What I liked about the Kurds was their habit--the common inheritance of most free men--of looking their interlocutor straight in the face. Their women, many possessing great physical beauty, and glorious creatures all, would crowd round to do the honours to those visiting their village. Amongst the Kurds the women are allowed a great deal of freedom. They shoot and ride like so many Amazons. It is true they are the hewers of wood and the drawers of {230} water in the village or community, but, save for lacking parliamentary enfranchisement, they do not seem to have many grievances against the masculine portion of the Kurdish world. They always go unveiled, are not a bit "man-shy," and, unlike their Moslem sisters in Turkey and Persia, do not consider themselves spiritually defiled when their faces are gazed upon by some Infidel whom chance has thrown across their path. From this I do not wish it to be inferred that the Kurdish women are immodest in conduct, or of what might be described as "flighty morals." Far from it. These self-same tribesmen who received us so hospitably in their villages, and gave us entertainment of their best--treating us in friendly fashion according to their laws, because we had come trusting to their honour in the guise of friends and without hostile intent--would, when they took the "war path" and raided a British post, put up a spirited fight, fully bent on killing or being killed. Persian Kurds are largely pastoral and nomadic. There are the sedentary tribes who are the tillers of the soil and never move very far away from home. The nomads, on the other hand, roam with their flocks and herds and womenfolk from winter to summer quarters and vice versa, and it is during these periodical migrations that the inherited predatory instincts of the Kurds are given free rein. Many are the armed forays made on a peaceful {231} Persian neighbour's stock. Often there is resistance, and occasionally an attempt at reprisals; so a respectably-sized Persian-Kurdish hill-war may have had as its origin the theft of half a dozen goats by Kurdish robbers. Stray bands of brigands who had made life more than usually interesting for some Persian village or other, if pursuit became too vigorous and they were threatened with capture, were always able to escape the consequences of their depredations by slipping over the frontier and seeking bast (sanctuary) in Turkish territory. Whether the Kurds are, or are not, the descendants of those first-class fighting men of long ago who opposed the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the bleak mountain passes of Kurdistan, they undeniably are imbued with a certain pride of ancestry which manifests itself in various little ways. No pure nomadic Kurd will ever engage in manual labour, which he looks upon as a disgrace, and a job fit only for helots, nor will he become a Charvadar (muleteer).