Road through Kurdistan

AM Hamilton was a New Zealand Engineer who oversaw the construction of a road through Iraq for four years, beginning in 1928. First published in 1937, the author revised it and republished in 1958 - which is the edition I have read.

Iraq at this time was referred to as Mandatory Iraq, administered by the British after World War I when the Ottoman empire was broken up.

Employed by the Public Works Department, Hamilton was initially posted to Diwaniyah, to build roads and infrastructure. After a relatively short time funds for the year were spent, and he was transferred to Kurdistan to take over the road project. The statistics provided in his appendices tell us the road is 115 miles long (185km). It passes through two of the most challenging gorges a road builder might expect to ever encounter.

P56

Sloane, who knew the Kurds better than any European of the century, had recently used this description of them:‘Shedders of blood, raisers of strife, seekers of turmoil and uproar, robbers and brigands; a people all malignant, and evil-doers of depraved habits, scorning the garment of wisdom; but a brave race and fearless, of a hospitality grateful to the soul, in truth and in honour unequalled, of pleasing countenance and fair cheek, boasting all the goods of beauty and grace.'What a wealth of paradox is here, yet these were words hardly calculated to reassure the new Engineer!

A Kurdish overseer, Ramze Effendi, had been appointed to assist me, but he had no knowledge of road-making and could speak no English. [...] There came also an Assyrian overseer called Benyamin Yonin. As the Assyrians are Christians and the Kurds Mohammedans, there mountain folk were often enemies, [...] so I wondered how my two overseers would get on together.The surveyor was a Hindi, and my clerk a Chaldean Christian. Yes with the help of this strangely assorted staff, I managed to get together some hundred workmen. The men who joined up were chiefly Arabs and Persians, though we also conscripted a few tribal Kurds. [...] With our Armenian as our expert in blasting (he said he had learnt the job in the Turkish Army), this party of the different races and religions set to work with a will to clear the huge boulders and use them to form a wide well-graded road, partly cut out of the solid rock of the hillside. Fortunately we all seemed blessed with enough sense of humour to laugh at our racial differences, and the work forged ahead with out trouble.

When spring comes to Gali Ali Beg, the barren country of Kurdistan, with its rugged mountain and grey rocks, bursts suddenly into extraordinary beauty.Towards the end of March, almost in a night it seems, the ground snows melt and the warmth of spring is in the air. The mists lift, and it is as though a veil that for months past had hung over the eyes of the beholder were suddenly withdrawn. In the clear air the mountains seem to stand nearer than ever before. Above the dark walls of the gorge the high snow-fields, like the white wings of some giant bird that has preened itself, stretch smoothly up into the brilliant cloudless sky; while the valley in all but the rockiest places becomes dense with green grass.