are affliction and tribulation; but now I am old, I realise what it might have been to have had a son, and I curse the stiff-neckedness that ran me counter to the infallible laws of the Omniscient,” and he wept awhile, embraced me, and departed. Left alone in my stone cell, I bethought me of finding a muleteer to take me to Sulaimania, and as the café is the advertisement medium of the East, I betook myself there, inquired for a “qatirchi,” as the Turks call a muleteer, and found myself immersed in local politics. The bearing of them upon my need of a mule appeared at the end of the story, and may as well do so here. There are in Mosul a number of Sulaimanians engaged in trade, besides the inconsequent people who in the East travel from place to place apparently for the love of it. There are also soldiers galore--creatures dead to any feeling of self-restraint, decency of behaviour and manners, who are a curse to the place they pollute. A brawl occurred, owing to an assault by a drunken soldier upon a Kurdish woman of Sulaimania, and as Kurdish blood, even the vitiated blood of Sulaimania, is hot, it boiled, and many Mosul people were killed. [Sidenote: A FEUD] The primitive laws of these parts count the blood-feud as their chief, and here was sufficient to keep the two towns at feud for years. No native of Mosul dared go to Sulaimania, and equally, no Sulaimanian dared show himself in Mosul, though he was safer in a city where sufficient order prevailed to prevent his murder, except under provoking circumstances.