"Have you heard anything of this reported murder of Mr. Wigram on the Jerma pass, on the 25th day of the month?" was the query.
"I have sahib; but I think that on the whole it is not true, because I had tea with him at Qudshanis" (well beyond the scene of the supposed murder), "on the 30th."
As the road goes north-west towards Van, the traveller gradually enters the land of the Armenian Christians, leaving the Assyrian or Nestorian land behind. Kurdistan, which is the general though unofficial title for the land where the Kurds live, embraces both; and of course any Turk will tell you that there is no such land as Armenia or Armenistan. Under the old régime, the word was carefully erased from all maps or books that entered the country,[117] lest erroneous teaching should be given in the Sultan's schools; and much in the same spirit, books on chemistry were sometimes barred, because they contained the treasonable formula, H_{ 2}O. The seditiousness of this is perhaps not obvious: but it will be clear to the meanest capacity when it is explained that H_{ 2} means, and can only mean, Hamid II, Sultan of Turkey; and if you supply the obviously understood symbol = between the 2 and the O, you get the appalling doctrine, "Hamid II = Zero," which clearly cannot be allowed to pass.
Armenia then, does not exist; though there are districts where Armenians are the prevailing type of Christians; and we are now entering one of them. Of course there is a certain amount of "interlacing," and isolated villages of either form of Christianity are found scattered among the districts mainly inhabited by the other.
Bashkala, which will be found upon the map, is the seat of government for the district; and this place is inhabited mainly by Jews, who are, as always, the financiers and merchants of the land. It is a postal centre, principally remarkable for the fact that the post goes to that point from Van, for distribution to such centres as Julamerk, Neri, and Diza; but only strays on to them, when a _zaptieh_ or policeman happens to be going in that direction. Then he takes on the letterbag, provided that he does not forget, or that it is not too heavy for him to carry. Hence letters and papers sometimes spend some time in that office; and we remember the courteous remark of the _mutaserif_[118] of the place, who observed to us when we called upon him on the way to Van after a winter spent in Qudshanis, "_Effendim_, the papers you used to receive during the winter had very good pictures in them." It sounded cool, but after all, the poor man had little to read; the papers were none the worse for his looking at them, and he never meddled with the letters. Also, he always sent them on when he had done with them, and his action did not even imply any delay in the forwarding; so it seemed to us that there was nothing very much to complain about.