Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

DURING 19TB CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 357
ments and the doubtful characters of modern Babylonia,
harbored a famous Kurdish outlaw and bold robber, Captain
(yus-bashi) Ahmed Bey, a deserter from the Turkish army,
who during eighteen months terrorized all travellers between
Hilla and Baghdad and extended his unlawful excursions
even to the districts of Kud(t) el-'Amara on the banks of
the Tigris, until after many futile efforts on the part of the
government he was finally captured and killed by an Arab.
In order to prevent any combined action against himself by
the consuls, he had been very careful never to attack any
foreigner. It is therefore reasonably certain to assume that
he would not have dared to molest an American who, moreover,
was the especial protege and guest of the same tribes
with whom he generally hid himself and his plunder. But
troubled in mind as Haynes was in those days by the weight
of responsibility and by numerous other causes, the temporary
presence of the Kurd in the neighborhood of Nuffar
increased his nervous condition
and sleeplessness to such a
degree that he smelled danger and complots against his
life everywhere, and, to quote his own words, looked upon
" every bush as concealing a waiting robber." What wonder
that under these circumstances the daily petty annoyances
from the good-natured and hard-working but undisplined
laborers, who frequently behaved more like a crowd
of frolicsome and naughty children than like real men,
began to worry him beyond measure ; that their occasional
small pilferings of seal cylinders; a short-lived and almost
ridiculous strike of the native basketmen misled by a disloyal
overseer from Jumjuma ; the broken leg of a foreman
injured by falling
bricks, or the more serious sudden cavein
of a deep undermined trench and the subsequent death
of another workman — occurrences familiar to him from the
previous expeditions — should in his mind assume an importance
entirely out of proportion to their real significance.