volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

54 Raids by the Shammar Arabs.
with the Shammar, but failed to do so, and a pretty big
fight took place in which the Karawan-b§,shi and several
of his men and three of the Shammar were killed. The
Shammar, exasperated at the resistance, seized every
bale of the caravan, and all the bags of food, and the
string of young camels, and then set to work to strip
the men of their clothes and personal belongings. The
attack had been carefully plaimed, for camels belonging
to the Shammar appeared as it were from out of the
ground, and the men loaded the bales on them, and, taking
the young camels which the horsemen had seized,
marched off with them. The Shammar horsemen then
tied some of their naked captives to their saddles and
rode off with them, the wretched men running by their
side, leaving a few naked men and the remainder of the
camels of the caravan to find their way to Mosul, a
journey of four or five days. Two of the men had died
of wounds or from hunger and exposure, and of the
300 camels of the larger caravan only about twenty had
straggled into Mosul the day before, and of these some
had since died. It was a terrible story and the facts
were indisputable. The men in the courtyard of the
Sarayah wanted me to get White to telegraph to his
father, and they urged me to telegraph to Colonel Talbot,
who was then relieving Colonel Tweedie, the British
Consul-General in Baghdad, but I told them that I must
hear what the Pasha had to say, and that he was the
person whose duty it was to protect their caravans.
At this moment messengers came to say that the
Pasha was in his office waiting to receive me, and Nimrud
and I followed them to the upper floor of the Sarayah.
There we found the Pasha seated in a large room, and
round about him on well-cushioned diwans were nearly
all the notables of the town. As we entered they
all rose and saluted us with the word " Salam," i.e.,
" Peace," and they laid their right hands upon their
breasts as they did so ; they then raised them first to
their lips and then to their foreheads, and sat down with
great dignity. The Pasha gave me a seat by his side
and clapped his hands as a signal to his attendants to