$ 



66 THE DESERT. 



It is not always that a caravan will pass by such 

 a company with impunity, though an afFray with 

 government soldiers armed with modern rifles is not 

 altogether to the taste of such roving bands of free- 

 booters, unless, as is sometimes the case, they are 

 equally well armed themselves. Wandering over such 

 a country as is theirs, it is perhaps only to be ex- 

 pected that an independent and freedom -loving people 

 such as they should treat the moral authority of the 

 Porte with scant respect, and I thought more kindly 

 of my friend the Colonel at Deir for his insisting on 

 my being in a position to back mere moral persuasion 

 with a show of force. 



The district which one traverses in a northern 

 direction on the right bank of the Khabur river is 

 the Gozan of the Old Testament, to which Shalman- 

 ezer carried the captive Israelites in the reign of 

 Hoshea, " and placed them in Halah and in Habor 

 by the river of Gozan." ^ It was once prosperous and 

 well wooded, but now a few mounds and scattered 

 remnants of former buildings are all that remain of 

 its erstwhile prosperity. 



About sixty miles up the river is situated a small 

 isolated police-station, Shehdadi, where the Khabur is 

 crossed by means of a ferry similar to that at Deir, 

 and the traveller strikes east into the heart of the 

 Mesopotamian steppe. A long stretch it seems across 

 the dreary, almost waterless desert, before the small 

 settlements which cling to the foot of the Sinjar 

 mountains are reached. My ponies were weak with 

 long marching and short rations, and after plodding 

 steadily along from sunrise on the 27th, we pitched 



1 2 Kings xvii. 6. Halah has been identified with Sar-i-pul i Zohab, the 

 second stage on the Baghdad-Kermanshah route after crossing the Persian 

 frontier. Vide Mrs Bishop's ' Travels in Persia and Kurdistan,' vol. i. 



