Conservatism triumphed on this occasion; but had the new régime been a success, we fancy that feminine youth would have put up a better fight for it. As things were, the old conditions persisted, which had made it none too safe for any young girl to allow her face to be seen in the streets; and they gave way. No doubt the battle will be renewed at a later date, and possibly with better fortune!
Most of us have some recollection of the legend of "Prester John," particularly in the version given in "Ariosto"; the legend of a Christian king ruling his people in the midst of infidels; a king who was yet a priest and who celebrated Mass regularly; who had a kingdom in the midst of wild inaccessible mountains, girdled by cloud and storm; and who was tormented by the harpies that came daily and snatched the food from his table. We read, too, how he was visited by the wandering English knight Astolpho, and how that hero drove away the harpies by the blast of his magic horn.
It sounds a staggering statement to make, but it is nevertheless the truth, that all these stories told by the Italian poet as legends current in his day, are literally the fact in all essentials (or were so until very lately), with the Patriarch of the Nestorians in Kurdistan. He is the "Bishop-Prince" of a mountain kingdom of Christians; subject to the Sultan of course, but still a recognized ruler, and ruler by virtue of his Episcopal rank. Even the mountains over which the hippogrif bore Astolpho were hardly more inaccessible than those which girdle the village of Qudshanis; while a very good imitation of the harpies that tormented Prester John are found in the Kurds that ravage the land. English visitors are there too, as members of what is known as the "Archbishop's Assyrian Mission;"[126] though they, alas, have no magic horn with which to drive away the harpies of to-day.
If, however, the old magical power has gone, some prestige attaches to the name of the English still; for villages where they reside are not raided when all others suffer, for fear that some evil may thereafter befall the thief. The writer once spent a night in a little village of Nestorians in this immediate district, called Shwawutha; a village whose little rock-built church is shown in one of our illustrations. Hospitality was given him there, as a matter of course; but in the middle of the night he was roused by a Dutch concert of the most pronounced description. Men shouted, women screamed, cattle bellowed, and sheep bleated; while a shot or so told that something warlike was afoot. And soon folk came rushing in to tell him that the Kurds had descended on the village, and were engaged at that moment in turning it inside out.