"I am trying to smell an enemy," he answered curtly.
"To smell—" I hastily checked my temptation to ridicule him, remembering that occasionally Nikka was startlingly metamorphosed in to a creature of primordial instincts. "Oh," I said lamely, "and—er—do you?"
"No," he said seriously. "It is as Hugh said. We have split the scent. They are at fault."
CHAPTER XII
THE BALKAN TRAIL
At Salonika we entered a Europe which was new to me, if an old story to Nikka, a Europe which was blended with the life and color and form of the Orient. Tall minarets like fingers of doom pointed skyward over bulbous domes, and driving to the railroad station through blocks of shabby houses that had replaced an area ravaged by fire, we heard the high-pitched, wail-call of the muezzin.
Jews in long, black gaberdines; Albanian Arnauts, Tosks, Ghegs and Malissori tribesmen, stately and savage; Greek mountaineers in the dirty, starched fustenella; tall Serb peasants, with the bearing of nobles and the faces of poets; Bulgars, stolid, imperturbable and level-eyed; hawk-nosed Ottoman Turks in tasseled fezzes; Armenians, fawning and humble; lank, hungry Syrians; treacherous-looking Greeks of the Peninsula; Greeks of the Islands, beautiful as statues by Phidias; Roumanians, with heavy black brows and the stocky build of Trajan's legionaries; Tziganes, lean and gaudily dressed; Kurds with cruel eyes and the bow-legs of a race of horsemen;—all the races of the Near East swarmed and crowded and cursed and pushed along the untidy sidewalks.
"This is No Man's Land," said Nikka as our dilapidated automobile forced a slow progress through the congested traffic. "All races here hate one another. We are two hundred years behind western Europe. Here treachery is the rule. Might is right. The strong hand takes all. Women are inferior beings—save amongst my own race."
His thin face lit with a smile.
"Many things can be said against my people, but we give our women freedom. Yet over us, as over all the other peoples, still hangs the shadow of Islam, shutting out the sun, denying culture, restricting thought."