In Persian fashion he rose as I entered, his hands crossed before him, nor sat till I was installed upon my strip of carpet and had requested him to do so. My muleteer now appeared, and Qadir, one of my fellow-travellers, Kurds both. These sat upon the door-step, and by the light of a candle we partook of tea. These two, hearing myself and the darvish speaking Persian, introduced us to the rhyme which is ever being quoted all over Kurdistan-- “Laoza laoza arawia Turki hunara Farsi shikara Kurdi guzi kara;” a doggerel signifying, “Arabic is sonorous, Turkish an achievement, Persian is sugar--and Kurdish an unpleasantness.”[30] The darvish and myself became so engrossed in the reminiscences of Persia in which we indulged, that we quite forgot the presence of the two Kurds. Our conversation outlasted the candle, which guttered out on its end in the mud wall, and by the light of a burning stick the darvish spread our bedding, and we retired, to the sound of a chant which he murmured under his cloak, till he fell asleep, mainly consisting of “Bismillah ar Rahman ar Rahim, al Hamdu’l illah Rebbu’l ’alemin ar Rahman ar Rahim.” He woke me next morning by murmuring gently, “Agha! Agha!” in my ear. To rouse a sleeper noisily is a breach of etiquette among Persians. It was just dawn as we crept along the stony road leading out of Altun Keupri to Kirkuk. There are three roads between the two places, and the condition of the country determines which one the caravan takes. This time we were to take the longest; for to our left, the east, lay the Hamavand country, distant certainly, but whence roving bands of Kurds emerged, raiding. By turning to the right, about ten miles outside Altun Keupri, we should pass through a long range of low hills which runs between the two places, and have their protection on our left as we went south to Kirkuk. These are almost the last of the ranges, which, rising higher and higher as the Kurdistan highlands are approached, are the sentinels of the Zagros range, which itself is the rampart of the Persian plateau. All along this road, till we put the hills between ourselves and the east, we could see far-away snowpeaks beyond Rawanduz, that were on Persian soil. We found a way through the range, which is not more that 500 feet high, and came out into a broken place of foothills, where were a few Kurds grazing sheep, and lower down some Arabs cutting green barley that would have yellowed and scorched if left longer. For here is the hot region; Kirkuk is on the same plain as Bagdad, and suffers from an even worse climate, the hot winds scorching it during several months of the year. Clear of these hills, we came out to the flat desert that stretches away west to the Tigris, and beyond to the Euphrates, and beyond again to Syria, a dead level over which the hot wind of summer blows, or where in later spring the air, getting stagnant, grows hot, and one bakes in the shadowless waste.