A peace was concluded at last; and the Sheikh was pleased to attribute it very largely to the friendly offices of the British; though really the principal factor was the intervention of a level-headed _Vali_ at Mosul.[84] We did little more than insist that the Sheikh's wives ought to be set at liberty and treated with fitting distinction; and that, when the "conspiracy" of which he was accused had been officially admitted to be non-existent, there was no longer any valid reason for keeping the "conspirators" in jail. But the Sheikh is "easy with them that have shown themselves easy with him," and those who take the trouble to "'gree wi' Rob" are usually gainers on the deal.
We traversed one of the battlefields in the course of our journey westward: a crater-like hollow in the wilderness, environed by steep stony hills. Here one of the Government regiments encountered the Sheikh and his army; for the Sheikh was present in person, though he left the actual conduct of operations to a certain Abd-'l-Kadr who acted as his "chief of the host." It was the first regular pitched battle, and the tribesmen were somewhat awed at the prospect of engaging the _Hukumet_; for which cause, in order to inspirit them, the Sheikh himself fired the first shot. In Kurdistan the firing of a gun constitutes an appeal for assistance; and the Sheikh, with fine dramatic instinct, fired his gun straight towards heaven, appealing to Allah Himself. The event of the day--the capture of the entire regiment, with three pieces of mountain artillery--was thus a prodigious enhancement of his Holiness's[85] personal prestige. Not only had he scored a valuable point in his secular and temporal capacity, but he was held to have signally vindicated his spiritual pre-eminence as well.
The Sheikh, in the eyes of his followers, is not merely a great tribal chieftain. They believe in his hereditary sanctity: and his clansmen are also his devotees. This fact is strikingly exemplified by an incident which had occurred a little earlier, and which was related to us by Mar Shimun, the Patriarch of the Assyrian Christians, who himself inspires equal veneration among his own adherents.[86] A column in pursuit of the Sheikh caught a small boy who had dropped behind the party, and demanded of him with menaces which way the fugitives had gone. But the child was as staunch as steel. "By the Holy Name of the Sheikh I will not tell!" he answered. And that was all they could get out of him either by coaxing or threats. The Turkish Captain was fortunately a kind-hearted fellow, and did not ill-use his small captive; but he did not omit, in releasing him, to draw a moral from his pluck. "We shall not make much of this war," he observed, with a smile to his officers. "You can judge from this example with what sort of folk we have to deal. This child is in my power utterly. None would call me to account if I killed him. And yet, knowing this, he defies me; and swears by his Sheikh as by a god!"