Tuesday May 4. Dearest Mother. I can't tell you how glad I was to have your telegram yesterday. All my letters are hung up Bellow Baghdad - the last news I had of you was a letter from Moll dated March 1 - I can't think how it got through but I was most grateful to her for it. By the way I got 2 telegrams from London yesterday. One was dated May 1 and said that the address Oleous was not registered and they cd not deliver my telegram and the other was dated May 2 and was your answer to my telegram, so I suppose they thought better of it. But it was extraordinarily stupid of them. That accounts for the delay in the delivery of my telegram. I sent my last letter to you in a great hurry as I suddenly found a mail was going. It was very very nice at Mosul [Mawsil, Al]. Mr Young knew Hugo at Trinity; he is very charming and was a delightful host. Mr Wigram and Captain Dickson [see also Dixon] left yesterday and Dr and Mrs Griffeth [see also Griffith] filled their places, their house being dismantled as they are on the point of leaving for England. On Friday Mr Young had a large luncheon party; the German Consul, the French Consul (an intelligent man whom I had met at Aleppo [Halab]) the Griffeths and 3 missionary ladies. On Sunday we lunched with the German Consul and met our French colleague. At tea time Mr Young had an immense reception - to meet Capt. Dickson and me. I talked to the notables of the town from 5 to 7 without stopping; they were brought up in detachments of 2 and 3, it was very funny. Also I met a lot of interesting people, big notables and rogues, and bishops and holy men, whom I saw either in their own houses or in Dr Griffeth's. One way and another I heard and saw a great deal in Mosul. There will be more trouble there, I fear; the town is in a desperate state of anarchy. But it always was, not only under the Constitution. So this morning I left, Mr Young coming with me to the ferry - the bridge, I need scarcely say, is broken - I have not met a bridge in working order yet. It was blazing hot. I sent my caravan on and myself rode up onto the great tell of Kuyunjik which is a part of Nineveh. The walls and palace mounds of Nineveh stretched away on either side and blue bee eaters flew in and out of the excavation galleries - Layard worked here. It was very very beautiful and very striking. Then I turned S and rode through blazing heat across the plains of Assyria, deep in corn. The peasants were harvesting the barley and close on their heels, the locusts alas! were harvesting the wheat, which is still green. It was so hot that I had to go into a house, in a village I passed, to lunch. Early in the afternoon we came to Mar Behnam where there is a wonderful Jacobite monastery, an ancient mound with a round pool at its feet, and a little village. I photographed and took notes in the monastery all the afternoon. My tents were pitched on the slopes of the mound and I sat and watched the people watering their flocks at the pool while the moon rose over Assyria and found it, I expect, very little changed.

Thursday May 6. [6 May 1909] It was blazing hot again on Wed. We were off at 6 and rode for a couple of hours to a Xian village called Karakosh where there are 5 exceedingly interesting Jacobite churches. I did not plan them because they have been done, I think, but I photographed and made notes for 3 hours. As they stand they are probably of the 14th century (I'm guessing, but that can't be far out) but they are built upon the ancient place that was probably invaded in the 3rd century and their relationship with Coptic churches is close and very remarkable. I shall have much to say on this head some day. I lunched in the house of a charming priest and then rode on towards the hills. As the ground began to rise we got into exquisite meadows of grass and flowers and on the hills there were even a few trees - we have seen none since the journey began. Just before we got into camp we crossed a rippling mountain stream running between banks rosy with oleander - I could have wept with joy at the sight. We reached camp at 4, it was pitched Bellow a steep rocky mountain high up on the slopes (or rather precipices) of which is the Jacobite monastery of Sheikh Matti. I had tea and rested for a little and then walked up to the monastery by a rocky hill path thick with flowers. The monastery has all been rebuilt; there is nothing ancient in it but the tombstone of the saint, and the bishop. With him I sat in a high chamber above the gate and looked out over the wonderful plains of Assyria while the sun set and the bishop told me the legends of all the monasteries. In the dusk, my soldier and I ran down the path again and got into camp at 7. We had come up 900 ft above Mosul [Mawsil, Al] and already the world was quite changed. Today we rode again across the foothills and over a wonderful valley where the storks were wading wing deep through flowers. When you remember that for 2 months I never saw a blade of anything green you will realize what it is like to have the whole world full of the smell and the beauty of growing things. So in the afternoon we came to Bavian and camped by its river under the Assyrian stelai [sic] for which the place is famous. They are cut in the cliffs over the river, but some have broken away and lie half in and half out of the water: winged beasts, and gods standing on lions and kings in adoration before them. I walked up the valley to a point where the cliff bends round and holds the stream in the curve of its arm; and here I found a deep still pool, the banks set with daisies and poppies and the rocks with campanulas and orchids. The river was all brown after the rains and the pool lay like a bit of polished bronze in a setting of green and white and scarlet enamel. I sat for a little in the delicious solitude, listening to the birds nesting and singing in the rocks above and the stream rushing over the stones Bellow, and then I bathed in the pool and came away rejoicing. I had not gone far before I met two Dominican monks who had dropped out of some neighbouring monastery. They were charming well informed people; I invited them both to tea and they gave me a lot of useful news of ruins and churches ahead. They have just ridden away on their mules and I shall now dine.

Friday May 7. [7 May 1909] I am this evening the guest of the High Priest of the Devil Worshippers, Ali Beg. (They aren't really Devil Worshippers, you know, though unfriendly people have so named them.) We reached his house at 10.30 this morning and he received me with the greatest affability, ordered coffee and insisted that I must stay with him. So firm was he on this head that I saw no way out of it, though I prefer my own tents once the season of fleas has begun. But Fattuh saved the situation with his usual tact and good manners. For having seen the room in which Ali Beg designed to place me, and found it to be hopping with fleas, he came back and explained with the best turned compliments that the tents were already in process of being pitched and if his Excellency didn't mind, it would save trouble if we might sleep in them, and being at his door we should still be his Highness's most grateful guests. Whereat Ali Beg replied that our pleasure was his and all was well. He and some of his people have long pointed curly beards; they look exactly like the heads on the Assyrian reliefs. The Yezidi religion is secret and I believe the learned consider them to be a remnant of the Sabaeans who were, if I remember rightly, supposed to be followers of John the Baptist. It is more likely however that the Sabaeans were an older sect and that John was to some extent preaching their doctrines. Some kind of worship of springs must certainly form part of the Yezidi faith, as you will presently see, and I suppose their respectful fear of the principle of evil, which gives them the repute of being devil worshippers, connects them with Zoroastrianism. I have seen Yezidis before, in the mountains N of Aleppo [Halab] and told Ali Beg that they had spoken to me of him as being the ruler of them all. "The ruler of us all" he said gravely "is God." He took me then to see his wife, a very attractive woman. The Yezidi women are not veiled or secluded; she was dressed in a purple cotton robe, with a white muslin veil wrapped round her head and chin (but not over her face) and a little black velvet cap holding it in its place. On her wrists were heavy gold bracelets set with turquoises. Unfortunately she talked nothing but Kurdish, which is the universal language here. Ali Beg talks Arabic, but badly. He sent me an enormous tray of lunch to my tents, rice and mutton and semolina pudding and excellent sour curds; there was enough for me and all my servants and soldiers. Then he gave me 2 guides and I rode with them and my 4 soldiers into the mountains to see the shrine of Sheikh Adi, which is the Yezidi holy place. (The reason I have 4 soldiers is that these mountains are very much disturbed, owing to the constant raids of the nomad Kurds. Two days ago an outlying Kurdish village of underground caves was stormed by soldiers, several people killed and others taken and sent prisoners to Mosul [Mawsil, Al].) We rode for 2 hours up into the rocky hills and in and out over the folds of them, between oak trees and bushes of flowering hawthorn, and at last we dropped down into a deep valley, at the head of which, embosomed in mulberry and fig, is the tiny village and the shrine of Sheikh Adi. Ali Beg's sister received and welcomed me and led me through the outer courts to the shrine. As she stood at the door in her long white robes and white veil she looked like some strange priestess; she kissed the door posts and murmured a prayer to Sheikh Adi before we entered. By the door a great snake is carved in relief upon the wall and painted black so that it catches your eye the moment you enter the peaceful little court. But I asked no questions. So we went into the shrine which was like a church with 2 aisles and no nave; and then she took me into a high chamber, pitch dark, in which stands the tomb of Sheikh Adi - I lighted it up with magnesian wire while she murmured prayers. Then we went into some underground chambers, through which a stream flows from basin to basin, passing through the wall of one room into another and finally out into a little court behind the sanctuary. The water flowed indiscriminately over the floor of the chamber and I took off my stockings - my boots I had taken off when I entered the shrine - and paddled about over sharp pebbles following my priestess with her oil lamp. She turned to me in the middle and said "Aren't you afraid? I am afraid." But I wasn't, probably because I did not know how holy it all was. She was very anxious to kill a lamb and make me a feast, but I succeeded in dissuading her and we compromised by my accepting bowls of milk and piles of bread which my guides and I shared between us. So we rode back over the mountains and got into camp at 6 o'clock. Ali Beg sent me out a dinner as ample as the lunch and then his little son, Sa'ad Beg, a charming boy, came and fetched me and I sat with them for an hour and came back to bed.

Sat May 8. [8 May 1909] Today I lunched with the prior of a Chaldaean monastery, Rabban Hormuzd is its name. It stands high up in the hills and is for the most part hollowed out of the rock. The prior was a delightful man, a keen politician - we brought him the news of the deposition of the Sultan at which he was much delighted. After a lunch of omelet and sour curds and honey, he showed me all over the monastery, but most of the built part has been rebuilt and there was nothing very old but the rock cut cells. Behind the church, in the rock, is a long pitch dark gallery leading to a small rock cut chamber in the roof of which are 2 iron rings. From these Rabban Hormuzd, who was a Sassanian bishop, was accustomed to suspend himself. "And here" said the prior "it is usual for visitors to make their offerings." So I made mine. On the wall of the church, Layard had carved his name and the date, 1846. The prior sent me off with a bunch of roses which soon withered, alas! in the blazing heat of the plain. I withered too; it was intolerably hot and heavy and steamy. We clambered over a beautiful little pass and then rode through a most wonderful wide valley between rocky hills. The grass and flowers touched our stirrups, but it was all deserted, practically no villages and no cultivation, because the Kurds wreck the whole world here. We got into camp at 4, just as I was making up my mind to die of fatigue. I hope I have not grown suddenly old and feeble.

Sunday May 9. [9 May 1909] No, I haven't; it was only the weather. We had a very long hot day today, but it wasn't stuffy like yesterday and consequently we came lightly through it. I packed my camp off at 6 on a 10 hours' march and myself rode up into the hills to see some Assyrian reliefs at a place called Malthai. We had to leave our horses at the foot of the hills and one of my soldiers and I climbed up the rocks for half an hour to where a peasant had told us the reliefs were to be found. But when we reached the place they were nowhere to be seen. So we clambered up and down looking for them in vain and at last I told Abdullah to go down to the valley and fetch a guide. I sat down in a flowery place under a rock (campanula pyramidalis- or something very like it - was stretching its long spires out of the crevices) and considered the wonderful landscape, the wide grassy valley and the rocky chains of the Kurdish hills beyond. The air was full of the sense and the smell of mountains and alive with the sound of mountain waters. All the high places of the world are akin and I was just claiming the rights of citizenship in Kurdistan when Abdullah came back shouting that he had found the reliefs. We had climbed above them. There were 4 of them, four processions all exactly the same; 8 men in long robes with stars upon their high conical hats, 6 of them standing on lions, one on his own feet, one seated in a chair on the back of a lion, a call coming forward towards a personage on a throne who faced them. The books call these Assyrian and others exactly like them in Anatolia Hittite, and my own opinion is that the learned have yet to solve the difficult questions connected with the interchange of religions and artistic conceptions between the two civilizations. But that is their business, not mine, and I fancy they have not yet got the clues. We rode for the rest of the day along the foot of the hills, always through the same deep beautiful grass. A week or two later the inhabitants of the very few villages that are scattered across the plain will set it all on fire, so I'm told, except for a tiny patch round their own houses, lest the Kurds should come down and pasture their flocks and steal and harry far and wide. At 6 in the evening we got into camp in a tiny village under the hills.

Monday May 10. [10 May 1909] Half an hour from our camp there was a ruined town I had been told I ought to go and see. I rode up to it this morning but there was nothing to be made of it. All that was left was a great wall of fine masonry that climbed up the hill to a sort of acropolis of rock and climbed down again enclosing the area where the town had been. It may have been a Byzantine frontier fortress; it certainly was not Arab and how the Kurds built I don't yet know. We had a short ride over a pass along the best road I have yet seen, well built and well graded, a real mountain road. Unfortunately it ended abruptly just over the head of the pass and left us to climb down over the boulders as best we might. We found camp pitched at Zakho where we got in about noon. Zakho lies mostly on an island in the middle of the Khabur river, at the gate of the pass. It was awfully hot and I was just as glad that there was nothing to see but a late Arab fortress, falling into ruins and inhabited mainly by storks. In the evening I had a visitor, a young Frenchman called Maurel, I had seen him at Mosul [Mawsil, Al]. He is in the Public Debt. Very nice and intelligent. My camp tonight faces the Alps of Kurdistan.

Tuesday May 11. [11 May 1909] Today we have crossed over into another chain of hills, the spurs of the great mountains whose snow covered heads rise over the top of our ridge. We crossed the Khabur actually by a bridge, but we had a merry time with one of its affluents which comes down very deep and swift from the snows. A whole village on its bank turned out to escort us over, stripped themselves stark naked and waded through by the side of our horses. The water came above my knee as I rode, and buffeted my mare so that I thought she would certainly fall, but she didn't, bless her. We are camped tonight in a splendid rocky gorge by the tiny village of Hassana. They are Christians here, Nestorians and Chaldaeans; terribly harried by the Kurds, poor dears. The Chaldaean Protestant (sic! he has been converted by the American missionaries) priest is to take me up the mountain tomorrow to see some Assyrian stelai [sic]. I shouldn't call him Chaldaean perhaps at all; he calls himself Prot. But whatever he is, he has brought me a very nice bunch of roses.

Friday May 14. [14 May 1909] I spent 2 days at Hassana. On the first I climbed up into the hills and saw a very ancient fortress on a crag - Assyrian I suspect for there was an Assyrian stele Bellow it. My guides were the Prot priest, Kas Mattai, and his brother Shim'an. They insisted on my wearing the local shoes of felt and wool; I put them on and found them most delightful, only the sharp rocks wore through the felt soles almost at once and my feet are not accustomed to stones and thorns, so I gave up rashikeh and returned to my boots. I walked through the oak woods on the mountain sides all the morning with Kas Mattai and it was so wonderfully beautiful that I determined to have another day of it and go to a summit. The temptation of getting for one day out of the heat was too strong. So yesterday we set off at 4 and climbed through the oak woods for 2 hours and then we came out onto the mountain tops where the snow was still lying in great wreaths and the high mountain flowers were in bloom. There were few of the real alpines - perhaps I wasn't high enough up for them - but the great beauty was the bulbs. Pale blue hyacinths and pale blue scillas, and a new asphodel (new to me I mean) and at the very top the scarlet tulips were still all in bloom just Bellow the - but I forgot to tell you what it was I came out to see - I wasn't just taking the air in the mountains, I went up to look at - the Ark. There is a large body of opinion in favour of this having been the place where it alighted and I also Bellong to this school of thought partly because, you see, I have seen the Ark there and partly because, since the Flood legends are Babylonian, it's far more likely that they chose for their mountain the first high mountain that they knew (which is this Judi Dagh) rather than a place far away in remote Armenia. We got up to the Ark about 9 - it was a most wonderful place from which you could see the whole world, though I must confess there isn't much of the Ark left. We stayed there many hours, lunched and slept and looked at the view and breathed the delicious cold air. And at last reluctantly we came down and walked back for a long way over the tops of the hills. And here we had a little adventure. We met some Kurdish shepherds who had brought their flocks up to the top of Judi Dagh in order to avoid paying the sheep tax; and they took us for soldiers and we had to explain the true situation amidst rifle shots. I don't think they were aimed at us, but just any where to let us know that the rifles were there. I was standing on a snow patch at the time and it occurred to me that I must make an admirable mark if anyone had a wish for a little fancy practice, so I withdrew into the grey stones and awaited developments. But none followed; as soon as we had explained that we were simple people like themselves, they became quite friendly. By a stroke of good luck, I had left my soldier in the woods with the donkey which had carried the lunch, otherwise there might have been trouble. Today I rode through the foothills to another village in a deep valley - no words can describe the beauty of these valleys. They are a wilderness of olive, pomegranate, mulberry, fig and almond, with vines trailing over all and corn growing beneath. In the hottest part of the day I toiled 2 hours up hill and saw some more Assyrian stele. This must be about the frontier of the Assyrian empire I should think, and tonight I have come to the eastern frontier of the Roman. At Jezireh ibn Omar [Cizre] on the Tigris, where I am camping, there is the remains of a Roman bridge, but I fancy they held very little of the country further east.
Here I shall post this letter. Ever your affectionate daughter Gertrude.