Wed May 12. [12 May 1909] Up at 3.30 and off a little before 5 with
Kas Mattai and his brother Shim'un to see the Assyrian (?) castle. We
took just 11/2 hours to get up to it from the village. All the way up the
crag are traces of a fine masonry embanked road. At the bottom of
the steep slope there is a place prepared for a stele but nothing on it.
Nothing left of the castle, but stones fallen down from the wall. At the
head of the valley there is another crag with another castle on it, they
say. Wild Rhubarb. I had worn the native shoes to climb up but as the
soles are of felt they wore out long before I got down and I was on the
rock before I rejoined my boots. Though I mended my shoes with a
safety pin! In the gorge below the crag is an Assyrian stele of a king
in a long fringed robe holding a small club in his hand. Cuneiform
inscrip. all across him. Still lower down in the valley a ruined
monastery of which nothing remains but a few vaulted chambers. We
climbed up the hill to the W and walked through oak woods for about
an hour to another monastery with vaulted parallel chambers. A large
garden of fruit trees round about it and a great grove of blue flags
probably the remains of its cemetary [sic]. On our way back we
stopped and some shepherds gave us milk. The pointed white felt
caps of the boys make them look like mountain gnomes. The older
men wind a rope like turban round their caps. Kas Mattai speaks
Fellahi, Syriac, Kurdish and Arabic. We got back to camp about 11. I
lunched and slept and wrote a letter to the Times. Awfully hot and
flies.