“True,” he replied. “When the telegram came last summer telling of liberty and equality, the people assembled before the serâyah, the government house, and bade the Ḳâimmaḳâm begone, for they would govern themselves. Thereat came orders from Baghdâd that the people must be dispersed; and the soldiers fired upon them, killing six men. And we do not know what the telegram about liberty and brotherhood can have meant, but at least the Ḳâimmaḳâm was dismissed.”
My zaptieh broke in here. “Effendim,” said he, “it fell out once that I was in Bombay--yes, I was sent from Baṣrah with horses for one of the kings of India. And there I saw a poor man whose passport had been stolen from him, and he carried his complaint to the judge. Now the judge was of the English, and he fined the thief and cut off two of his fingers. That is government; in India the poor are protected.”
“Allah!” said one of the coffee-drinkers in undisguised admiration.
I knew better than to question the validity of the anecdote, and, with what modesty I could assume, I accepted the credit that accrued from it.
“But even the English,” pursued another, “cannot hold the tribes. Effendim, have the Afghans submitted to you? Wallah, no.”
He had laid his finger upon a knotty point, and I took up the question from a different side.
“Have not you men of ’Ânah sent a deputy to the mejlis?” I asked.
“Let him make known in Constantinople the evils under which you suffer, that the government may seek for a remedy.”
The suggestion was received in silent perplexity.
“For what purpose did you pay the deputy to go to Stambûl?” I pursued.
“The order came,” replied one of my interlocutors. “We do not know why the deputy was sent. Doubtless he has his own business in Stambûl and he is not concerned with ’Ânah.”
“His business is yours,” I said; “and if he will not see to it, at the next election you must choose a better man.”
“Will there be another election?” said they, and I found all ’Ânah to be under the impression that their representative held a life appointment.
The island is a little paradise of fruit-trees, palms and corn, in the middle of which is a village of some thirty houses built in the heaped-up ruins of the castle. From among the houses springs a tall and beautiful minaret, octagonal in plan (Fig. 56). Its height is broken by eight rows of niches, each face of the octagon bearing in alternate storeys a double and single niche, all terminating in the cusped arch which is employed at Raḳḳah. Some of the niches are pierced with windows to light the winding stair. The tower rises yet another two storeys, but the upper part is of narrower diameter, and the windows and niches are covered with plain round arches. At the northern end of the island the walls and round bastions of the fortress stand in part, but they are not very ancient. Ibn Khurdâdhbeh, who is the first of the Mohammadan geographers to mention ’Ânah, says only that it is a small town on an island;[63] in Abu’l Fidâ’s time it was still confined to the island;[64] Rauwolff (1564) notices the town on the island and the town on the right bank;[65] Yâḳût (1225) speaks of the castle, but the walls which I saw cannot be as old as his day. The minaret may belong to a different period, and de Beylié places it in the earliest centuries of Islâm.[66] I think that there was probably a fortress on the island long before the first written record which has come down to us, but I was close upon a generation too late to see the remains of it. From two informants in ’Ânah I heard that there had been big stone slabs at the northern end of the island “with figures of men upon them and a writing like nails,” but they had fallen into the water within the memory of the older inhabitants and had been washed away or covered by the stream. This tale of cuneiform inscriptions would not in itself be worth much, but while I was examining the minaret, a villager brought me a fragment of stone covered with carving in relief which was unmistakably Assyrian. I asked him whence it came, and he replied that it had formed part of a big stone picture which had fallen into the river. I bought from him a broken bowl inscribed with Jewish incantations of the well-known type.[67]