Having decided to remain here over-night, I seek the accommodation of a rudely comfortable hotel, kept by an Armenian, where, at the supper-table, I am first made acquainted with the Asiatic dish called "pillau," that is destined to form no inconsiderable part of my daily bill of fare for several weeks. Pillau is a dish that is met - with in one disguise or another all over Asia. With a foundation of boiled rice, it receives a variety of other compounds, the nature of which will appear as they enter into my daily experiences. In deference to the limited knowledge of each other's language possessed by myself and the proprietor, I am invited into the cookhouse and permitted to take a peep at the contents of several different pots and kettles simmering over a slow fire in a sort of brick trench, to point out to the waiter such dishes as I think I shall like. Failing to find among the assortment any familiar acquaintances, I try the pillau, and find it quite palatable, preferring it to anything else the house affords.
Our friend the Frenchman is quite delighted at the advent of a bicycle in Ismidt, for in his younger days, he tells me with much enthusiasm, he used to be somewhat partial to whirling wheels himself; and when he first came here from France, some eighteen years ago, he actually brought with him a bone-shaker, with which, for the first summer, he was wont to surprise the natives. This relic of by-gone days has been stowed away among a lot of old traps ever since, all but forgotten; but the appearance of a mounted wheelman recalls it to memory, and this evening, in honor of my visit, it is brought once more to light, its past history explained by its owner, and its merits and demerits as a vehicle in comparison with my bicycle duly discussed. The bone-shaker has wheels heavy enough for a dog-cart; the saddle is nearly all gnawed away by mice, and it presents altogether so antiquated an appearance that it seems a relic rather of a past century than of a past decade. Its owner assays to take a ride on it; but the best he can do is to wabble around a vacant space in front of the hotel, the awkward motions of the old bone-shaker affording intense amusement to the crowd. After supper this chatty and entertaining gentleman brings his wife, a rotund, motherly-looking person, to see the bicycle; she is a Levantine Greek, and besides her own lingua franca, her husband has improved her education to the extent of a smattering of rather misleading English. Desiring to be complimentary in return for my riding back and forth a few times for her special benefit, the lady comes forward as I dismount and, smiling complacently upon me, remarks, "How very grateful you ride, monsieur!" and her husband and tutor, desiring also to say something complimentary, echoes, " Much grateful - very."
The Greeks seem to be the life and poetry of these sea-coast places on the Ismidt gulf. My hotel faces the water; and for hours after dark a half-dozen caique-loads of serenaders are paddling about in front of the town, making quite an entertaining concert in the silence of the night, the pleasing effect being heightened by the well-known softening influence of the water, and not a little enhanced by a display of rockets and Roman candles. Earlier in the evening, while taking a look at Ismidt and the surrounding scenery, in company with a few sociable natives, who point out beauty-spots in the surrounding landscape with no little enthusiasm, I am impressed with the extreme loveliness of the situation. The town itself, now a place of thirteen thousand inhabitants, is the Nicomedia of the ancients. It is built in the form of a crescent, facing the sea; the houses, many of them painted white, are terraced upon the slopes of the green hills, whose sides and summits are clothed with verdure, and whose bases are laved by the blue waves of the gulf, which here, at the upper extremity, narrows to about a mile and a half in width; white villages dot the green mountain-slopes on the opposite shore, prominent among them being the Armenian town of Bahgjadjik, where for a number of years has been established an American missionary-school, a branch, I think, of Roberts College. Every mile of visible country, whether gently sloping or more rugged and imposing, is green with luxuriant vegetation, and the waters of the gulf are of that deep-blue color peculiar to mountain-locked inlets; the bright green hills, the dancing blue waters, and the white painted villages combine to make a scene so lovely in the chastened light of early eventide that, after the Bosporus, I think I never saw a place more beautiful. Besides the loveliness of the situation, the little mountain-sheltered inlet makes an excellent anchorage for shipping; and during the late war, at the well-remembered crisis when the Russian armies were bearing down on Constantinople and the British fleet received the famous order to pass through the Dardanelles with or without the Sultan's permission, the head-waters of the Ismidt gulf became, for several months, the rendezvous of the ships.
CHAPTER XI.
ON THROUGH ASIA.
Early dawn on Tuesday morning finds me already astir and groping about the hotel in search of some of the slumbering employees to let me out. Pocketing a cold lunch in lieu of eating breakfast, I mount and wheel down the long street leading out of the eastern end of town. On the way out I pass a party of caravan-teamsters who have just arrived with a cargo of mohair from Angora; their pack-mules are fairly festooned with strings of bells of all sizes, from a tiny sleigh-bell to a solemn-voiced sheet-iron affair the size of a two-gallon jar. These bells make an awful din; the men are unpacking the weary animals, shouting both at the mules and at each other, as if their chief object were to create as much noise as possible; but as I wheel noiselessly past, they cease their unpacking and their shouting, as if by common consent, and greet me with that silent stare of wonder that men might be supposed to accord to an apparition from another world. For some few miles a rough macadam road affords a somewhat choppy but nevertheless ridable surface, and further inland it develops into a fairly good roadway, where a dismount is unnecessary for several miles. The road leads along a depression between a continuation of the mountain-chains that inclose the Ismidt gulf, which now run parallel with my road on either hand at the distance of a couple of miles, some of the spurs on the south range rising to quite an imposing height. For four miles out of Ismidt the country is flat and swampy; beyond that it changes to higher ground; and the swampy flat, the higher ground, and the mountain-slopes are all covered with timber and a dense growth of underbrush, in which wild-fig shrubs and the homely but beautiful ferns of the English commons, the Missouri Valley woods, and the California foot-hills, mingle their respective charms, and hob-nob with scrub-oak, chestnut, walnut, and scores of others. The whole face of the country is covered with this dense thicket, and the first little hamlet I pass on the road is nearly hidden in it, the roofs of the houses being barely visible above the green sea of vegetation. Orchards and little patches of ground that have been cleared and cultivated are hidden entirely, and one cannot help thinking that if this interminable forest of brushwood were once to get fairly ablaze, nothing could prevent it from destroying everything these villagers possess.
A foretaste of what awaits me farther in the interior is obtained even within the first few hours of the morning, when a couple of horsemen canter at my heels for miles; they seem delighted beyond measure, and their solicitude for my health and general welfare is quite affecting. When I halt to pluck some blackberries, they solemnly pat their stomachs and shake their heads in chorus, to make me understand that blackberries are not good things to eat; and by gestures they notify me of bad places in the road which are yet out of sight ahead. Eude mehanax, now called khans, occupy little clearings by the roadside, at intervals of a few miles; and among the habitues congregated there I notice several of the Circassian refugees on whose account friends at Ismidt and Constantinople have shown themselves so concerned for my safety.
They are dressed in the long Cossack coats of dark cloth peculiar to the inhabitants of the Caucasus; two rows of bone or metal cartridge-cases adorn their breast, being fitted into flutes or pockets made for them; they wear either top boots or top bootlegs, and the counterpart of my own moccasins; and their headdress is a tall black lamb's-wool turban, similar to the national headgear of the Persians. They are by far the best-dressed and most respectable-looking men one sees among the groups; for while the majority of the natives are both ragged and barefooted, I don't remember ever seeing Circassians either. To all outward appearances they are the most trustworthy men of them all; but there is really more deviltry concealed beneath the smiling exterior of one of these homeless mountaineers from Circassia than in a whole village of the less likely- looking natives here, whose general cutthroat appearance - an effect produced, more than anything else, by the universal custom of wearing all the old swords, knives, anil pistols they can get hold of-really counts for nothing. In picturesqueness of attire some of these khan loafers leave nothing to be desired; and although I am this morning wearing Igali's cerulean scarf as a sash, the tri-colored pencil string of Servia around my neck, and a handsome pair of Circassian moccasins, I ain absolutely nowhere by the side of many a native here whose entire wardrobe wouldn't fetch half a mcdjedie in a Galata auction-room. The great light of Central Asian hospitality casts a glimmer even up into this out-of-the-way northwestern corner of the continent, though it seems to partake more of the Nevada interpretation of the word than farther in the interior. Thrice during the forenoon I am accosted with the invitation "mastic? cogniac? coffee." by road-side klian-jees or their customers who wish me to stop and let them satisfy their consuming curiosity at my novel bagar (horse), as many of them jokingly allude to it. Beyond these three beverages and the inevitable nargileh, these wayside khans provide nothing; vishner syrup (a pleasant extract of the vishner cherry; a spoonful in a tumbler of water makes a most agreeable and refreshing sherbet), which is my favorite beverage on the road, being an inoffensive, non-intoxicating drink, is not in sufficient demand among the patrons of the khans to justify keeping it in stock. An ancient bowlder causeway traverses the route I am following, hut the blocks of stone composing it have long since become misplaced and scattered about in confusion, making it impassable for wheeled vehicles; and the natural dirt-road alongside it is covered with several inches of dust which is continually being churned up by mule-caravans bringing mohair from Angora and miscellaneous merchandise from Ismidt. Camel-caravans make smooth tracks, but they seldom venture to Ismidt at this time of the year, I am told, on account of the bellicose character of the mosquitoes that inhabit this particular region; their special mode of attack being to invade the camels' sensitive nostrils, which drives these patient beasts of burden to the last verge of distraction, sometimes even worrying them to death. Stopping for dinner at the village of Sabanja, the scenes familiar in connection with a halt for refreshments in the Balkan Peninsula are enacted; though for bland and childlike assurance there is no comparison between the European Turk and his brother in Asia Minor. More than one villager approaches me during the few minutes I am engaged in eating dinner, and blandly asks me to quit eating and let him see me ride; one of them, with a view of putting it out of my power to refuse, supplements his request with a few green apples which no European could eat without bringing on an attack of cholera morbus, but which Asiatics consume with impunity. After dinner I request the proprietor to save me from the madding crowd long enough to round up a few notes, which he attempts to do by locking me in a room over the stable. In less than ten minutes the door is unlocked, and in walks the headman of the village, making a most solemn and profound salaam as he enters. He has searched out a man who fought with the English in the Crimea, according to his - the man's-own explanation, and who knows a few words of Frank language and has brought him along to interpret. Without the slightest hesitation he asks me to leave off writing and come down and ride, in order that he may see the performance, and - he continues, artfully - that he may judge of the comparative merits of a horse and a bicycle.
This peculiar trait of the Asiatic character is further illustrated during the afternoon in the case of a caravan leader whom I meet on an unridable stretch of road. "Bin! bin!" says this person, as soon as his mental faculties grasp the idea that the bicycle is something to ride on. "Mimlcin, deyil; fenna yole; duz yolo lazim " (impossible; bad road; good road necessary), I reply, airing my limited stock of Turkish. Nothing daunted by this answer, the man blandly requests me to turn about and follow his caravan until ridable road is reached - a good mile - in order that he may be enlightened. It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that, so far as I know, this particular individual's ideas of 'cycling are as hazy and undefined to-day as they ever were.
The principal occupation of the Sabanjans seems to be killing time; or perhaps waiting for something to turn up. Apple and pear-orchards are scattered about among the brush, looking utterly neglected; they are old trees mostly, and were planted by the more enterprising ancestors of the present owners, who would appear to be altogether unworthy of their sires, since they evidently do nothing in the way of trimming and pruning, but merely accept such blessings as unaided nature vouchsafes to bestow upon them. Moss-grown gravestones are visible here and there amid the thickets; the graveyards are neither protected by fence nor shorn of brush; in short, this aggressive undergrowth appears to be altogether too much for the energies of the Sabanjans; it seems to be encroaching upon them from every direction, ruthlessly pursuing them even to their very door-sills; like Banquo's ghost, it will not down, and the people have evidently retired discouraged from the contest. Higher up on the mountain-slopes the underbrush gives place to heavier timber, and small clearings abound, around which the unsubdued forest stands like a solid wall of green, the scene reminding one quite forcibly of backwoods clearings in Ohio; and were it not for the ancient appearance of the Sabanja minarets, the old bowlder causeway, and other evidences of declining years, one might easily imagine himself in a new country instead of the cradle of our race.