Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/374

 from Bagdad to Aleppo. Being situated in an oasis of the desert the city must at all times be on the lookout against the Arabs. The walls which completely surround the city are weak but high, and offer sufficient protection against the irregular bands of mounted Bedouins. The Bab-el-amadi gate, mentioned in the time of the crusaders, is still standing, although it has been walled up. Most of the dwellings are built of sun-dried bricks and a kind of mortar which hardens within a few seconds. Following an Oriental custom great weight is attached to beautiful and large entrance doors (Bab). You can see arched portals of marble (which is quarried immediately outside the city gates) in front of houses and mudhuts the roofs of which scarcely reach to the points of the arches. The roofs are flat, made of stamped earth (Dam), and are surrounded by low walls and parapets. In most of the larger houses you can see traces of their having been hit by bullets, and the fortress-like aspect of these dwellings reminds you of the palaces of Florence, except that here everything is smaller, humbler and less perfect.

The inhabitants of Mossul are a remarkable mixture of the original Chaldean populace and the Arabs, Kurds, Persians and Turks who successively have ruled over them. The common speech is Arabic.

Indshe-Bairaktar, the governor, received us with great courtesy and had us quartered with the Armenian Patriarch. The Nestorian and Jacobite Christians of Mossul have the most beautiful churches I have seen in Turkey, but they are living in discord and hatred. One of these churches happened to belong, I do not know why, to two congregations, and since everything which the one did in these sacred halls was an abomination in the eyes of the other, the beautiful vault had been divided by a brick wall directly in the centre.

Our Jacobite Patriarch was greatly troubled about having to house heretics, but he much preferred us to Nestorians or Greeks. Since no Christians, moreover, had ever