“All maternity is sacred to the Turk, and every child enjoys full legal status. The super-cowardice of declaring a child as born of ‘parents unknown’ (as you may in France) could never be allowed. If marriage be not the high sacrament it is, theoretically, regarded in Europe, the life of every babe whom God sends us is held to be a sacred charge. Do our missionaries in Turkey really preach the Gospel of Christ?”
“Do you approve, or admire, the resignation of the East, the Turk’s ideal of being content with so little?” asked the energetic American.
“We are both wrong. Their resignation too often leaves life stagnant, our race for dollars drenches the world in blood.
“Is it not horrible for us to have to confess that all this appalling Battle of the Cross against the Crescent, sprang out of greed for oil.
“One cannot realise what the world would be like were all nations governed by your and my ideals. Would there ever have been a British Empire? We can scarcely justify, on grounds of high morality, the conquest of America; and, surely, the States could by such ruling have, indeed, become ‘God’s own country.’”
When the road became rather more European, our Turkish boy friends sought to relieve the monotony by a furious race between the two yailis, and we were tossed about beyond all possibility of further talk. When, however, the boys had won the first heat, I begged to be excused from trying to secure our revenge, as the carriages did not seem solid enough for racing.
Then behold, at the word, one of our wheels flew off! And, though we were mercifully taking a saunter “between rounds” at the moment, we had to follow our belongings into the mud and do what we could to help the wheelwright.
The American, I found, had been teaching himself the language, and claims to have read Nasreddin Hodja in the original. Now he hastened to improve the occasion by the most voluble congratulations to our unmoved drivers. “This wheel evidently knew how to choose the ‘psychological moment’ for its detachment,” he exclaimed. “On the edge of a mountain, we should all have been pitched into the depths; crossing a river, our lady passenger, who cannot swim, would have been drowned; during the race, we could not have avoided a fatal collision. If it had to happen, it could not have happened more wisely!”