CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
I Half Way Through the First Year[3]
II Three Christmases and the Seven Sleepers[13]
III A Visit to Adana[32]
IV Great Expectations[48]
V Round about Tarsus[60]
VI Hamlet and the Gathering of the Storm Clouds[92]
VII The Storm Approaches[103]
VIII The Storm Breaks[111]
IX Life and Death[132]
X Why?[147]
XI Abdul Hamid's Last Day[156]
XII The Young Turks and the Toy Fleet[162]
XIII A New Life[172]
XIV Off to Egypt[183]

THE RED RUGS
OF TARSUS

THE RED RUGS
OF TARSUS

HALF WAY THROUGH THE
FIRST YEAR

Tarsus, Turkey-in-Asia,
December second,
Nineteen-Eight.

Mother dear:

My first married birthday! I am twenty-six years old. It is twenty-six weeks since The Day. I have been counting up the different places at which we stopped on the way from New York to Tarsus. This is the twenty-sixth abode we have occupied in the twenty-six weeks. Isn't that a coincidence? You are smiling and saying that it is just like honeymooners to notice it at all.

Wish you could sit beside me near our big log fire in the bedroom. The fireplace is made of solid stone, and in it we burn whole logs. When the wind is blowing a certain direction, puffs come down the chimney and the smoke nearly chokes me. It is good for us that this is only an occasional happening. Herbert insists solemnly that the smoke of a wood fire is good for the eyes. Even with his eyes smarting and half-shut, I can see him twinkle and know that he is teasing.

I am training myself to look after every little detail in the care of our rooms. In the morning I put all "ingoodorder." Chips are picked up and thrown into the woodbox. Tumblers and mirror polished, every corner dusted. No meals for me to think about: for the mission family eats in the college dining-room.

Each of the three young couples in this house has what Mother Christie calls a house boy. That means a student who is making his own way. Ours is a Greek about sixteen years old, whose tuition we pay. He gives us two hours' work each day. Socrates makes our fires, puts the saddles on our horses, brings water, and goes to the market to fetch oranges (of which I eat an inordinate number). A fire is made under a huge kettle, like my grandmother's apple-butter boiler, and hot water is obtained in this way for our baths. If we want a bath at night, Socrates starts the fire at supper-time, and brings us the water during the little recess he has between two evening study hours. He keeps my bottle of alcohol filled with the pure grape spirits people make here. I get an oke at a time (a quart is about four cups, isn't it? Well, an oke is about five). I have a basket for big Jaffa oranges and another for mandarines.

Socrates interprets well when we go shopping. He is certainly a handy boy. We help him with his lessons sometimes. When he cleaned our room the first Saturday, he asked me "to arrange all those funny pretty things," pointing to silver toilet articles, "just the way you want them kept." When it was done, he spent a long time walking slowly around the place. He memorized my arrangement, and has not slipped up a single Saturday since. When we take a horseback ride Saturday morning, part of the fun of that ride is the thought that when we get back to our rooms, they will have been beautifully cleaned and everything will look just right for Sunday.

On the outside wall of our bedroom, directly behind the head of our bed, and covering the entire space between two windows, is a very large red and blue kileem. On the floor are square blue rugs, just the shade to make Herbert imagine my eyes are not green. On one side Mrs. Christie has had two cedar wardrobes built in, and between them are a whole lot of drawers, up to dressing-table height. Back of the door, leading from the bedroom to the study, is a table where I have the First Aid outfit Dr. Oliver Smith gave me for my wedding gift.

Socrates confided in me that he wants to be a doctor. He comes from a Greek village in the heart of the silver mine district of the Taurus. His father and mother died during an epidemic. He tells me that he knew, young as he was, that if there had been a doctor in his village, his parents might not have died; and that he had determined then to be a doctor, so that other little boys might not lose their parents.

Doctor Christie told the boys in Chapel one morning that when they got hurt they could come to me for bandaging. Herbert teases me about the miles and miles of bandages in my professional-looking japanned tin box. There is a wonderful case of medicine. Those I do not know how to use I have put away up high on a shelf in case I might sometime lend them to the doctor. The things I know how to use are kept in first-class order by Socrates. I bought a little white enameled basin or two to be used when I make dressings. For six weeks I have been taking care of an ugly open sore on the leg of one of my students. It is a case of cotton poisoning. These people get cotton poisoning by contact with the plant at picking-time. I never heard of it before, but I used my head, cleaned the sore with camphenol, and have dressed it with camphenol-soaked bandages twice every day. I was rewarded after a week in seeing the wound surrounded by a ring of nice clean flesh. The infected part has been diminishing in size, and within the past few days is completely covered with a layer of new skin. I am proud of this: for the boy could not walk very well when he first came to me.

Last Sunday Melanchthon, a kid of fourteen, nearly amputated his finger in the bread-cutter. I fixed it up with adhesive tape stitches placed all around the cut, until the doctor could get back from some distant village to sew it. Thank Heaven, Melanchthon can still wiggle his finger joint. When Socrates took him back to the dormitory after I had dressed his finger that first day, the little fellow asked if he could go to see the lady again. Socrates explained that the lady had said he must return on the morrow for another dressing. Melanchthon was pleased. He did want to see the pretty room again. He wondered if Sultan Abdul Hamid had anything so fine in Yildiz Kiosk.

Eflaton (Armenian for Plato), a nearsighted chap in my Sub-Freshman class, was working with a bunch of boys at the corner of the yard, where a wee bit of wall is being built. Some day there may be money to put the wall all around the college property. It grows almost imperceptibly as gifts for that purpose come in. They are few, alas! Just a tiny corner is finished. The boys were piling stone, and Eflaton had the ill-luck to get two fingers of his right hand badly crushed. Again the doctor was far away, and I did my best. To-day, when I had finished Eflaton's dressing, he looked up at me with those dreamy eyes of his and announced, "Mrs. Gibbons, you are a angel!" When I protested that I was not "a angel," he agreed with me. Because, said he, "You are better than that: you are a angel mother." Oh, these honey-tongued Orientals! They beat the Irish.

The trip planned by Henri Imer and Herbert to Namroun has not yet come off. They intended to leave towards the end of the last week of October, returning the following Tuesday. Wives were to take their classes. Before the bad weather set in, we were anxious to have Henri take for us a lot of photographs of the acropolis and castle there. All plans were made to go. But political news prevented their leaving. The action of Bulgaria and Austria has raised a ferment throughout Turkey, especially in these parts, where there are many Armenian Christians. A reactionary movement is feared. The Armenians fear that the Mohammedans distrust their loyalty.

The fasting month of Ramazan ended on October twenty-fifth, and the following Monday the great Bairam (feast) began. Lower-class Mohammedans generally get gloriously drunk in towns on this day. Occidental Turkophiles write of and praise Moslems as being the original White Ribboners. Perhaps many are, but not town Turks, who consume quantities of raki, the strongest fire-water man ever invented. During this Bairam the Armenians were fearing a massacre. The Constitution has lifted the prohibition of owning firearms. We hear the Armenians have been buying in large quantities. We did not ourselves anticipate trouble. But one never knows in this country. It was best for Henri and Herbert not to go.

I am soon for bed. We must be up by six. At least I suppose it is six. The way they tell time here makes me dizzy. So many hours since sunrise, they say. Or, so many hours since sunset. The precise minute for doing any given thing must be worked out the way they make a time-table at the sea-shore, to show you when to take your swim. The mischief of it is, of course, that the time-table varies each day. The night we arrived in Tarsus, after our weeks of camping in the Taurus, we rode our tired horses under the arch of the college gate at ten P.M. The silly clock in a tower near by was striking four.

I am not sure whether the East or the West knows the philosophical way to tell time. Perhaps Western reckoning tends to be too precise, and Greenwich time is contrary to nature. Anyhow, the Eastern way would make an efficiency expert's work-schedule look like a cinema film run by a greenhorn. Perhaps these Eastern peoples who dream dreams and feed their souls on starlight must map out their day by the going of the sun.

THREE CHRISTMASES AND
THE SEVEN SLEEPERS

Tarsus,
December twenty-fifth.

Dearest Mother:

College classes going at full swing to-day. It is not Christmas for the boys. Some of the early missionaries to Turkey had it in their noddle that December twenty-fifth was really the day Christ was born, and they were shocked to see the Greeks celebrating January sixth and the Armenians January nineteenth. Missionaries were unimaginative, too, wrapped up in their own narrow ideas, too sure they were right and all the rest of mankind wrong (else why had they sacrificed everything to come way out here?) to realize that the Eastern calendar is thirteen days behind ours.

The missionaries couldn't call the Greek aberration a sin. They could not logically hold out for a calendar made in Rome! But they did get after their Armenian converts on the theological question, and for many years insisted on an American celebration. Absurdities like that have now happily passed in missionary work, and your missionary of to-day is better able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials than the old-fashioned Puritans, who were every bit as bigoted as medieval Catholics.

But I am getting away from Christmas in Asia! Herbert and I taught our classes this morning as usual. We are going to celebrate to-night. We have a turkey roasting, and there is a jar of cranberry sauce that did not arrive in time for Thanksgiving. I have just come from the kitchen, flushed with the stove and the triumph of having really succeeded in doing the trick I learned at Simmons College last year. My fruits and nuts are genuinely glacéd.

If I haven't lived up to Simmons College cookery, Mother, I've made some use of Bryn Mawr. Herbert's schedule is twenty-five hours a week. What time was there left for private study? To take advantage of next year in Paris, he simply must do some groundwork on his fellowship thesis. So I have taken over ten of his hours—the two English courses: preparatory boys learning the first rudiments of our language, and—joy of joys!—his Sub-Freshman class. They know pretty well how to speak and write English, so I am giving them rhetoric—and incidentally I am getting myself more than I give. One has to teach to learn!

I have kidnapped that Sub-Freshman class, and Herbert will not get them back. I may grow weary of beginners' English, and find some excuse for putting the beginners again on Herbert's schedule. But the Sub-Freshmen give me a splendid chance for letting loose my theories on helpless beings, and I confess that I am vain—or is conceited the word?—enough to like the sensation of handing out knowledge ex cathedra.

I am teaching the boys how to plan and construct an essay. Many of my teachers thought they had finished their work when they had given us a subject and corrected the essay. Not so Mrs. G. We began with words. Then came the sentences. Then separate and related paragraphs. We keep juggling with the principles of unity, clearness, and force. Once a week we do a formal essay. I do not simply announce my subject and leave my struggling boy to evolve an atrocious piece of writing. No. I write the subject on the board. Then call for concisely stated facts about it. These facts are numbered and copied by the boys. When we have about twenty facts, we indicate roughly possible combinations. The boys have a clear idea of the difference between a Subject and a Theme. We have forged ahead a bit into the study of the figure of speech (Mejaz, as it is called in Turkish). This appeals deeply, because Orientals see and think and speak in figures. They are poets.

I had a whole week of lectures on figures, and now the boys are learning the way to make and recognize the different ones. This has been done entirely without a text-book. I found early in the game that the boys could memorize rapidly. Put this with the fact that they think excellence in scholarship consists in giving you back again what you said. I reversed the old-fashioned way of clearing the decks for action by lining up a lot of stupid and meaningless definitions. Absorb information first, I say; handle it, get acquainted with it, digest it—then, with a background of experience, classify your ideas and concentrate them into definitions.

Later

You lost the chance of your lifetime, Mother. I broke off suddenly the learned lecture on rhetoric. Henri Imer and Herbert were coming in from their ride, and I had literally to jump down the stairs to get the glacé fruits out of the way in the kitchen before Herbert would burst in and find them there, spread out all over the room on buttered paper. We are a big family, and I made a lot.

I am thinking of my Christmases. This is the first I have ever spent away from you.

Tarsus, January eighth,
Nineteen-Nine.

It isn't because my husband is brand-new, or that we are living what is supposed to be "that difficult first year" that I object to separations. If this first year is difficult, come on the rest of the years, I say. But I already know, from our engagement days, what separations mean. Still, I saw quite distinctly, when Herbert's father sent him a check to go to the Holy Land, that he ought not to miss the chance. We may not get out this way again. I put it to myself: it will be a glorious thing to have done! So I told him he must seize the day. I could not accompany him for a reason that you may guess. I have not told you before: one doesn't always know one's self.

Our holidays and examinations are arranged according to the Oriental Christmases. So they come in January to take in the period from the sixth to the nineteenth. It isn't a long time for a trip: but the Holy Land is not far away. Herbert started off two days ago on the Greek Christmas, and I took Socrates down to Mersina with me to see him off. Being Socrates' Christmas, we could avoid our own lack of gaiety in the last meal by blowing him to a big dinner at the hotel.

You ought to have seen Herbert embarking for Syria, with Mr. Gould, an Englishman on our faculty, and half a dozen boys who live at Alexandretta, the next port—near enough and cheap enough to go home for the holidays. Mr. G. and Herbert took deck passage with the boys. It is January, with snow on the Taurus and cold winds on the Plain, but the Mediterranean blew hot on the day they left, and they could change to a cabin the next day, if it was too cold to spend the second night to Jaffa on deck. Herbert wore an old suit that we intended to throw away, and a black fez. With the beard he has grown to make him look older in the classroom, he is for all the world like a Russian pilgrim.

Herbert is to be gone two weeks. Work is an antidote for the "mopes." I tell myself that he may be delayed in returning, and that I may have to tide over the first few days of the new term. So I am working up psychology lectures. I chew over a phrase like William James's "states of consciousness as such" until I fall asleep. I have to begin all over again the next morning, for I cannot remember what he means by "as such."

Dr. Christie knows how to handle women to perfection. We are a small circle, and he says that wives must share in the faculty meetings. He declares that he wants our opinion and our advice, and that "the very best example set to the Orientals is to show them how we respect and defer to our women." But I know this is only half the truth. He takes us in, so that we won't be able to criticize decisions in which we had no part. I knit in faculty meetings. My college education never destroyed the woman's instinct to have hands constantly occupied. Only, I sometimes forget and go ahead at my knitting mechanically. The first baby-band I made in faculty meeting was big enough to go around Herbert. So I called it a cholera belt and gave it to him. Orientals love to talk and talk and talk and talk. So do Occidentals. And in faculty meetings I have discovered that men are not a bit less garrulous than women. Since I committed matrimony I've found to my surprise that the other sex has very much the same failings as mine. This comes out in faculty meetings. I bet I'd find the same thing in corporation board meetings. Every one loves to talk, listens impatiently to others when they talk, watches for an opportunity to get another word, and gives in through weariness or indifference rather than through conviction. The best talker has it over the best thinker every time.

Mersina, January eighteenth.

I have written you about the Doughty-Wylies, how they stopped for lunch with us in Tarsus on their way from Konia, the summer British Consulate, to the winter Consulate at Mersina, and what joy it was for us to meet them. A few days later, a letter came with the inscription "For the Youngest Bride at St. Paul's College." It was a week-end invitation for Herbert and me. We went down to Mersina the very next Saturday. That was in October. Since then, week-ends with the Doughty-Wylies have been in a certain sense oases—you understand what I mean. The British Consulate means that world of ours which seems far away, and is missed occasionally in spite of the novelty of Tarsus life and the cordiality of the missionaries. At the Dougthy-Wylies, I am able to dress in the evening, and Herbert always looks best to me in his dinner-coat. We are unconventional until we get back into convention: then we wonder how and why we ever broke loose.

With tea served when you wake up, ten o'clock help-yourself-when-you-want breakfasts, a morning canter, siesta after lunch, and whiskey-and-soda and smokes in the evening—we are thirty miles only from Tarsus, and yet three thousand. We are back in an English country home. We can smell the box and feel the cold and fear the rain—so strong is the influence of the interior—until we step out-of-doors into the sunshine that makes us thankful, after all, that "back in England" was only a dream.

The Major is still in his thirties but has had a whole lifetime of adventure crowded into fifteen years of active service in India, Somaliland, Egypt, and South Africa. He has not been robust of late, and was given this consular post temporarily. Intends to return to active army service. Mrs. Doughty-Wylie is a little woman full of life and spirits. She loves nursing—has been after the bubonic plague in India and followed the British army in the Boer War. Frank and outspoken, you never know what she is going to say next. She is as vehement as the Major is mild, as bubbling over as he is cool, as Scotch as he is English. They are lovely to us, and as they have taken on with travel a sense of humor, we have great sessions, sitting around a log-fire until all hours of the night. The Major is keen on the Seljuk Turks. He is going to wean Herbert away from French to Ottoman history, I think. Plays up the possibilities of the field for research in glowing terms.

You can imagine how I whooped when Mrs. Doughty-Wylie wrote just after Herbert left that I "really must spend the time your husband is away with us." Socrates was brushing and cleaning Herbert's clothes, and an iron was on to press the trousers. I left them hanging on the line, with caution to Socrates to be sure to take them in that night. Suitcases were quickly packed. I took the next train to Mersina. Wouldn't you have done so to be able to wake the next morning at nine, and have a maid push back the curtains while you sipped tea and munched thin toast? Then, too, I hated everything about our quarters at Tarsus, cozy as they were, with Herbert away.

After a week of a lazy, restful relaxing, just as I was beginning to fell in the frame of mind to wonder how we ever happened to get out into this country and to feel sure that we would never come back, and when I was speculating on the mysterious phenomenon of the best of England's blood content always to live away from home, Herbert returned. I woke up one morning, and there he stood in the room, looking down at me. He declared that ten days in the Holy Land—without me—was enough for him. He had "done" Jerusalem and bathed in the Dead Sea—but Galilee could wait for another time. There was a swift Italian steamer up the coast. He saw it posted at Cook's in Jerusalem. Hurried down to Jaffa and caught it. We have decided that separations are not a success. May there be no more.

As we do not have to go back to Tarsus for two days, we are staying on to pass Armenian Christmas with the Doughty-Wylies. They are going to take us pig-sticking to-morrow.

Tarsus,
January twenty-second.

To-day we rode across the Plain to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.

I enjoy "training the Turks." They let their wives walk while they ride. Sometimes the poor woman will have a child or some other load on her back. You can imagine they do not turn aside to give a woman the path, not even a foreign lady. Sometimes I jar their sensibilities by standing my horse sturdily in their path. It never enters their head that I do not intend to turn out. When I rein up with the nose of my horse right in their face (they are generally on little donkeys) they have an awful shock. Reluctantly they give way to me, always looking injured and surprised. Sometimes they express their feeling in language that I fortunately cannot understand. I love to speak to them in English. I say something like this: "You old unwashed villain, I am sure you haven't used Pears' or any other soap this or any other morning. Hurry up, and get out of my way."

We came across a donkey standing patiently by the roadside. His halter-rope was tied around the leg of his rider, a boy who lay moaning on the grass. We had Socrates ask him in Turkish what the matter was. He responded that he had a fever and was too ill to go on. Herbert told Socrates to set the boy on his donkey. He went several miles with us, groaning all the way. We encouraged him, and fortunately soon met some people from his village. The Turks are absolutely indifferent to human suffering, and would have let him die there like a dog. Outside of large centers of population, they have no physicians, no hospitals, no medicines—it is only through the missionaries that such things are known at all.

At last we reached our mountain-goal, and climbed up to the cave. The Mullah received us cordially. Turks are polite and hospitable to travelers. I will say that for them. The Mullah's servant stabled our horses, brought us water, and allowed us to spread our lunch on the front porch of the mosque. It is a pretty little mosque, and right beside it is a home for the Mullah built of stone. Both are close to the entrance of the cave. The group of buildings looked beautiful from the bottom of the hill. But as is invariably the case in Turkey, close inspection revealed the primitiveness and roughness.

After lunch, during which the servant and his little boy gravely sat and watched us, we went into the cave. We took our shoes off against our will, for the cave looked dirty and mussy. Down a long flight of stone steps the beturbaned guardian led us into a sickening atmosphere of incense and goatskin. We were told that the cave was large, but, as we were in stocking feet and had noses, we elected not to explore it. During the Decian persecutions, seven young men fled from Tarsus to this cave to escape. Here they fell asleep. They were miraculously kept asleep for one hundred years. Waking they thought it was the next day, and went down to a nearby village. They were surprised to learn that the whole world was Christian. This is the genesis, or at least the Oriental version, of the Rip Van Winkle story. The Christians built a shrine at the cave. The invading Mohammedan conquerors took it over and adapted shrine and legend to their own religion, as they have done with most Christian holy places.

We sketched the mosque in the afternoon. Then we sat looking out over the plain to the sea. It is great to have a chance to talk to one's husband. We are so busy during the week that we save up our talks for Saturday and Sunday, and we are just getting to know each other. The keeper told us through Socrates that his wife had died seven years before and that he lived there all alone, except for the Mullah, with his little five year old boy. The kid sang a song for us. We gave him slices of bread thickly spread with jam, which he ate with gusto. It was probably the first jam he had ever tasted—certainly the first Crosse & Blackwell's strawberry jam. After the feast was over, he crept up slyly, seized Herbert's hand, and imprinted on it a sticky kiss. We were saddled and ready to start homeward immediately after tea, but not soon enough to get away from the hail-storm that came up all of a sudden. Before we were out of the stable, the storm broke, great big hailstones that stung when they hit you. We rode hard for twenty minutes, enjoying it keenly. It rained just long enough to make the sunset richer and the air sweeter than usual. We do not mind a bit getting wet like that when we are on horse. By riding fast, the wind soon dries our outer garments and the rain does not penetrate. By the time we reached home, we were dry and did not need to change our clothes before dinner. After our exercise a good warm bath made us sleep like the pair of healthy children we are.