X. We will now say goodbye, and we thank your Excellency for all your kindness.
Vali. It is I that am indebted for your presence. Will you send my love to his Excellency your father? for he also is a Pasha, and we are brothers.
From Adana our next stage was to Aintab. Our luggage had now all to be conveyed on pack-mules, for we were going over tracks where wheels could not pass. This made our party seem larger, for we needed three mules for the baggage, and they were accompanied by three muleteers, who also looked after our horses and the mules ridden by our men. Our escort here consisted of four Zaptiehs and a Captain. This was the lowest number to which we had been able to reduce the fifteen men the Vali had pressed upon us. Nominally, they received no pay from us, but the "baksheesh" which we were expected to give them no doubt compensated for the arrears of pay from which the Turkish soldier invariably suffers.
We had parted with Constantin at Adana. He was not very suitable for really rough camping work, and we had asked the missionaries at Adana to recommend us a less civilised person, who would be more competent in tight places. Through them we engaged an Armenian, Arten by name. He could only speak Turkish, so we were now entirely thrown on our own resources as to Turkish conversation. X, however, had acquired quite enough of the language to be intelligible to Hassan, who interpreted our wants to the others.
We had hardly left Adana before incessant heavy rains came on, which turned the tracks into impassable mud swamps. We struggled on as far as Hamidieh, where we sought refuge in the house of an Austrian widow who ran a large cotton mill in the place. For three days the rain came down in torrents. I went to bed indoors with fever; X, however, still preferred to sleep out in the tent in pools of water, which the men vainly endeavoured to keep out by digging trenches all round. On the third day we sallied out again and pitched our camp in the middle of little green pasture fields in the bed of a lovely valley. Real milking cows strayed about in the little fields, and cocks and hens crowed and cackled familiarly close to us. This was a very different country from the one we had left. In spite of the fact that we had had to exchange wheels for pack-mules, it seemed far more civilised and cultivated. Trees and water everywhere gave one a feeling of life and growing things, unlike the stagnation of the waterless parts.
The Zaptiehs here, in greeting the town or village we were approaching, would always include in their praises its power of providing milk and eggs. Our former Zaptiehs had handed on to them that we had an insatiable desire for these luxuries, and they would use this as an inducement for us to come on to any place where they particularly desired to camp, a desire which generally arose from the vicinity of some large khan where they could spend a sociable evening.
"Oh, it is a lovely village; there are many eggs, there is much milk. The cows they are never dry, and the hens they never cease to lay. The chickens, too, they are not all legs, they are fat and juicy."
But we were getting out of the Cilician Plain and the Taurus was with us again. The branch which runs southwards from the main chain to the coast at Alexandretta, the beautiful Amanus range, still cut us off from the fertile plains of Mesopotamia.