Page 275. NOTE. We add a note to make this matter clearer, for the benefit of liturgiologists. Two sorts of leaven are put into the dough to leaven it, and both are called "melka" (King, cf the Spanish title for the Host "Su Majestad.")
One of these is a portion taken, before consecration, from the loaf prepared for the last celebration, and reserved for this purpose. The other consists of a mere pinch of flour, or of bread reduced once more to the consistency of flour, which is kept in a special vessel in the sanctuary.
The tradition concerning this is as follows. When the Lord distributed the elements at the first Qurbana in the upper room, he gave a double portion of the bread to St. John. The Apostle consumed one part and reserved one, which he moistened with the blood of Christ on Calvary, and divided, after the Ascension, into twelve portions. One was given to each Apostle when they went forth to preach, that the act of mingling particles of it with the dough to be consecrated at every Eucharist, might connect the bread used on each occasion with that used at the first. This Melka is supplemented as needful, either with pulverised bread from the Qurbana or with fine flour, (our informant was not clear on this point), and is held to contain particles of the original, or at least to have been put into connexion with it.
Qudshanis is probably a spot that is unique on the world's surface; but on leaving it for the south, the traveller soon finds himself in a land that is fascinating enough, though plenty of parallels might be found for it, even in the present orderly world, and numbers in the history of every nation in the past. This land is the country of the Nestorian "_ashirets_" of Tyari, Tkhuma, Diz, Baz, and a few other wild mountain cantons; men who live under the peculiar conditions described in an earlier chapter.
It is to be expected that the natural features of a land where so primitive a state of things prevails will be rugged; and those of Hakkiari are wild and strange enough to merit a special description. The mountains are in fact a section of that great Taurus range, which extends in a curve from the shores of the Mediterranean to somewhere south of Baghdad. At this point they are pierced by a large river, the Zab, which rises well to the north of them on the Armenian plateau; and with rare determination bores its way clean through the range, till it emerges on the Mesopotamian level to the south of it, and so falls into the Tigris a little below Mosul. The cleft that it makes in the mountains is one of the great _cañons_ of the world, comparable, in the opinion of those who have seen all, to the gorges of Yosemite and the "great Cañon of Colorado." Midway in its course the peaks of Supa Durig and Koka Bulend, the two kings of that wilderness, stand opposite to one another. Each is nearly fourteen thousand feet in height above the sea; and as a bird flies, their crests are not more than twelve miles apart. But the level of the river Zab that flows between them is only 4000 feet above the sea at that point, so that the net depth of the gorge is over 9000 feet.