Leila starts to sing—a haunting melody, dirge-like. Her voice keeps rising and falling. One moment she is a young woman, but the next she sounds ageless, featureless, a creature of water and foam. When she speaks it is no longer in Kurdish. Arthur feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The words pouring from her lips are remarkably similar to Akkadian, the ancient Semitic language of Mesopotamia. It enthralls him, the mirroring of the consonants. Yet again he finds himself wondering whether the Yazidis could be the descendants of a civilization that flourished in this region
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