volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

i68 Kindness of the Wdlt of Damascus.
appeared and welcomed us warmly. He asked me many
questions about Colonel Talbot, who was acting Consul-
General when I was in Baghd§.d, and about the antiquities
and manuscripts which I had taken home from
there in 1889. I* was clear that he was on as good terms
with Mr. Dickson at Damascus as he had been with Colonel
Talbot at Baghdad, and he seemed to be really anxious
to " get on " with the representatives of all the Great
Powers. He asked me what I was doing in Damascus,
and where I was going, and I explained my plans to
him, and asked him to help me to carry them out. He
turned to Mr. Dickson and had a conversation with him
in an undertone, and then told me that officially he was
unable to help me, for he had refused to sanction the
departure of the French Sisters for Mosul and of other
Europeans to other towns ; that the " yellow wind," i.e.,
the cholera, was still raging in many parts of Mesopotamia,
and that every town and large village had a
cordon drawn round it, and that any attempt to bribe
the police would certainly fail. " Such," said he, " is my
official attitude. But you did me a kindness in BaghdM
and I will do you a kindness in Damascus. I cannot
and dare not authorize you to set out for Mosul, and
I ought to detain you here in quarantine, but I can
arrange the matter in such a way that you will have the
opportunity of doing what you want only at your own
risk. I have need to send letters to the shekh of the
camel fair at Sukhnah, two or three days' journey
beyond Tudmur, and though the business is not urgent,
I will send them this week. Allah has already sent the
man to carry them, and He now sends the opportunity.
The man to carry them is Muhammad an-NlLsir ibn
Idris, who for many years was one of the ablest of the
camel-postmen who carried the mail for the English
between Baghdad and Damascus.^ (The camel-postmen
' The Government camel-post between Baghdad and Damascus
was a development of the private camel-post which was established
by Lynch Bros, soon after i860. Captain Lynch made arrangements
with the shikhs of the various districts through which the
post passed, and the Arab tribes kept their obligations loyally. Between