volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

'Askar the Kurd and the Dog Saba}. 63
nothing more to be got from us after breakfast-time, and
left us in peace for the rest of the day. Nimrud, who
was a rigid "dry "1 Nestorian, and a fervent hater of
the Muslims, was horrified at our weakness, but the
" waste " (as he called it) earned us the good- will of the
MusUms, as they are extraordinarily generous to the poor.
In spite of all our attempts to keep our court to
ourselves it was impossible to do so. One morning I
went into the stable and found there a horse which did
not belong to us. When I asked our Kurd, whom we
called " 'Askar," i.e., "the soldier," to whom the horse
belonged, he said that it was the property of a poor
man, and that it had always lived in the stable in the
days when the Pasha was alive, and that it was too old
to be out in the open at nights during the winter. I
spoke to the owner of the horse and asked him why
he had not asked our permission for the horse to stay
there before he brought it into the stable. He replied,
" Pasha, I saw you buying bread to feed the starving
dogs in the baz§,r last Friday, as the Muslims do, and I
said, ' These Englishmen and the Muslims are all one,
and they have hearts of gold. But the Muslims esteem
horses more than dogs, and these Englishmen will do
the same, and they will let my horse go back to his
stable as in the days of the old Pasha, and God shall
prolong their lives.' " There was no more to be said,
and the horse stayed in the stable and we fed him from
that time tUl the end of the period for which we hired
the court.
One day 'Askar was followed into our court by a large
dog with short and thick black hair, and quite unlike
any of the other dogs which were to be seen in hundreds
in the town. The creature was in a very emaciated
condition, but he did not cringe like the other dogs of
Mosul, and having looked steadily at White and myself
he walked to the door of the stable, and having dragged
* The epithet " wet " was applied to that section of the Nestorians
who received a subsidy from Rome "
; dry " Nestorians were those
who did not.