How long?
Did I come in a steamboat?
Were there many black men in America?
How many?
These queries, and a host of others of the same stamp, gave me just cause to wonder if the man had not mistaken me for a travelling Baedeker. Had he been as tired as I was he would have enjoyed a night’s rest just as much as I. Finally, I became desperate and jerked the curtains together—a rude procedure, no doubt—and went to sleep with a volley of interrogations raging about me. If my Bosnian friend wished to know during the night aught of the history, topography or population of the United States, I fail to remember, having conveniently lost consciousness, but he was ready with a fresh volume of questions when I awakened in the morning.
At seven we stopped long enough to take coffee on the vine-arboured station-porch of a little village; a short twenty minutes later the station-master rang his bell, the train conductor blew his horn and the engineer tooted his whistle, all of which seem to be absolutely necessary to start a train in the Balkans, and we were off again, whisking over the wonderfully well-kept roadbed, past the water tanks and the switch towers in their immaculate coats of fresh, white paint, through tunnels, across gorges, and in three more hours we arrived at Sarajevo.
One might as well be precipitated from the clouds into Turkey itself as to come suddenly upon Sarajevo from the country in the North. In this little city it isn’t one Turk here and one Turk there, as in Belgrade or Sophia, but more than half the population is Ottoman. Here the Mohammedan element occupies a most interesting bazaar that covers in area several city blocks; on every hand the pencil-like pinnacles of the forty-odd mosques rear themselves skyward; the streets are alive with red-fezzed Mohammedans in spacious knee breeches, Turkish women in bloomers and veiled goddesses of the Harem. At the noon hour the air reverberates with the cries of the Muezzins, in response to which the faithful spread themselves devoutly upon their knees in the courtyards and on the steps of their houses of worship.
Sarajevo lies on both sides of the Miljača River, the banks of which are protected from the ravages of flood by well-built and not inartistic stone walls. Mountains surround the town on all sides. The streets are narrow as becomes a Turkish city, but under the Austrian régime they are kept clean as new pins. The buildings, especially the government ones, are large and well-proportioned, the shops are good and the hotels excellent.
SOME TURKISH HOMES IN SARAJEVO.