Jilu is a curious little mountain canton--a fan of narrow gorges descending from the rugged Galiashin range, the highest peak of which, Supa Durig, approaches 14,000 feet. Their union forms the Oramar River, that considerable tributary of the Zab mentioned in the previous chapter. Nothing but "terrace cultivation" is possible on the bare rocky slopes; and the earth that composes the fields has usually to be carried to the spot where the terrace wall has been built to retain it, in baskets on men's backs. A spot has to be chosen which is reasonably safe from avalanches; else the poor farmer may find, some spring morning, that not only his crop, but his whole field, has been swept away in the night.
Men of Jilu have a harder life than even the average mountaineer of Kurdistan; and hence it is, no doubt, that they have developed the _wanderlust_, which is far more strongly marked in them than in most of their fellow countrymen. They wander everywhere in search of work, though they always drift back to this strange little canton at the end. Starting with nothing but the clothes they stand up in, and very ragged clothes too, they apparently never starve, and occasionally bring back a fortune. Men are to be found in Jilu who helped to build the forts of Port Arthur; and who corrected the writer on certain points connected with that fortress when the siege was being discussed in the patriarch's _diwan_. Who served guns on board the American battleships off Cuba; or have (goodness alone knows how) found some charitable person to give them a university education in America. One of these wanderers brought back £3000; or, to be accurate, brought it to within a few days' journey of his home, when his luck deserted him at last, for he met a party of Kurds, and the robbers made the haul of their wicked lives. It was the cruellest trick of fortune; but he owned to have made the money in one very doubtful trade that these fellows practise; and we could not avoid the feeling that the thief by violence had as good a right to the spoil as had the thief by fraud.
The trade in question is this. Jilu men have made the discovery that folk in Europe and America have much sympathy with an ancient and struggling church, and are willing to give considerable sums to assist it. So they collect for "schools and orphanages." Men go by the dozen to gather in money, nominally for these objects; but actually spend it on their own needs alone. American police know the trick well, and indeed have invented the term "fake-priest" as descriptive of this branch of the great profession of roguery.