The gesture or the manner with which these responses are made encourages him, for he immediately asks whether I have ever been in Alabania. I have no negative or affirmative in any of the languages of the Adriatic. My Dalmatian servitor, Pedro, is absent, and my next best affirmative is in Russian.
“Do prawda.” Perhaps, being affiliated with the Sclav, he understands this language.
“You have never been in Egypt?”
As the pine and the palm are associated in my mind, and having connected the Polar midnight sun with the Pyramids of the Pharaohs, I respond in Swedish, making it intense—
“Ja!” adding a little affirmative in Roumanian, to give intensity to the remark, “Gie.”
After a pause in the conversation he resumes. He believes that he has my nationality fixed. He surmises that I am from some Balkan province, and he asks—
“Have you been in Roumelia, Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and Herzegovina?”
Knowing that I could not answer this truthfully, and not being able to answer it partially, I give him back in Roumanian an emphatic negative—
“Na canna, bucca.”
“You have been quite a traveller!”