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.