Amid all the horror and misery of this desert of human despair we found a Christian angel of pity, isolated, working single-handed, striving to alleviate the terrible lot of the starving people. The angel was an American woman, Miss Cowden, of the Presbyterian Mission. Years before she had given up home, country, and friends in obedience to a higher call, and was devoting her life and her energies to the betterment of the temporal lot of the unhappy, underfed, Persian children. She had learned their language, and moved from village to village alone and unattended, carrying out her great work of charity, and content to live in some dirty hovel. A vocation surely demanding sublime self-abnegation, and calling, I should think, for the highest attributes of faith and courage! I hold no brief for foreign missionaries in general. I know that their proselytizing methods have been the subject of severe criticism in the public press and on the lecture platform. All the more reason, therefore, why I should tell of a work which is being done so unobtrusively, without hope of earthly recompense, and well beyond the range of the most powerful "Big Bertha" of the cinema world. The Kirindis for the most part belong to the curious religious sect called Aliullahis, about {85} whose beliefs and rites many strange legends circulate. One of these concerns their immunity from injury by fire, and recalls the "fire walkers" of the Tongan Islands. Aliullahian devotees, it is said, will enter a kind of oven and stay there while fire is heaped around it, making it red-hot. Then, covering their heads with the burning cinders, they cry, "I am cold," and pass out unhurt. Another ceremony consists in lifting bars of red-hot iron out of the fire with their bare hands, their skin showing no signs of burning. Their religion seems to be a strange mixture of Mohammedanism and Judaism, with doctrines from various other esoteric faiths grafted on to it. Thus they number amongst their prophets Benjamin, Moses, Elia, David, and Jesus Christ, and they have also a saint of peculiar efficacy in intercession named Ali. Some investigators into their creed maintain that Ali and Daoud (David) are one and the same person; others think that Ali is so high up in the spiritual hierarchy as only to be invoked through Daoud. In any case, their prayer before battle is, "O Daoud, we are going to war. Grant that we overcome our enemy!" They then sacrifice some animal, usually a sheep, which is roasted whole. The High Priest prays over the carcass and distributes the flesh in small portions to those present. Communion in this sacrament appears to inspire the Aliullahian with absolute confidence in the success of any undertaking it precedes. {86} Another of their beliefs is that of a successive incarnation of the Deity in the greatest of their spiritual guides, seven of whom are clubbed together under the name of "Haft-Tan."