Before leaving Erzeroum, we paid a visit to the Armenian school, which is organized on the German plan and includes a commercial and classical curriculum. It had at that time one hundred and thirty-four pupils. It was a bitterly cold day, the playground had been flooded and was a sheet of ice, and a number of boys and grown-ups were skating. One of the masters told me that the whole “American Colony” of Erzeroum came to skate there. I asked “What Americans?” and discovered that there was absolutely only one bonâ-fide American in the whole city at that particular moment, and he was Mr. Leo Bergholz, the American Consul, and even he was not a Christian, being of the Jewish persuasion; moreover, he had not yet received his official exequatur. The so-called American Colony consisted entirely of Armenians who had acquired American citizenship and flaunted their cheaply gained nationality in the face of the Turkish authorities.
Later on, at Alexandretta, when our dragoman became ill, an “American” doctor was called in to attend him, and turned out to be a dark Syrian Armenian—a thoroughbred Asiatic. These facts in themselves were not necessarily of a mischievous kind; but nobody who has travelled in those parts can be ignorant of the capital made by these strange Americans out of their exotic nationality, and the trouble they occasionally give to the Turkish authorities by their pretensions, quite independent of the fact that many of these so-called “Americans” were in touch, as they doubtless were in full sympathy, with the Armenian revolutionary movement.
We were heartily glad to leave Erzeroum, for among other inconveniences we found the air so rarefied that the slightest exertion would increase the heart’s action and produce a sense of fatigue.
CHAPTER VI
JOURNEY THROUGH ASIATIC TURKEY: III
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak—such was the process;
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.