But in the country to the west of Mianeh and south of Lake Urumia the enemy was still inclined to spasmodic activity. It was in this region that he had harried the Nestorian Army as it was fighting its way to the south and to safety. At the beginning of October, 1918, the Turks held Sauj Bulagh, the local capital of the Kurds of Azerbaijan, Sakiz, Sain Kaleh, and Takan Teppeh, all of which were in more or less precarious touch with Kowanduz on the western slopes of the Kurdistan Range, and thence with the main and sole surviving Turkish Mesopotamian Army which was clinging tenaciously to Mosul. Their occupation of these several strategic points on the Persian side of the frontier enabled the Turks to threaten the British post at Bijar, on the confines of South-Western Kurdistan, and in a sense to menace the British occupation of Hamadan. [Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE SCENE FOLLOWING THE ARMENIAN RETIREMENT.] But Allenby's smashing blow at the Turk in Palestine had its repercussion in the remote highlands of Persia and in the remoter region of the Caspian Sea. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke the Turkish grip on Baku and appreciably loosened his hold on Azerbaijan. He withdrew from Mianeh and made ready to evacuate Tabriz and retire into his own territory in an eleventh-hour effort to {227} buttress up his remaining Asiatic provinces which, one after the other, were tottering beneath the sledgehammer blows of the British. Early in October the wheel of fate and the illness of a brother officer led to my being transferred from Caspian Headquarters to Bijar, as Assistant Political Officer and Intelligence Officer. I looked it up on the map and started. It was a long and interesting zigzag trek across Persia, first south-west to Hamadan, then north-west to Bijar and the wild country of the Kurdish tribes. Few Europeans can lay claim to any intimate knowledge of Kurdistan and its predatory but fascinating people. It is distinctly remote from the beaten tourist track. Russian and German travellers and scholars have nibbled at the ethnological and philological problems which it presents, and, much more recently, our own Major Soane in his remarkable book, "Through Kurdistan in Disguise," draws aside the veil a little, and we are able to take a peep at Kurdish life and manners naturally portrayed. Kurdistan cannot be said to possess either natural or political boundaries, for it embraces both Persian and Turkish territory, and in it live people who are not racially Kurds. Broadly speaking, it may be said to stretch from Turkish Armenia on the north to the Luristan Mountains on the south, and the Turkish-Persian frontier cuts it into two longitudinal sections. Persian Kurdistan, then, is bounded by Azerbaijan on the north, the Turkish frontier on the {228} west, Kermanshah on the south, and Khamseh and Hamadan on the east. Its old administrative capital is Sinneh.