The church of Rabban Hormizd is very much "Lord of Name," that is it enjoys great repute as a place of pilgrimage; and the virtue for which it is chiefly celebrated is the healing of the insane, or (as they are more commonly called in this country) the "possessed." The lunatic (often quite willing) is solemnly conducted to the church, and is tethered up in it for the night with a ponderous iron chain and collar affixed to a staple in the wall.[72] By morning (unless he is very mad indeed) he will usually profess himself cured. Quite a number of other mountain churches can boast a similar reputation, but their methods of treatment (as will be hereafter related) are often more drastic still.
We rejoined our caravan at the mouth of the gorge, and pursued our way steadily eastward along the foot of the mountains; passing first the village of Baadri, dominated by Ali Beg's castle, and then rejoining the road which we had followed previously on our visit to the Yezidi shrine. Some two hours beyond Ain Sufni, we reached the river Gomel, a fairly large mountain stream; and here we swung round to the left, perhaps half a mile up the river, in order to get a passing glimpse of the famous "Picture Rocks" of Bavian.[73]
The Gomel emerges from the mountains by a flat-bottomed winding valley shut in on either hand by vertical walls of rock; and along the cliffs on the right bank a little above the point of exit, hangs that marvellous gallery of "pictures" so well known to Assyriologists. The principal bas-relief is a huge square panel, graven on the face of a rock bastion which immediately overhangs the stream. It comprises four gigantic figures; now wofully battered and weather-beaten, but awesome beyond all telling in the loneliness of that desolate glen. Some dozen smaller panels are ranged above it, along an upper story of the cliff; and at its foot two great detached stone tables lie half submerged in the waters of the stream. The design of the big panel is self-repeating, each half being mirrored by the other; and this circumstance is of great assistance in deciphering the details of the work. For, some thousand years after the carvings were executed, a party of mis-begotten hermits came to settle down in the valley, and burrowed a set of cells for themselves along the face of the cliff. Two or three of these vandals chose to excavate immediately behind the great panel, and cut out their windows in the middle of it, quite regardless of the "idols" outside. With fortunate carelessness, however, they did not do their damage symmetrically, and the portions destroyed upon one side remain on the other intact. The subject is King Sennacherib making an offering to the goddess Ishtar; and the inscription records the destruction of Babylon, which had rebelled against him at the commencement of his reign, and which he took and razed to the ground.