volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Departure from Mosul. 85
desert for two days and covered everything with a thin
layer of sand and dust. We therefore hurried on the building
of the raft by which we intended to go to BaghdsLd, and
before the end of the month of February it was finished.
During the last few days of our stay in Mosul we
were visited by many people of the town, both clergy
and laity, who came specially to say their adieux to
White, of whom they had seen very little. As soon as
his leg grew strong he called on the General commanding
the Mosul garrison, and they became great friends.
The General introduced him to the officers, who made
him an honorary member of their mess, and White spent
much time with them and became a general favourite.
They arranged small shooting parties, and he went off
with them into the Kurdish hills for days at a time,
but he was unused to the hard life and the poor and
scanty food which they found in the villages in the
hill country, and each of his trips was followed by a
period of exhaustion and depression. Everyone with a
grievance who could, get speech with him gave him a
written petition and implored him to ask his father to
use his influence and interest with the Porte to get his
wrong righted, and White took all such documents and
promised the petitioners to do his best for them. Some
of the more importunate of these men pressed him to
take them with him to Constantinople, and when the
time came to load up our raft I found that he had
promised to give several persons a passage to Baghdad
on it by way of helping them on their way to Europe !
Several of the merchants asked me if it would not be
possible for him to be made British Consul in Mosul,
but when I mentioned the suggestion to him he said
that nothing would ever induce him to return to the
town, and he wanted to get away from it as soon as
possible. I therefore arranged with Nimriid Rassam to
superintend the excavations, and gathered together the
tablets we had found at Kuyfinjik and the Syriac and
Arabic manuscripts which had begun to come in from
various places, and on one of the last days of February
we embarked on our raft for Baghdad.