"Then why don't they?"
"I thought you knew." He lowered his voice and whispered, "Daajek"—the Turk.
"You mean they won't allow you?"
Avedis nodded. "Wait till we get home," he said.
The conversation was resumed, where alone such conversations were safe, though not always even there, within closed doors.
"I know," said Jack, "that the Turks hate machinery."
"They detest it, and they fear it. They think every machine the work of Shaytan—the Devil."
"I can't help thinking," said Jack, "of the Dark Ages, and of what I read of them before I came. Here are men of the twelfth century, with their feet on the necks of men of the nineteenth. It's bad for both. They must be puzzled with you, and afraid of you, as a Norman Baron would have been of his Saxon serfs if they had understood all about steam and electricity, while he thought those things mysterious works of the Devil. But I wonder how long he could have kept them serfs?"
"As long as he had arms, and they had none. More especially if he was backed up from outside," Avedis answered sadly. Then he sang softly, as if to himself, two lines of an old Armenian national song—