The Tennessean in Persia and Kurdistan: being scenes and incidents in the life of Samuel Audley Rhea.(Excerpt)

1869

IN A SINGLE BATTLE of the great Russian and Turkish war more souls entered eternity than all the missionaries who have died for five hundred years. Honor to the brave! Let them win earthly applause. Those who came out of sieges, battles, pestilence, and, from Kars and Crimea, returned safely to Sardinia, England, France, they had the honor of the nations. But did not the angels look down as approvingly upon those who, throughout the Crimean and Persian wars, held the missionary front in Koordistan? Was the hero of Kars and the Malakoff more heroic than the solitary lady amid the Koords and snows of Gawar?

General Williams in those days sent an officer, a Pole, in hot haste from Kars to check a great Koordish rebellion on the Tigris. Russia was not only besieging, but intriguing against him, and he must meet Russia at a distance. Persia was long trembling on the edge of plunging into the red war sea for Russia. Her Moslem followers of Ali are drilled to hate with bitter intensity Turkish followers of the Ommiades, the murderers of Ali. Almost drawn into the Crimean war, Persia actually engaged in war with England; but fortunately, not till after the very sudden and unexpected peace arranged by Alexander and Napoleon.

The wild tribes of Koordistan sensitively sympathized with these agitations. It was a question whether some of their hot and trembling mountains might not belch lava and run down with liquid fire. Reports of Koordish warriors massing for storm rolled in long reverberations through the Koordish mountains. The alert movement of General Williams from Kars, in sending an officer to negotiation with Yez Deen Shir, was none too quick. The Turks removed the powerful young chief from Jezirah and made him a state prisoner at Mosul. He used to visit us at Mosul to while away his time, and had savagely informed us that he would "like to kill every Jew, Yezidee and Christian," politely adding, "except yourselves, my friends, and drink their blood!" The Turks, in straits of war, trusted him to raise soldiers among the Koords. Koords flocked to his standard, not simply five thousand, but enough to lead him to defy the Turks. He rebelled, held Jezirah for several months, took and held all the fastnesses where the Tigris for fifty miles cuts through mountain-clefts grander than the Highlands of the Hudson. Before putting to death the pasha of Seert, he ignominiously rode him upon a donkey with face to the tail, making him carry puppies. The atrocities committed by him upon the Christians of Jebal Tour sent shuddering through the mountains.

While scenes of blood were enacting on the great highway from Baghdad to Constantinople, Mr. Rhea, one hundred miles farther east, was occupying apparently the most exposed point of all. Mohammed Agha, near him, was trying to get up a Russian party and proceed to the Russian camp, in avowed rebellion. We all knew something of the treacherous character of the Koords. A number of our missionaries had been robbed by them. I had undergone that process twice and Mr. Cochran once in the neighborhood of Gawar.

During these months, Mr. and Mrs. Rhea nobly labored on and trusted God. Alluding to Yez Deen Shir, then in possession of Jezirah and all that region, including the field of our native missionaries in Botan, Mr. Rhea wrote to me:

January 23, 1855.--How much we have to be grateful for! Our homes might have been desolated, but God has kept us as the apple of his eye. How his great presence is round about us, and from his infinite heart streams of love and mercy are ever gushing out, and we see him not! How many hours of each day pass off, and how few warm, hearty, loving thoughts go up to that great Being, at the faintest conception of whose Eternity and Immensity our feeble intellects read and stagger; and before the unsullied glory of whose purity and holiness our poor hearts quail and sink within us! There are times when I have unutterable longings of soul to know that great Being who made me and sent his Son to redeem me.