The Project Gutenberg eBook, Around the Black Sea, by William Eleroy Curtis

Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them. Links to larger, higher-resolution versions of the maps at the end of the book are shown below those maps.

A complete map of the Black Sea and surrounding country will be found affixed to the inside of the back cover of this book.

Around The Black Sea

ASIA MINOR, ARMENIA, CAUCASUS, CIRCASSIA
DAGHESTAN, THE CRIMEA
ROUMANIA

BY
WILLIAM ELEROY CURTIS

AUTHOR OF “TURKESTAN: THE HEART OF ASIA”
“BETWEEN THE ANDES AND THE OCEAN”
“TODAY IN SYRIA AND PALESTINE”
“MODERN INDIA,” ETC., ETC.

HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1911,
By George H. Doran Company

THIS VOLUME IS COMPOSED OF NEWSPAPER LETTERS
WRITTEN DURING THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1910
AND IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE
MEMORY OF THE LATE
CORNELIUS McAULIFF,
MANAGING EDITOR OF THE CHICAGO RECORD-HERALD

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

AROUND THE BLACK SEA

CHAPTER I
CRUISING IN THE BLACK SEA

There are several lines of steamers on the Black Sea, sailing under the Turkish, Greek, Russian, German, French, Austrian, and Italian flags. The steamers of the North German Lloyd Company, which sail from Genoa and Naples, through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are best, but they visit only the ports on the northern coast. The Austrian Lloyd steamers, which come from Trieste, are second best, and we were fortunate in obtaining cabins on the Euterpe, which is old-fashioned, but comfortable. The captain is an Italian of Trieste, who speaks English well, as do two of the under officers; the steward is thoughtful and attentive and the cook is beyond criticism.

The passengers were a perfect babel, representing all the races and speaking all the tongues of the East, with several Europeans mixed in, each wearing his own peculiar costume. There were Turks of all kinds and all classes and all ages wearing fezzes of red felt; there were Persians, wearing fezzes of black lamb’s-wool; Albanians with fezzes of white felt, and Jews with turbans and long robes, such as they used to wear in the days of the Scriptures. We had several Turkish army officers to amuse us, and one big, blue-eyed general, who looked like a philanthropist, but is said to be a fiend of a fighter. There were English, German, and French tourists and rug buyers on their way to Persia and Turkestan; a very fat Austrian woman who was going to visit her son, consul at Batoum, and several Russians who had been visiting Paris and the Riviera and were on their way back to their homes in the Caucasus.

We had five different kinds of clergymen—Mohammedan mullahs, wearing long robes and red fezzes with white turbans wound around them, Greek and Armenian priests, who are difficult to distinguish, and three Capuchin monks. One of them was a venerable old gentleman with a patriarchal beard, and one was a mere boy who smoked cigarettes incessantly—and a cigarette does not fit in well with the hood and robe of a monk. The Capuchins have several monasteries in Asia Minor, and maintain schools and do parish work in several of the cities along the coast, where there are communities of Roman Catholics.

There were several Armenians in frock suits of broadcloth, low-cut vests, and snowy shirt bosoms, like those affected by lawyers in Mississippi and Arkansas, and one howling dervish. He did not look a bit as you would expect, but was a jaunty fellow in a fancy shirt of black cotton with white spots, without a collar, and an ordinary sack suit of gray European clothes over which he wore his distinctive coat of camel’s hair with wide sleeves and facings and trimmings of broad black braid, and on his shaven head a fez of gray wool with a wide band of black around it. He carried a dainty cane and whirled it around in his fingers like a dandy when he promenaded the deck. He was a presumptuous young dervish, for he endeavoured to enjoy the privileges of first-class passengers on a third-class ticket, which the deck steward would not permit. And when he did not go back to his proper place, after being told to do so, he was rudely elbowed down the stairs. It was not a respectful way to treat a saint in embryo, which howling dervishes are supposed to be, but I suppose the deck steward had his orders, and perhaps he was accustomed to dealing with such men.

Most of the Turks in the first-class cabin did not come to the table, because they will not eat Christian food for fear that lard or some other extract of the despised pig was used in its preparation. They took their meals in their state-rooms, with their wives and children, where they made their own coffee over spirit lamps and drank water from red earthen jugs which they had filled at the sacred fountains before leaving Constantinople. The women did not leave their cabins until they reached their destination, when they climbed blindly down the gangways into the row-boats, with veils drawn closely over their faces and their bodies enveloped in large shawls.

Several Persians in the first cabin came to their meals regularly, and brought their appetites with them. The Koran applies to them the same as it does to the Turks, but those gentlemen were not so pious as they should be. And I noticed that none of the Mohammedan passengers, except the mullahs and one general, said their prayers when the time came. The general was very devout. He wore a long, light-gray overcoat, reaching to his heels, which he kept so closely buttoned that we wondered if he had anything under it, and, like all military men over here, Russians, Austrians, and Turks, he never put aside his sword, not even when he spread his prayer rug on the deck and turned his face toward Mecca to pray.

The other first-class Mohammedan passengers paid no attention whatever to the hours for devotions, which gave me a disagreeable shock, because I have always understood that a Moslem is so conscientious that he will say his prayers five times a day at the proper moment, no matter what he happens to be doing or where he happens to be.

Many of the third-class passengers, who are compelled to sleep on the open deck, performed their duties regularly. They spread their prayer rugs carefully down in the first open place they could find, and, turning their eyes toward Mecca, went through with the genuflections which are a part of the Mohammedan ritual, and cried in loud voices that there is no God but Allah. Several of the private soldiers, and we had a large number on board, said their prayers regularly, regardless of their surroundings, but the majority of them did not and probably not more than one out of five of the Moslem passengers paid any attention to the hours of prayer.

Two of the mullahs in the first-class end of the ship had handsomely bound books from which they read aloud, as is their custom. Turkish students always study aloud. When you are riding along through country villages in the East you can locate the school-houses by the murmur of the voices of the pupils learning their lessons. If you go into a mosque that is used for educational purposes you can always find groups of students squatting on the floor, rocking their bodies back and forth with a motion as regular as that of a rocking chair, and repeating the lines of their lessons in loud voices.

I once asked a Mohammedan teacher in a Syrian mosque why this is done. He explained that people understand that which they learn through their ears better than that which they learn through their eyes. In the second place, he said, when a person studies aloud the mind is kept upon the subject intently and is not so apt to wander; thirdly, a person who is studying aloud is not so apt to go to sleep as when he reads to himself—and the danger of falling asleep is the reason for the rocking motion of the body which all students practise when they are at their books.

On the forward deck, where the anchor winch is, was camped a group of Persians. Some of them were merchants of Constantinople and other cities on their way to their native country to buy rugs and other goods; others were faithful Mohammedans returning from pilgrimages to Mecca. They were dignified, thoughtful persons with dreamy eyes and intensely black beards, and two or three old men had made themselves supremely ridiculous by the use of henna, which gives hair a bright scarlet hue. It reminded me of What’s-His-Name in “Alice in Wonderland,” who suggested that it would be awfully funny if everybody would dye his whiskers green.

“And hide our heads behind our fans

So they cannot be seen.”

Others had their finger nails stained scarlet with the same stuff, which gives a startling effect.

On the other side of the deck from the Armenians was a nest of their hereditary enemies, Kurds—tall, robust, brown fellows, with snub noses, small, fierce eyes and garments that are indescribable because of the variety of cut and colour. They lay around smoking cigarettes in the most indolent manner, each having what looked like an old-fashioned quilted comfortable for a mattress and an embroidered bag for a pillow.

The most interesting of all were the Lazis, from Lazistan, short, broad-shouldered, muscular chaps, most of whom brought their wives and children with them and camped amidship on the open deck like a lot of gypsies. The women were entirely concealed in shawls of cotton or silk that cover the head as well as the body, and they squatted in groups in the same place all day long, scarcely moving a muscle except when their husbands were hungry, and then they would dig down into a bag and produce a loaf of bread, a dried fish, a few onions, and other simple forms of food.

There were several babies scattered about promiscuously in bright-coloured wrappings, and a number of children under ten years old. Some of them had dainty features and lovely eyes, and a better behaved lot of children you never saw. We did not hear one of them cry during the entire voyage. They lay in their clumsy, queer-looking cradles, made by rude carpenters, without the slightest attention, as self-satisfied as if they had been millionaires smothered in luxury.

One night the peasants from Lazistan gave an interesting performance. The music was furnished by an ordinary bagpipe with three stops, which emitted a mournful and monotonous refrain, but with perfect time, and the dancers kept step to it very much after the manner of the North American Indian. They placed a child in the centre, a dozen or so of them clasped hands in a circle, alternately spreading out as far as their arms would reach and then coming together in a bunch, and in the meantime stamping their feet, bowing the knees, and bending the upper part of the body forward. Sometimes they would stoop to a squatting posture and hop along on one side and then on the other; then they would raise their arms as high as they could reach, revolving all the time to the left. It was a graceful movement and rather fascinating, and they seemed to enjoy it.

The third-class passengers who occupy the open deck, make themselves as comfortable as possible with big bundles of rugs and blankets and pillows, which they spread out wherever the boatswain will let them. They gave us a continuous performance abounding in life and a gorgeous riot of colour, entirely unconscious of their odd ways, their artistic poses, and the entertainment they were furnishing to the foreigners who could look down upon them from the afterdeck. The captain told me that there were doubtless thirty different races among the passengers upon that ship—Turks, Tartars, Mongols, Arabs, Armenians, Albanians, Circassians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Lazis, Slavs, Syrians, Turkomans, Bokharoits, Wallachs, and Persians of various clans, which can be detected one from another by experts, because of the way they wear their clothes. Everybody except the women wore brilliant colours, and they were shut off from observation as much as possible by blankets pinned to the canvas awning so as to make screens.

Turks are very democratic. Islam recognizes no caste; there is no aristocracy or nobility or any divisions among the Turks except on an official basis and the inferiors show great respect to those who are above them. The ordinary Turkish peasant is good-natured, honest, sober, patient, frugal, industrious, and capable of great endurance. He is not fanatical, but is kindly disposed toward everybody. His hospitality is unbounded and the exercise of charity is one of his greatest pleasures. Two ragged fellows came up to the first-class deck one day, bringing a wash basin of graniteware painted a bright blue, which they passed around, asking contributions for the benefit of a sick man with five children who was lying helpless on the open deck and ought to be given shelter below in the second-class cabin, which he had no money to pay for. I noticed that everybody chipped in something, from the glittering general to the tatterdemalions who lay sprawled upon their blankets in the shady places.

Every third-class passenger had a basket of provisions and a jug of water, and an old man fixed himself a place in the corner, where he set up a samovar and made coffee to sell. He did a good business, too. His little brass pot was always in motion, because Turks are inveterate coffee drinkers and want a cup of that beverage every few minutes. The old coffee seller was a picture—a Turk from Samsoun, a good-natured old fellow with a wrinkled face, a curly beard, a white turban, and a smile like that of our President, which won’t come off.

Coffee peddler on our steamer

A Turk of Trebizard

The beauties of the Bosphorus have often been described, and probably no sheet of water of corresponding length is so highly decorated by nature and by man. There are a dozen splendid palaces, some of the most imposing residences in all the world, sitting on the very edge of the water at the foot of the hills which enclose the Bosphorus. The Dolma Bactche Palace, now occupied by the sultan, is perhaps the finest, and near it is another equally famous, the Cherigan Palace, which was occupied by the Turkish Parliament until it was burned in February, 1910. The roofless walls, stained with smoke, and the hollow windows now stand mute, unable to testify in their own defence and solve the mystery whether the calamity was due to arson or accident. It is generally assumed that the fire was started by incendiaries, for it seemed to break out in several places at the same time, and burned so fiercely as to suggest inflammables. However, there is no definite knowledge on the subject. It occurred in the night, the watchmen were asleep or absent, there were no police in the neighbourhood, and one of the most exquisite gems of architecture in existence was a hideous skeleton of marble before an attempt to save it could be organized.

The possible motive of an incendiary was to destroy a mass of documents discovered in the Yildiz Kiosk after the forcible evacuation of Abdul Hamid. His archives, official and personal, filled fifty carts and were hauled away to some unknown place, where they were being sorted over by a parliamentary commission, and already extraordinary discoveries had been made concerning the treachery and hypocrisy of prominent men. There has been and still is a determination on the part of certain personages, whose reputations will be ruined, to prevent the publication of these papers, and there have been several stormy debates in the Chamber of Deputies on the subject. Lacking other explanations, it has been assumed that the Cherigan Palace was set on fire for the purpose of destroying these private papers of the ex-sultan, although it was a useless sacrifice. The documents were not there. Few people knew where they were, except the commission which was engaged in classifying them.

Cherigan Palace stood on the shore of the Bosphorus about two miles from the bridge which connects Galata and Stamboul, and it was the most attractive and artistic of all the many buildings which give that water course its fame. It was built about sixty years ago by Abdul Aziz, who was sultan from 1861 to 1876, and was the best ruler Turkey has known for centuries. He intended it for his own residence, lived there for twelve years, and died there in a most tragic manner, June 17, 1876. There his son, Murad V, was allowed to reign for a few months, until he was deposed by a conspiracy which placed Abdul Hamid, the late sultan, in power, and the latter kept his elder brother a prisoner within its beautiful walls for several years, until he, too, was taken off in a mysterious way—some believe by suicide and some by violence. However, no prison was ever more artistic in design or expensive in construction. It was entirely of marble, inside and out, and the interior was remarkable for the richness of the carvings and of the hangings and upholstery and for the beauty of the mural decorations. When the Parliament was organized, Cherigan Palace seemed to be the most convenient building for its sessions. The Senate sat in the state dining-room, and the Chamber of Deputies in the ballroom, which were easily fitted up for the purpose.

There are several hotels on the Bosphorus, which are occupied during the summer, and all of the great nations, except the United States, have handsome residences for their embassies in a water suburb known as Therapia. The Russian embassy is the last and looks directly up the narrow throat which leads from the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Both sides of this passage are guarded by heavy earthworks against a Russian invasion. Turkey fears no other nation and Russia cannot reach her southern coast by sea without going through Turkish waters. This situation has exasperated every Russian since Peter the Great, who is supposed to have left a will in which he admonished his successors never to rest until they have added the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn to the Russian Empire.

Robert College, an American institution which has turned out some of the best men in the East, and an old Byzantine castle which dates back many centuries, are the most conspicuous objects on the European side, and near them is a sightly location where Dr. Mary Patrick has erected new buildings for the American College for Girls, with funds contributed by friends in the United States. Her former buildings in Scutari were not half big enough, since the constitution was adopted, to accommodate the young Turkish women who want an education.

The first town of importance, sailing eastward from Constantinople along the southern coast of the Black Sea, is the ancient City of Samsoun, founded by the Greeks more than two thousand five hundred years ago, and always of consequence commercially. It has a splendid location, sloping gradually upward from the sea, but like many people, as well as towns, does not fulfil the expectations excited by its appearance from a distance. There is a big hospital for soldiers upon a slight eminence back of the town; several minarets show where the mosques are; the five domes of a Greek church glisten in the sun; several imposing business blocks and residences line up well along the seashore and give a brave appearance to the place: but when you land, you are disappointed to find the streets narrow and dirty, with a mixture of smells arising from unknown sources, wretched pavements, and mangy dogs lying around in the sun scratching themselves in a way that is more suggestive than comfortable. Scratching is sometimes contagious.

But the narrow streets are interesting, and the market place, with a circular fountain and an ancient mosque, offers one of the quaintest and most picturesque Oriental scenes you could imagine. In the foreground a butter dealer in an indescribable costume of more colours than Joseph could possibly have had in his coat, was ladling greasy-looking stuff from a great tub with a wooden spoon and, on his scales, he used stones for weights. The vegetables and oranges were fine. Onions and garlic could be felt in the air, both in the raw material and in the finished form of odours. Turks are largely vegetarians. Vegetables, fruits, and soups made of grain are the chief articles of their diet. We were told that Samsoun is a great place for apples, so much so that the bears come down in droves from the mountains back of the town when the fruit is ripe and rob the orchards. We tried some of the apples which the peasants sell by weight in the market place, and found them dry and tasteless, but I don’t think they were to blame. No apples are good in May.

There is a café every few yards on every street, where it seemed as if the entire male population were sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. We saw a few nargiles—those long-tubed water pipes which are generally associated with cross-legged Turks—in Constantinople, but did not find one anywhere else. I suppose they are out of style, for all the Turks that we met were smoking cigarettes instead.

Quantities of licorice root are shipped from Samsoun. It grows wild in the mountains. The quality, as well as the value, might be improved by cultivation, but such a thing has never been attempted on a large scale. The sheep upon the mountain sides furnish cargoes of wool, and the cattle we saw grazing in large herds add many hides, but tobacco is the chief article of export from Samsoun, and a boy who voluntarily attached himself to our party and followed us along, chattering as he went, told us that a large establishment surrounded by a high wall belonged to Americans.

How a Turkish lad, who presumably had never been out of his native place, could have identified us as Americans is remarkable, for in Oriental countries, even in China and Japan, the natives are seldom able to distinguish between Uncle Sam and John Bull; but, nevertheless, we acted on the welcome information and soon found three fellow-countrymen representing the American Tobacco Company purely for the purpose of buying cigarette material, and, in 1909, they shipped $397,000 in tobacco from that port alone. There are several other buyers for the American market, but they come and go with the season.

The tobacco produced around Samsoun is light of colour, and of fine flavour, especially suited for cigarettes. There is a great difference in the quality according to the care and cultivation, and the Americans have persuaded a few of the farmers to improve their methods and implements. They told me that twice the present crop might be produced from the same area if half the care and skill were expended upon it that the Cuban planters give to their tobacco. Samsoun expects to be the northern terminus of one of the railways which have been authorized by the Turkish Parliament.

If you will look on your map you will notice that Asia Minor is that part of Turkey which projects into the Mediterranean on the Asiatic side, an almost square peninsula about three hundred miles each way. It is bounded on the north by the Black Sea, on the east by Armenia and Kurdistan, on the south by Syria and the Mediterranean and on the west by the Ægean Sea. The western portion of Asia Minor is called Anatolia. It is densely settled by Turkish farmers who cultivate the ground in a primitive, awkward way, but do not realize more than half the value of their labour; first, because of their primitive tools and instruments and their imperfect cultivation, and, second, because there are no transportation facilities by which they can send their produce to market. There are two railways running into the interior from the Mediterranean coast, furnishing communication for about 10 per cent. of the population. Throughout 90 per cent. of Asia Minor the only way of travelling is on the back of a horse or a donkey and the only facility for moving freight is by caravans of camels, which are slow and very expensive. For these reasons the inhabitants depend to a great extent upon their own resources. They make everything they wear except cotton fabrics and have very little to ship away.

Almost directly south of Samsoun, about a hundred miles, is the Marsovan station of the American Board, first occupied in 1852, and for fifty-eight years the headquarters of missionary work, not only for that important city, but for a wide reach of country, including Samsoun, Amasia, and other important towns. The work has naturally been built up by a process of growth. Little day schools, teaching reading, writing, and spelling in the vernacular, have developed into two great institutions: Anatolia College, with its extensive buildings devoted to the collegiate training of young men, and the Girls’ High and Boarding School, an institution quite by itself, giving nearly the same complete course of study that is given to the young men.

These two schools have ample grounds and are both adding gradually to their large plants. The college for young men will soon have $30,000 worth of new buildings, which amount will erect about eight times as much as in the United States. The girls’ school has completely outgrown its large plant, completed only a few years ago, and is adding substantial new buildings.

The college for boys has in a peculiar way taken hold upon southern Russia. Three or four years ago Russian students began to come across the Black Sea, and have doubled in number every year since. It was feared at first that they might be unruly and disorderly, or perhaps revolutionary in their tendencies, but, quite contrary to expectations, they have proved to be among the most steady, earnest, able students the college has had. Like Robert College, at Constantinople, Anatolia has Greek, Mohammedan, and Armenian students. Greeks are not found in colleges east of Marsovan, to any extent.

The college has also, as a part of its organization, a large medical department with extensive hospitals and a nurses’ training school under the direction of two efficient American physicians, Dr. Jesse K. Marden and Dr. Alden R. Hoover, assisted by a large native medical staff.

Patients come to the hospital at Marsovan from a wide area of country and it is reaching not only the Armenians but the Mohammedan classes. The medical service has an unmeasured influence upon the people of the country and makes an impression which no other form of missionary work can possibly do. The people know when they are ill and want medicines, but they are not often aware when they are ignorant and need educating or are morally in need of spiritual uplift. When they meet with severe accidents, as so frequently occurs in that country, or when they are racked by disease, they quickly learn that relief can be found at the mission hospital at Marsovan, and some means of reaching there is devised. They often go on a rude cart, sometimes upon the back of some animal, or, if they live upon a possible road, in a Turkish araba or hooded “carry-all.” They find their way to the hospital and there receive the kind treatment which belongs to every hospital, but especially to the missionary hospital in a non-Christian land. After treatment, they return to their homes full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what they have seen and received.

In addition to the institutions already mentioned, which have separate buildings, there is a theological school for training native college graduates for direct evangelistic work among their countrymen. This school will soon have a separate building, having hitherto been considered a part of the college to which it was attached. The importance of this work has now reached a stage where it demands a separate home and possibly separate management.

Industrial work is an important adjunct to the college. It was started as a means of self-help, to enable students who could not pay their tuition or board to earn a part of it by manual labour, and American machinery and tools were introduced for cabinet work according to modern methods. This has proved so popular that it was necessary to make a rule that no boy should take the mechanical courses alone, without taking some of the regular courses in the college or the preparatory school. Many fathers were so anxious to have their sons learn to use tools and machinery and to make things, that they brought them to the college and asked that they be admitted simply for mechanical instruction. While the school has not been wholly self-supporting, the students have been able to earn a large part of the cost of their education and have received instruction that could not have been given them in any other way.

This kind of training is especially important in Turkey, where the idea has prevailed, and still prevails to no small extent, that when a man is educated he must not do anything that looks like manual labour. Unfortunately this delusion is not confined to Turkey. The mechanical department is calculated to take that fallacy out of the minds of young men, making them see that manual labour is no disgrace and that even a scholar may do things with his hands. Turkey must come to the idea that a scholar of the highest type may be a civil engineer, who will be required to do outdoor work. The industrial school at Marsovan is but a preparatory step to the larger comprehensions of the dignity of labour, while at the same time, it trains the students who come within its influence in mechanical exactness. There is much of value, missionaries have learned, as well as educators in America, in training a boy to do something that is worth while in a mechanical way.

As a part of the medical work, it has been necessary for the American missionaries to establish dispensaries where cases can be treated temporarily, and especially where medicines can be provided for outside patients. It is so difficult to get pure drugs at regular Turkish drug stores that it has been necessary for all the American hospitals in the country to establish and maintain their own dispensaries. Their supplies, bought at wholesale, are sent out from the mission headquarters in Boston, and, therefore, are reliable in every way. Many native pharmacists are being properly trained. These dispensaries often prove almost as valuable for the lives and health of the people as the hospitals, and are regarded as a necessary adjunct of every hospital.

At Marsovan, to carry on this work in all departments, there are nineteen Americans: four ordained missionaries and their wives, three laymen, two physicians, and six single women, all college graduates, and nearly all having taken from three to five years of post-graduate work. Connected with them, and working with them in every way, are at least twenty-five times this number of trained native Christian leaders, many of whom are graduates of the college or other American institutions. Some have studied in Europe after taking a course in the college at Marsovan. Upon the American staff, with the native associates, also rests the responsibility of supervising native evangelistic work in a wide field. Tours of inspection are taken by the missionaries from time to time, thus keeping them familiar with what is going on, so that they may devote their energies at the centre to the demands of the work outside.

As an illustration of the way in which educational institutions grow, Anatolia College is an admirable example. The germ which produced this great institution, now with more than three hundred students and several departments, was a little school in the corner of a stable in the city of Marsovan in charge of Dr. C. C. Tracy. The stable filled the greater part of the building, and in one of the corners, on a platform of earth raised a foot or so above the common level of the mud floor, and protected by a light rail, was the school. Less than a dozen children there took their first lessons in learning to read. At the start, in common intelligence, they were but little in advance of the animals that occupied the rest of the room. No one could have detected in that humble beginning the germ of an institution that now covers several acres in buildings and campus just outside the large and flourishing city of Marsovan, filled with bright young men from all parts of Anatolia, from along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea, and even from Russia, on the northern coast—studying for academic degrees in preparation for positions of influence and leadership in the new Turkish Empire.

This little stable school became a high school in 1886, and a full-grown college a few years later. It now has a faculty of twenty-three professors, fourteen of whom are natives of the country and eight have taken post-graduate courses to prepare themselves for their work. They have degrees from the New College at Edinburgh, the University of Berlin, the University of Athens, the Imperial Law School at Constantinople, the Royal Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart and the Academy at Paris.

Anatolia College has sent out 224 graduates, of whom 207 are now living. Fifty-two are engaged in teaching, forty-eight are practising medicine, and eighty-six are in business. In addition to these graduates, several thousand other young men have for a time studied in the institution and for various reasons have been compelled to leave without completing the course. These have, however, gone out armed with a new power which this college has given them, and many are doing signal service within and without the Turkish Empire. Not long since, in a mixed gathering of Turks and Christians in Marsovan, profound thanks were expressed by Mohammedan leaders for this institution and what it has done to disseminate ideas of liberty, for the emancipation of women, and for the general welfare.

Among the students in the college, who come from about half of the twenty-nine provinces of the Ottoman Empire, are also found natives of Greece, Albania, Egypt, and, as has already been stated, Russia. The courses of study are similar to the usual college courses in the United States, with the exception that more emphasis is put upon the living languages than upon the dead.

Coasting along the south shore of the Black Sea, we were sailing through a land of fable, and our steamer touched at some scene of Greek mythology two or three times every day. At every port where we stopped to discharge or take on cargo we were surrounded by fleets of queer-looking boats with high-pointed prows and sterns, like the gondolas of Venice and the ancient galleys of the Greeks. There is always an exciting scramble when the gangway is lowered, and the barefooted boatmen climb over each other to get on board to solicit the patronage of the passengers. Their costumes, their cries, their gesticulations, and the confusion they create make it hard to believe that they are the descendants of gods and demi-gods, the heroes of the poems and the fables and legends we read in Greek mythology. The coast is bordered with a continuous range of magnificent mountains, rising gradually from the sea, clothed with forests on the upper heights and usually a strip of cultivated land along the coast. The successive ranges, rising one above the other, culminate in snow-capped peaks in the far background. The lower slopes and the coast line are dotted with villages embowered in oak, chestnut, beech, walnut, and hazel trees and masses of lilac, rhododendrons, azaleas, myrtles, orange groves, and orchards of quince and cherry trees, which are all in blossom in April and May and make a charming picture.

The steamer stops usually from one to five hours, which is long enough to see everything that is interesting and gave us a good idea of northern Turkey, which, by the way, is very different from what I expected in many respects. Indeed it is necessary for every one who goes there to revise his preconceived ideas of Turkish life and character; but the way we had to fight with the boatmen and the hackmen, who refused in almost every case to accept the fares agreed upon before starting, shows that the successors of Castor and Pollux, Theseus, Diana, and the other demi-gods have degenerated from the classic days. It seemed almost incredible that we were actually visiting the playgrounds of the gods. The imagination of the ancient Greeks peopled that beautiful coast with supernatural beings, who were the heroes of their fables and their songs, and there was a mixture of history in them all.

The Argonauts, you will remember, sailed from Thessaly to Colchis under command of Jason, to fetch a golden fleece, which was suspended from an oak tree in a grove, guarded day and night by a ferocious dragon. Jason built a ship of fifty oars, called the Argo, after the name of the designer, who was instructed by the goddess Minerva.

Jason was accompanied upon this expedition by several of the greatest heroes of Greek fable, including Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Theseus, and others, who were called the Argonauts, after the name of the ship. They met with surprising adventures, and when they arrived at their destination the king of Colchis promised to give up the golden fleece provided Jason would yoke together two fire-breathing oxen and sow the teeth of the dragon which had not been used by Cadmus at Thebes. Meantime Medea, the daughter of the king, fell in love with the captain of the Argonauts, and, when he promised to marry her, showed him how to put to sleep the dragon that guarded the golden fleece, and how to protect himself against the flames that came from the nostrils of those terrible steers. Jason did the stunt, to use a classic phrase, married the girl, and sailed away with the treasure. After wandering about the coast of the Black Sea and threading the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, the Argonauts at length arrived at Thessaly and told the story of their adventures.

It is believed that the fable of the Argonauts was founded upon a commercial expedition which wealthy merchants of Thessaly sent out to explore the coast of the Black Sea, twelve or fifteen hundred years before the Christian era, and the remains of the colonies they founded may still be found along the shores of Asia Minor. This expedition was followed by many Greeks from Miletus and other places who built a fringe of cities and towns on every bay and island along the coast. And their fleets carried on a commerce quite as important as that of to-day. All historic interest in the Black Sea centres around those colonies, which brought with them the culture that distinguished the Greek from the barbarian of those days. Situated on carefully selected sites, which the traveller can still identify, these colonies became the profitable markets where the products of Asia and those of Europe changed hands.

But the Argonauts were not the only characters of mythology that may be met with up there. The city of Eregli, the first port at which the steamer touches after leaving the Bosphorus and entering the Black Sea, stands on the site of Heraclea, a famous town founded by Hercules in prehistoric days; and in a garden north of the town is the cavern called Acherusia, through which he is supposed to have descended to the infernal regions to encounter Cerberus, according to the story. Near this cave are the ruins of a Roman aqueduct and of two temples which have been converted into churches, and on the mountain side are coal mines that were worked by the ancient Greek colonists before the dawn of history. Fuel was obtained from them, also, for the European battleships during the Crimean war. These mines are said to contain an excellent quality of steam and gas coal, but have never been developed because the Turkish government, for some reason or another, has not permitted it.

A poisonous honey made in the neighbourhood of Heraclea, according to Pliny the historian, is supposed to have been derived from yellow azaleas and purple rhododendrons, which abound on the hillsides in that neighbourhood. Even now the farmers cannot keep bees, because the honey they produce invariably makes people ill.

A little farther up the coast, the village of Bartan, known in ancient times as Parthenius, according to Greek fables was the home of Artemis, or the goddess Diana, as she is better known, who hunted deer and more harmful creatures among the forests upon the mountain sides and bathed in the waters of the river that comes bubbling down into the sea. Those who do not believe this story can find proof in nearly every picture gallery of Europe, for acres of canvas have been covered with paintings of Diana, the divine huntress, and her achievements in forest and field.

The next village, Amastris, was the birthplace of the wife of Darius, the great Persian king, and Dionysius, the Roman tyrant, and in a gossippy letter to the emperor Trajan Pliny describes Amastris as “a handsome city.” It continued to be a port of importance as late as the ninth century. The Venetians and the Genoese occupied it in turn in the Middle Ages several times. The site of the ancient city is now occupied by an insignificant village, and the only reminder of the power and prosperity associated with its past are the ruins of a citadel, an aqueduct, and fortifications.

The port of Sinub is the ancient Sinope, the mother colony founded by Autolycus, a companion of Hercules, and the most important of all the Greek colonies on the Euxine or Black Sea. Here the cynic philosopher, Diogenes, was born. It was also the birthplace of Mithridates the Great, who ruled Asia Minor and all the country surrounding it several hundred years before Christ. During the time of Pericles, Sinope was the strongest and most important of all the colonies of Greece, having the only safe harbour on the southern coast. It was the terminus of the royal road which extended from the Persian Gulf through Mesopotamia, following the valley of the Euphrates to the shores of the Black Sea. Sinub is surrounded by high-wooded mountains which were occupied by the fabled Amazons, and upon the island called Adasi, there was a temple to Mars erected by and presided over by two Amazonian queens.

One of the stories connected with Sinub, which, however, I do not vouch for, is that Mithridates, the Greek emperor, put his wives and sisters to death with his own hands in the palace whose ruins we saw one morning to prevent their falling into the hands of Lucullus and his Roman invaders.

There is much to see in all these little towns in the way of ruins, but the difficulty is that nobody can tell you anything about them. They are not esteemed by the people and no archæologist has ever undertaken to investigate them. They represent successive civilizations, first Greek, then Roman, then Persian and Venetian, and, finally, the Byzantine periods of occupation and culture, each of which was founded upon the fragments of those which preceded it. No country has had so much history, but it is impossible to fix dates or circumstances. Asia Minor and that coast have been in the midst of the current of events from the beginning of things. Every great conqueror has occupied that country in turn, down to the final invasion of the Turks, whose supremacy was established in the fifteenth century and has been maintained ever since.

It was difficult to adjust ourselves to the realization that the little towns where we went ashore as the steamer stopped are the same that were occupied by Alexander the Great, by Cyrus, Darius and Timour the Tartar, and it is asserted that there are traces of every one of them there. But those communities have seen many changes since. That coast has been a thoroughfare for conquerors, because of its geographical position—a battle field for many, but the abiding place of none.

CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT CITY OF TREBIZOND

I remember, when a boy, seeing one of Offenbach’s comic operas entitled “The Princess of Trebizond,” the plot of which, I supposed, was pure fiction; but, since looking into things, it seems entirely probable that the main incidents actually occurred when Trebizond was an empire and a despot known as the “Grand Comnenus” ruled over that quaint, little, old town and the country that surrounds it. The ruins of the palaces the rulers occupied and the fortifications which they built to defend their capital still remain, and it is difficult to conceive anything more picturesque than the ancient walls and towers covered with ivy and other creeping vines. The Turks have utilized a good part of them, and from the deck of the ship we saw the ugly mouths of cannon yawning at us from the top of a castle that is at least one thousand, and perhaps fifteen hundred years old. The central part of the little city, where the Moslem population lives, is still partly enclosed by the old wall, while the Christian population live outside.

Trebizond is older than Rome. It was founded by a colony of Greeks from the neighbouring town of Sinope in the year 756 B.C., while Rome was not founded until three years later, in 753. But even the good people of Trebizond will admit that Rome is a little ahead of their own town at present. After the Romans drove out the Greeks the emperor Trajan made Trebizond the capital of the province of Cappadocia, and Hadrian built the harbour, which wasn’t a very good job, for the anchorage is so unsafe that in stormy weather the ships have to pull up anchor and run to Platena, seven miles westward, for safety. There is an unfinished pier and custom house, which our captain said had been building a hundred years and would not be finished for another hundred, according to the way the Turks do things. Just now passengers and cargo are handled at a small iron pier extending beyond the breakers, and it is a nasty place for people to land.

The Roman emperor, Justinian, built the original castle and gave the city its water supply, but most of the ruins date from the empire which was founded in 1204 by Alexius I, grandson of the Byzantine emperor, Andronicus I, who assumed the title of “Grand Comnenus.” Alexius had twenty successors and the empire lasted until 1461. In the meantime Trebizond, according to the historians, “was famed for its magnificence, the court for its luxury and elaborate ceremonials, while at the same time it was frequently a hotbed of intrigue and immorality.” The imperial family were renowned for their beauty, and the princesses were sought as brides not only by the Byzantine emperors, but by the Moslem rulers of Persia and the chiefs of the Mongols and Turkomans. The Grand Comneni were patrons of art and learning; the library of the palace was filled with valuable manuscripts; and the city was adorned with splendid buildings. The writers of that time speak with enthusiasm of its lofty towers, of the churches and monasteries in its suburbs, and especially of the gardens, orchards, and olive groves.

It is difficult to believe all this, but the ruins are there, and the mute walls of crumbling stone would probably confirm the statements if they could speak. There is an enormous monastery in ruins at the top of a hill, which is said to have played an important part in the history of the city and was the scene of a crisis which ended the empire. There is an old church in the suburbs which dates back nearly a thousand years and contains the tombs of several of the emperors of Trebizond and a monument to Solomon, one of the early kings of the neighbouring state of Georgia, now a Russian province.

About two miles west of the town is the Church of St. Sophia, which was built eight hundred years ago, and must have been a magnificent structure, judging from what remains. It has been a mosque for several centuries, but is seldom used these days. The pavement of many-coloured marble is very beautiful, and the walls are decorated with pictures in mosaic, like those in the mosques of Salonika, although the vandals have covered them with whitewash because they represent Christian saints and martyrs. In the vestibule, until 1843, was a fine fresco representing the emperor Alexius, his mother, the dowager Irene, and his wife, the empress Theodora, all clad in their imperial robes, but it mysteriously disappeared while the church was being repaired and has never been recovered. There are other relics of ancient times which one would like to know more about, but there was no one to tell us, and the archæologists have neglected this part of the world.

To a historical student, perhaps, the most interesting fact about Trebizond is that it was the end of the masterly retreat of the famous “Ten Thousand” under command of Xenophon, a newspaper man, whose story is told in the Anabasis. Every school-boy who has ever studied Greek knows more or less about it.

Darius, the great king of Persia, had two sons, Artaxerxes and Cyrus. The latter was not satisfied with the division of the kingdom and 400 B.C. organized an army in Greece and marched against his brother at Babylon. Xenophon accompanied the expedition as a war correspondent. When Cyrus was killed, his barbaric troops scattered, leaving ten thousand Greek mercenaries who had accompanied him to look after themselves in a desert between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Their commanders became rattled and lay down, whereupon Xenophon showed what newspaper men are capable of doing when responsibility falls upon them, by assuming command, reorganizing the force, and leading it back through an unknown country with marvellous skill. He had never served as a soldier, but like every other newspaper man was a master of the science of war.

The retreat of the “Ten Thousand” is one of the greatest military achievements in history, for, although he had no supplies and was compelled to forage on the people, and no knowledge of the geography or topography of the country, Xenophon conducted the “Ten Thousand” across Armenia and over the mountains to Trebizond, where the settlers received him with generous hospitality and assisted him to obtain boats to carry his soldiers back to Greece.

The American consul at Trebizond has a beautiful house with a terrace, and a view that is worth a fortune, and our government ought to buy it while it is possible, because there are very few houses suitable for a consulate in Trebizond and they are in great demand. Other nations own the houses that their consuls occupy and the United States ought to be equally prudent. The present consul is Dr. Milo A. Jewett, who was born in Turkey, the son of an American missionary, but was educated and practised medicine in Massachusetts until he came into the consular service many years ago.

There is an American school there also, in charge of Dr. L. S. Crawford of North Adams, Mass., who is doing great work under the direction of the American Board of Foreign Missions by educating young Trebizonians. All the students obtain a good knowledge of English, and their advanced courses are taken through the medium of that language.

Trebizond was the first mission station occupied east of Constantinople on the Black Sea. Thomas P. Johnson, the first American missionary, took up his residence there in 1835. The nearest mission station is at Erzroom, six days’ journey to the south, over extensive ranges of mountains and on one of the upper branches of the Euphrates River. The territory directly connected with this important city has a population of about 800,000 Mohammedans, 120,000 Greeks, and 32,000 Armenians. The city itself has a population of only 56,000, being now nearly four times as large as it was seventy-five years ago.

No large educational institution or important medical work has been built up in Trebizond, not because of the want of need or opportunity, but because it has not been possible to find a force sufficient for the other missions. The work carried on by Doctor and Mrs. Crawford, in the city itself, has been largely among the Armenians, while Ordoun, a large city on the Black Sea, west of Trebizond, has been the headquarters of a mission for the Greeks. As Trebizond is so near the Russian border and so accessible by water for all that part of Russia, there has been a most urgent call during the last few years for institutions there to meet the demands of the Russian young men who are seeking a modern education, but have no facilities for it in their own country. Many Russians go to the mission high school in Trebizond and it is evident that if a strong educational institution could be started there, it would have a wide patronage from the Russian coast of the Black Sea and from the Caucasus.

The city of Erzroom is situated on a high plateau six days inland from Trebizond. It stands at an elevation of some six thousand feet above the sea, and at the same time is surrounded by mountains rising a thousand or more feet above the plain. The most northerly branch of the Euphrates River rises to the eastward and flows down through the plain a little below the city. In times of drought this is only a trickling stream, but in the wet season it becomes a river of no small proportions. The city is one of the most important in the Turkish Empire, in that it is only about twelve hours’ journey from the Russian border. At the time of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878, it was occupied by the Russians for some time, until, through the pressure of the Powers, they were compelled to withdraw, and to their great disappointment the line between the two countries was established to the eastward and left it still a part of Turkey.

The mountains about the city are fortified by the Turks, and the city itself is enclosed in earthworks, the entrances being through guarded passage ways and heavy gates, to be shut in times of attack. Because of the strategic importance of the post, the Turkish governor is usually a man of large military experience. It is believed that should war break out between Turkey and Russia, and it may happen at any time, Erzroom would be the first point of attack. For the same reason the great European Powers maintain in Trebizond consuls of unusual ability, and not infrequently these consuls have had extensive military experience.

Erzroom, like most of the large cities of interior Turkey, is the centre of a great number of smaller cities and villages scattered over the far-stretching plain and into the ravines of the mountains. There is a large Kurdish population to the south and east of Erzroom, which presents in itself a considerable problem. Erzroom itself has for many years been the headquarters of an army corps of the Turkish Empire, maintained there particularly to keep order among the various antagonistic races, especially the Kurds, and particularly to guard the frontier against undue aggression on the part of Russia.

The people of Erzroom and vicinity, like mountain people generally, are unusually hardy and vigorous, with a large degree of independence. The city itself, so far as wealth is concerned, is hardly surpassed by any of the interior cities of Turkey. Its merchants go all over the empire, and as a centre of trade with Persia as well as with Europe Erzroom holds a unique place.

Since the city was occupied as a mission station in 1840, many distracting events have occurred, such as the war of 1877–78, when it was taken by the Russians and, following the siege, was sorely afflicted by the plague. One of the American missionaries, Rev. Royal M. Cole, D.D., then in Erzroom, went to the front with the army to care for the wounded and the suffering, and gave himself wholly to this work so long as the war lasted, devoting himself to the sick after the Russian troops had withdrawn. Two of his own children died from the plague at that time. Again in 1895 Erzroom came within the massacre belt and suffered greatly from the attacks upon the Christians by the Turks and Kurds.

Beside the evangelistic activity, two lines of work have been developed at Erzroom that have had great influence and won the approbation of Turkish officials: namely, education and medical relief for both men and women. An American nurse, left in charge of the missionary hospital in the absence of the missionary physician who went home on furlough, was invited by the military authorities to take charge of the military hospital, which she did, and was there brought into direct contact with Turkish soldiers. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a Christian missionary nurse, at the invitation of army officials, was ever identified with the staff of a Mohammedan hospital or given unhampered freedom in contact with Mohammedans. Her ministrations were most gratefully received and by her example she removed from the minds of many Moslems deep-seated prejudices against Christianity.

Mrs. Dr. Stapleton, a trained lady physician of unusual skill and tact, has had access during many years to the homes of the high Turkish officials, where she meets with a cordial welcome. She has no hospital, but does her medical work almost wholly by visitation in the homes, and largely the homes of the officials. It takes time to break down the prejudices of honest Mohammedan believers, many of whom have a conviction that Christianity is an inferior religion and that those who profess it lack the moral virtues. These opinions cannot be changed by argument or by preaching, and only by that close personal contact that a physician may have with his patients in their homes during periods of protracted illness. This, of all the methods of missionary work, is most effective. It does not show results that can be tabulated; but nevertheless is far-reaching in its influence and power, and ultimately will accomplish much by changing the attitude of those who have believed that there is nothing good in Christianity.

The school work in Erzroom does not differ from that at Sivas and Trebizond. There are boarding-schools for both young men and young women, always separate, as they must be in the Turkish Empire. The importance of the boarding-school as a missionary force can hardly be over-estimated. Into these schools young men and young women are brought, often from rude homes and not infrequently from homes that exert a demoralizing and harmful influence upon the children. The boarding-school is so arranged that it becomes a new home to the pupils. They are surrounded by wholesome influences. Their minds are constantly stimulated to activity and they are led unconsciously to adopt American methods and helpful ideas. Children coming from a distance often remain the entire year under these influences before returning to their homes. Sometimes employment is given them during the vacation months so that they stay longer. One can readily imagine the change that takes place in a young man or young woman who has never before been out of one of the rude villages after a year or two of this refining experience and inspiring instruction.

When these young people return to their homes the change that has taken place in them makes a profound impression upon the entire village. The value of education is promptly recognized, and often one pupil from a district in the interior of the country will be the means of bringing dozens of others to the school, sent by parents who, ambitious for their children, wish for them the same kind of education and to see in them the same advance that has appeared in the child of a neighbour. One does not need to use his imagination to see how the entire villages and communities are elevated through a single pupil who has spent, it may be, no more than a couple of years in an American mission boarding-school in some remote city and who, upon his return, not only exercises a silent influence for education and morals, but may at once open a school for the children of his own village.

This represents, in a simple way, something of the influence and power of the missionary boarding-school upon the region in which it is located. While time is required for the full exercise of this influence, and while the lines can only in the remotest degree ever be traced, it is found that they are far-reaching and fundamental. These schools also prepare students for college. The graduates of the two high schools at Erzroom have gone chiefly to the colleges at Harpoot, Marsovan, and Constantinople.

The city of Sivas, in Asia Minor, was occupied by the Americans as a mission station in 1851. It is located on the old caravan road extending from Samsoun, through Tokat and Amasia, an eight days’ journey by camel, but now covered easily in six days by the Turkish Arabs. It is on the route of the proposed American railroad now under discussion, which is expected to extend eastward into Mamurettaul-Aziz, in the vilayet of Harpoot, and so on southward.

Sivas is noted among archæologists for its ruins of the Seljuko, an ancient Persian dynasty, some of which reveal in their fragments the splendour of the structure of which they formed a part. The city is in the midst of a large and fertile plain, and is the central market for a wide area. It was selected as a location for missionary work because of its strategic position on the caravan road, and its large and thrifty population, which is composed of Turks, Kurds, Greeks, and Armenians.

One of the first missionaries sent into that country was a physician, Doctor West, who, by his successful practice, and, to them, astounding surgical operations, won a reputation which stands to-day unsurpassed even so far as the remote villages of the mountains of that district. The natives still tell of the miracles which Doctor West performed with his surgical instruments, and one can rest assured that these stories have lost nothing as they have passed on into the second generation and are still doing service in support of scientific medicine. They made it difficult for a modern physician to live up to the reputation of the first missionary doctor seen in that region. As might be expected, this work, at once recognized as of such importance, has been maintained and an American physician is now located at Sivas with a hospital and dispensary.

At the time of Doctor West there were no missionary hospitals, and the dispensary usually consisted of a cupboard in a corner of the doctor’s office, or more frequently of saddle bags from which he drew according to his needs on his journeys up and down the country. The first missionary physicians were itinerants with no office hours, but ready whenever and wherever called to render relief to the sick and suffering to the limit of their power. Under the changes that have taken place since those days, the physician naturally and rightfully demands a place in which he can care for patients who are seriously ill or after surgical operations, until danger is passed.

There was no hospital in Sivas until six years ago, when a small house was hired with four beds in it. After passing through various changes, it is now equipped with twenty beds, with a royal permit from Constantinople which puts it upon a legal and recognized basis. The physician in charge, Charles E. Clark, M.D., has a trained nurse as an assistant. The patients who avail themselves of their services range all the way from the beggar on the street to the wealthy government official. Turkish Moslems, Circassian soldiers, Kurds, Armenians, all come to the American doctor and the American dispensary and hospital, when suffering. The hospital is crowded to such extent that it must be enlarged to accommodate not only the hospital patients, but the clinics in the dispensary. The demands which press upon the physician cannot be met with the present equipment. Over five thousand patients were treated in the year 1910.

Several of the colleges administered by American missionaries in Turkey have passed out of the first period of their history, that of laying foundations, and have entered on a period of expansion. One hundred and thirteen high schools and boarding-schools which are the feeders for the colleges, have hitherto lacked the attention and the money necessary for their best development, but now that they are firmly established more attention is being given to the lower schools, without which the colleges cannot do their best work. Several of these high schools are the educational centres of territory larger in extent and containing a greater population than some of our American states.

The Sivas Normal School, located in the heart of Sivas, a city of 65,000 people, and the capital of the ancient Seljuks, is a good example, and until recently was unique in Turkey in the attention it gives to training teachers for the common schools.

More than twenty-five years ago, the American missionaries, because of the increasing need of more and better prepared teachers, decided to strengthen a common school which was being carried on under their direction and to raise the standard to that of a high school. The name Sivas Normal School was given to it at that time to represent the consciousness of the need and the purpose. Those who laid the foundations were Rev. Henry T. Perry, who is still connected with the school, and Rev. Albert W. Hubbard. Whatever has been accomplished since in making the school a more effective and wider agency for Christian education has been built on the foundation which they laid.

About fifteen years ago, when a striking increase of interest in education began to appear in the Sivas field, two men of exceptional ability as teachers became associated in its management. Mr. Baliosian, a graduate of the normal school, returned after completing his course of study in Central Turkey College, and soon Mr. Kabakjian came from Anatolia College to join him. Many good ideas and influences from these two strong colleges were thus introduced into the normal school and it was due in no small degree to the coöperation of these two men that it began to progress rapidly. The number of students grew in a few years from twenty-five to one hundred and thirty, greatly overcrowding the building which had been enlarged to its fullest possible capacity.

The educational system which has been developed by the missionaries in Sivas now includes about four thousand pupils, of whom nine hundred are in the city under their direct care; two thirds are in the lower grades; four hundred and thirty are boys, of whom about one hundred are in the normal school.

The Turkish officials are making strenuous efforts to establish a thorough compulsory educational system for all classes of Ottoman subjects. They are having the same difficulty that China experienced a few years ago when that government set about to build up a comprehensive system of education for her people and could not find teachers competent to do the work required. There has been a great reaction in China for that reason, and New Turkey is now facing exactly the same problem. The minister of public instruction and his associates are convinced that there must be a system of general education in Turkey in order to make constitutional and representative government safe and stable. And how are they to secure teachers with proper training to make them competent for the work? The Turkish schools hitherto have not provided them, and the American colleges, although filled with students for the last twenty years, have not been able to turn out more than a fraction of the number required to supply the Turkish national schools, to say nothing of the demands of private institutions.

To aid in meeting these demands a normal school has been established at Sivas and is preparing to give a thorough modern training to young men who are fitting themselves for the profession of teacher. For all such there is a future full of promise. The American Board purchased a fine site just outside the city and is now endeavouring to secure funds to complete a commodious and attractive building to accommodate the number of ambitious students knocking at its doors. If this school were equipped to train a thousand young men and to send out annually two hundred graduates with the most complete normal training that could be given them in a course of five years, it would not begin to meet the demand that New Turkey is placing upon it at the present time.

You must not forget that a large proportion of the people of Turkey are villagers, uneducated and unambitious, but full of possibilities if properly trained. It is to meet the needs of this intelligent but untrained village population that the normal school exists. It is expected that the government schools will take all the graduates and set them to work as rapidly as they can be prepared for it. Wherever these teachers are sent in the villages of Turkey, they will be the best educated men of the entire region, and their influence will be tremendous for peace, order, progress, education, and for the building up of a new society on the basis of Western Christian civilization. School committees in these villages, priests and bishops of the old churches, are clamouring for teachers. The success of constitutional government depends upon raising the general level of thought and character, and all this depends upon the supply of proper teachers.

The studies provided are the ordinary American course for normal training, including the theory and practice of teaching and school management, lectures on the common branches by speakers of experience, and a considerable amount of practice teaching under proper supervision. A year’s course in pedagogy is also given.

American missionaries tell me that the education of women has been a critical subject of discussion among the inhabitants of Sivas and that part of Turkey. In the interior provinces it has been the common belief that women cannot learn to read under the most favourable circumstances; in intellectual ability it was customary to class them with animals. Not infrequently in conversation with men of the last generation the statement would be made that a girl could no more learn to read than a donkey, and at any rate, of what possible use in the world could a reading woman be? It was often asserted that, if women learned to read, the whole fabric of Turkish society would be overturned, since they would become independent, would be liable to talk back when beaten by their husbands, and make trouble for the family and the community. It was the general opinion that it was safer to leave women in ignorance, even if the point should be conceded that they were capable of learning anything under the most favourable conditions.

The first missionaries who went into the country fought these theories down, largely by hiring girls to attend school in order to demonstrate the fact that they can learn to read. The girls of Turkey are as bright as those of any country, and generally the languages of Turkey are easier to learn than English, so that in every case the missionary won. He was careful to select bright girls for the tests, and in no instance was there a failure. They demonstrated that it was possible for a girl to learn to read and that in very quick time. A little group of ten girls was gathered into a school in Sivas away back in 1864, and from that time to this the education of this sex has not been neglected. In two years that little school had thirty-two pupils. It became so popular that the Armenian bishop twice anathematized the school and its teachers, but that only tended to advertise it and the number of pupils rapidly increased.

The present High School for Girls, which had only four pupils in 1874 and was located in an old native house, has attained extensive influence and power, not only through the pupils themselves, but through the five hundred and sixty girls in various other schools in the city, all of which are affiliated with this high school, and those in other cities, like Gurum, Tokat, Divrik, Endires, Zara, etc., where all the teachers are its graduates. What is perhaps of equal importance is that the Gregorian priests have founded and are now carrying on similar schools for girls in many of the centres of population in the vilayet, in which the American methods have been adopted, American courses are taught, and American ideas about the education of women are accepted and are in practical operation. This recognition of missionary methods is as sincere as it is general; an imitation is the most genuine endorsement.

In addition to the medical and educational work it has been necessary for the American missionaries, especially in the interior towns of Turkey, during the last fifteen years, to open orphanages for the accommodation of the great number of children that have been left wholly destitute by the frequent massacres. This began in 1895, at the time of the great massacres which swept over so much of the Turkish Empire, when more than three hundred children were gathered into an orphanage in Sivas. Our missionaries were aided by helpers sent out from Switzerland under a Swiss committee, so that the work has become international in its character. These children have been given comfortable Christian homes and a modern education. It became necessary to introduce many forms of industry for them that they might not be idle and to enable them to bear at least a part of the expense of their support and schooling. Later this work was enlarged somewhat to include relief for widows.

As missionary enterprises, all these lines of work are connected with general Christian instruction in no way hostile to the belief and thoughts of the people. The instruction given has been constructive and helpful rather than destructive and combative.

Trebizond is the terminus of the northern caravan route from Persia, and about 30 per cent. of the commerce of the city is carried back and forth on camels. The road over which the caravans travel is the same that Xenophon followed in the retreat of the “Ten Thousand,” and it has been kept in fairly good condition all these centuries, although it is scarcely fit for vehicles. In former years about twenty thousand camels arrived annually at Trebizond, each carrying from four hundred to five hundred pounds. So much of the trade has been diverted through the Caucasus by the new Russian road from Teheran to Rescht and the railway through the Caucasus, that not more than eight thousand to ten thousand camels are employed at present.

The distances between the principal points along the caravan route are as follows:

The caravans usually take sixty days for the journey each way, twenty-four days from Trebizond to the frontier and thirty-six days from the frontier to Teheran.

Formerly travellers for Teheran used to go that way and made the journey upon swift-moving camels in about twenty days. The route to Persia via the steamers on the Black Sea to Batoum, the railway across the Caucasus, and steamers on the Caspian Sea is quicker, shorter, and cheaper, and hence the trade goes that way.

The caravans stop at a khan (as the old-fashioned hotels are called where entertainment is given to both man and beast), just outside of Trebizond, and we went down there to see the camels and their drivers. Two hundred camels had just arrived from Persia after a journey of thirty days, bringing twelve hundred bags of rice. I talked with the boss driver, a gigantic Persian with a broad, cheerful face, who told me that he had never been anywhere but along the same route between Tabriz and Trebizond, and had travelled that regularly two or three times a year for more than twenty years. Caravans often went to Tibet and as far as China, he said, but he had never been that far.

The camels used on this line are a common species of dromedary with only one hump, and cost all the way from $50 to $150 each, according to age and condition. There is no regular system of camel-breeding in Asia Minor, although that animal is the only beast of burden and is absolutely indispensable. Most of the animals used here come from Arabia, where they are bred by the Bedouins, and at the age of three years are broken to load. The strength of a camel begins to decline at twenty years, and after he reaches twenty-five he is not worth much. An ordinary caravan is made up of groups of seven camels in charge of one man, who leads them, feeds them, and cares for them from the time he is twenty years old until they all die together. A camel driver has no home. He is a nomad. He never has anything but the clothes he wears. He sleeps with one of his camels for a pillow, and it might be said that he eats the same food, which consists of straw and beans. A caravan is usually led by a little donkey, for camels, as well as human beings, will follow donkeys wherever they may go, in a most mysterious manner.

A camel is never relieved of its load from the beginning to the end of a journey. It eats, sleeps, and travels under its burden, often for weeks at a time, and will carry six hundred pounds without a murmur. When the load is off, the driver rides, but when the load is on he walks by the side of his charge.

Camels are used for all kinds of purposes, the same as horses. They are broken to saddle and to wagon. They are hitched to plows and haul saw logs out of the forests. They can go for ten days over a desert without water. Their stomachs are divided into compartments and the contents are digested in order, one after the other, as the system needs nourishment. And it is often said that a “fifth stomach” is kept as a reserve for an emergency.

Our word caravansary comes from the Turkish term caravanseria, which means literally a bower for caravans, or a resting place where the animals are fed and the camel driver eats his bread and drinks his wine. He gets nothing and pays for nothing except space, shelter, and protection against robbers and thieves. These caravanserias are found in every town along the caravan roads. They are distinguished from khans—which are usually square enclosures or court-yards paved with stone, with rooms opening upon them, where travellers can store their goods, and often a gallery and a second floor, where the better class can obtain lodgings. These khans may be found in Constantinople and in every other Eastern city, and in the day-time are busy places, the freighters loading and unloading and merchants showing their goods to customers. At sunset the gates are closed, the donkeys and the animals lie down to sleep, and their drivers lie down beside them.

There is a long range of snow-clad mountains along the southern coast of the Black Sea reaching almost the entire distance from Trebizond to Rizeh, the next stopping place, and between them and the water side are low foothills covered with farms. The new wheat was a vivid green that lights up a lovely picture. There is no more beautiful sea coast. Indeed, there is nothing to surpass that landscape in the Alps, or the Pyrenees, or the Andes, or the Rocky Mountains, or anywhere else, owing to the great variety of scenery that lies between the water and the snow-capped crags. In May, when we were there, nature is all smiles. Both the woods and the fields are alive with glory. The foliage is perfect; rhododendrons and azaleas hide the scars in the rocks and creepers drape the rugged cliffs with a profusion of garlands that artificial decorations cannot compare with. Here and there the farming land is broken by a lofty precipice rising a thousand feet or more directly out of luxuriant vegetation, just as an artist would put some bold figure into a picture to offer a contrast to the peaceful, cultivated slope. And the lofty mountain peaks look bolder and sterner because they rise so near the wheat fields, the gentle valleys dotted with white villages, and the sombre forests that are so thick and so green.

We were told that the finest oranges, cherries, and other fruits in the world come from the slopes that line the shore of the Black Sea. We were told, too, that cherries got their name from the town of Kerasun, which was called Cherryson by the Greeks. We were too early, of course, for all the fruits except oranges, but the captain said that in the summer and fall cherries, grapes, plums, peaches, pears, and melons, finer than can be found in Paris, “can be bought for almost nothing.”

The people of the villages on that part of the coast, and particularly those of the town of Rizeh, are sailors and fishermen. They are wild, reckless, handsome fellows, wearing short open jackets of scarlet or blue, with zouave trousers, purple or yellow sashes bound around their waists, and a knotted black turban with the tasselled ends hanging down over their shoulders. Most of the seamen on the Turkish cruisers and gunboats come from that town and the neighbouring villages.

“Rizeh is the most beautiful place on the Black Sea,” said the captain with a shrug, “but everybody carries a knife, and would not hesitate to kill a stranger for his hat or his handkerchief.”

And we learned afterward that there were two hundred murderers serving sentences of from fifteen years to life in the prison that day. We saw several of the short-sentence men at the windows as we passed the prison, and somebody was standing on a tomb in the cemetery under the windows talking to them in a loud tone. The people on the street did not appear to pay any attention to him, although he was very much in earnest.

Near by was a more interesting crowd. Our steamer brought the mail from Constantinople and fifty or sixty citizens of Rizeh were gathered in a compact body around the steps of the post-office, while some gentleman read the news aloud to them. We were told it was a regular practice every time a mail came in. Most of the population are illiterate, but they are intensely patriotic and partisan, and keep close tab on political events at Constantinople and elsewhere.

They must be very superstitious, also, judging by the precautions they adopt to protect their houses and fields from the evil eye and other uncanny influences. The skull of a goat or a sheep, with a bunch of red peppers attached to it, was hanging from the corner of the eaves of almost every dwelling. We saw similar amulets in the gardens, orchards, and fields to protect the fruit and the crops. An old shoe and a bunch of garlic are equally efficacious, we are told, if you haven’t the skull of a sheep. The peasants in the country believe in miraculous cures, in witchcraft, and all such things, and often sacrifice animals at the shrines of saints to fulfil vows they have made in times of danger or distress. On a certain day in summer they splash water over each other; in the spring every woman releases a pigeon she has kept during the winter, and in some places the women go out to welcome the storks which fly in here at a certain time of the year. A new baby is always passed over a flame and young girls leap through fire to insure good husbands.

The patriarchal system prevails very generally among the farmer peasants, and the father, or after his death the eldest son, is the head and dictator of the family. A newly married couple always go to live in the house of the groom’s father, and the bride is condemned to perpetual silence in the presence of the family until her first child is born or until another marriage takes place in the same house. A young wife is not permitted to speak to any one save her own husband, and to him only when they are alone. But after her first baby is born she is considered worthy of sufficient respect to be recognized as a member of the household.

Although this practice doubtless would not be encouraged by the Daughters of the Revolution or the suffragettes, nevertheless, every one will admit that it has its advantages. I have read the wise comments of a certain Baron Haxthausen, a learned German who spent some time in that country forty or fifty years ago and saw many things to approve. The herr professor must have had some painful matrimonial experience, for he commended this custom as tending to increase the peace of a family as well as conjugal devotion. He is very positive that its adoption in other countries would reduce the business of the divorce courts and promote the peace and happiness of mankind.

Group of Lazis, Armenia, ready for a dance

“Imagine five or six women living together in the same house,” he says, “and a new member added to the company with the pride and vanity which are usually felt by a bride. Should we not anticipate continued dissension which the authority in the head of the family is unable to prevent? Much unhappiness and quarrelling arise from the use of women’s tongues, and what is so certain a cure as silence? It is only in the rarest cases that a bride submits gracefully to the opinion and the authority of her mother-in-law. She usually enters the family with a disposition to assert her independence, and if her freedom of speech is restrained, this cannot be done to an extent that will be offensive. Indeed, I cannot imagine a more wholesome custom than that which restrains the conversational powers of a young woman entering a new family.”

It must be distinctly understood that the above opinions are in quotation marks, and those who do not agree with them are not compelled to act upon the recommendations. And, notwithstanding these precautions, you will remember that the prison at Rizeh is full of murderers. How many of them are women and how many are brides is not stated.

These people are called Lazis, and this part of Armenia is known as Lazistan. They belong to the Georgian race and came there from Georgia, which lies a little farther along, west of the Caucasus Mountains, in order to escape persecution from their neighbours because they accepted the Mohammedan faith. It sounds refreshing to hear that a Mohammedan has been persecuted on religious grounds. It is the first case of the kind I have ever known, and the Lazis showed their good sense by coming over into a Mohammedan country after accepting that religion. And they are said to be very fanatical about it, as converts often are, and will stab a man for a difference of opinion on theology, as soon as cut his throat for his purse. At the same time, they are the most highly skilled gardeners in all the Ottoman Empire and are conspicuous, under ordinary circumstances, for their quiet, orderly behaviour, for their industry, honesty, and fair dealing. We can testify to the last fact, because we always made a bargain with the boatmen who took us ashore from the steamer at every port we stopped, and those at Rizeh are the only ones that did not demand more money than they had agreed to accept.

With all these virtues, they have been known to dodge their religious obligations. During the Mohammedan Lent, which is called Ramazan, every faithful member of that faith is bound to abstain from all kinds of nourishment, stimulants, and pleasures between sunrise and sunset; but the Lazis continue to smoke all day long on the pretext that tobacco was unknown to the prophet Mohammed, and therefore its use could not have been forbidden by him.

And so far as persecution is concerned, they have proven very handy when a massacre has been ordered, and no pious Moslem ever cut the throat of a Christian or burned his home with so much zeal as they have shown on several occasions. Nearly all of the Armenian population has been driven back into the country by the fanatical outbreaks of the Lazis, and the Greeks, who were the original settlers and civilizers of that coast, have been driven across to the Russian side of the Black Sea, where they can worship in their own way without being interfered with. But the whole world will be glad to learn that it is believed that religious persecution is at an end in Armenia. No people have ever suffered so much or have ever shown greater loyalty and tenacity to the faith which they profess.

During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and part of the fifteenth centuries the Venetians controlled this coast, and their rivals in the Genoese Republic continually attempted to drive them out. Every port was protected by a formidable castle and every town was surrounded by a high wall. The Venetian castle at Rizeh has been almost entirely obliterated, although its site is marked by a pile of débris, and one can trace the foundations upon the summit overlooking the bay. The city wall is quite perfect in places and can be followed for half a mile or more on one side of the town. The Venetian influence appears in a striking manner in the architecture. There are several distinctly Venetian houses that contribute to the charming picture which this little city embowered in foliage presents from the deck of a ship. And the cottages are unique in their designs and methods of construction, suggesting the familiar Elizabethan school so common in English villages. The walls are made of cross pieces of wood with the spaces between them filled in with masonry, broad roofs, overhanging eaves, narrow windows, and loggias.

Everybody seems to be fond of brilliant colours, which makes the place look gay, although the women keep their faces hid and envelop their bodies in large cotton shawls. They select the gayest patterns they can find, which, of course, makes them all the more conspicuous. The guide book says that Rizeh is a great place for linen and other fabrics, and that the women weave their own shawls, but the fashion must have changed since the book was written, because we inquired at several of the shops and found that all of the dry-goods offered for sale were made in Germany, in imitation of the old home-made patterns.

Batoum, the Colchis of the ancients, where Jason and the Argonauts captured the golden fleece, is the only seaport of the Russian province of the Caucasus and the only outlet for the trade of that vast and productive area. It is the terminus of nearly all the lines of steamers on the Black Sea, and, therefore, a place of great importance. There is a railway across the Caucasus between the Black and the Caspian Seas, a pipe line for conveying oil from Baku and special docks for loading tank steamers with that kind of freight.

Batoum was a part of Turkey until the year 1878, and was awarded to Russia by the Treaty of Berlin, in which the European Powers all participated, as part of the price which Turkey was compelled to pay for peace. Since the cession the place has been strongly fortified by the Russians, notwithstanding a stipulation in that convention against it. There is a population of about thirty thousand, very cosmopolitan. All the Turkish clans are represented and there are about six thousand Greeks. There is an old and a new town. The former is a duplication of one hundred small Turkish cities with bazaars, mosques, cafés, and khans, where travellers and caravans find accommodations for themselves, their animals, and their merchandise. All of the labour is done by Armenians, Georgians, Greeks, Turks, and Circassians and representatives of a dozen other races, each of which adheres tenaciously to its native costume as well as its native customs.

The city of Batoum

The new town is distinctly Russian, with wide streets, good sidewalks, and shade trees everywhere. There are two well-kept parks, a boulevard and promenade along the seashore which is very attractive and must be a great comfort to the population during the long, hot summer months. There is a good deal of bathing au naturel, the women undressing and going into the water “in the altogether” at one end of the promenade, and the men at the other, without the formality of bathing-houses, although they might be built at a very slight expense in the interest of common decency as well as convenience. No other necessity is neglected.

It was decidedly pleasant to see the unveiled faces of women again, after several weeks in Mohammedan towns; and one never admires blonde hair and blue eyes, particularly when worn by an American girl, as he does after spending some time among Orientals. It was pleasant to escape the musty smells which are attached to every Turkish town and to see healthy, clean dogs that could be touched without contamination.

Batoum has a splendid cathedral of the solid and ornate Russian style of architecture, with the five domes required by Byzantine traditions. It was erected as a memorial several years ago. Somebody, unfortunately, furnished the cathedral with a peal of heavy, deep-toned bells, which are ringing nearly all the time and cause a suspension of business, because nobody can talk or hear or even think in the eruption of sound they produce. There are good shops, well filled with modern merchandise, and a hotel that is quite comfortable, but is kept by a man whose name might be Barabbas, for he is a robber.

The streets and cafés are full of Russian officers and soldiers, including many stately Cossacks wearing tall chimney-pot hats of white Persian lamb and the many other accoutrements that pertain to that race of professional warriors. A Cossack, as perhaps you know, comes from the valley of the river Don, in eastern Russia, where soldiers are bred, and they go into the Russian army for life, furnishing their own uniforms, their own horses, and their own arms, as well as their own rations and supplies, for which they receive a lump sum per month. They are doubtless the finest cavalry in the world and are absolutely loyal to their employers. It is a matter of principle and not a matter of partisanship. In all the Russian revolutions, in all the conspiracies against the czar and the government, no Cossack has ever been corrupted. On the other hand, they are absolutely merciless. They seem to be entirely without the ordinary feelings of humanity, knowing neither sympathy nor sorrow, regret nor remorse. They will shoot an infant as readily as an armed foe.

The Russian drosky, the little baby victoria, so familiar to the czar’s possessions, which may be found in every town between Riga and Vladivostock, is here at the convenience of the tourist as well as the residents. We saw a few of the splendid black stallions, with long tails and manes, that were introduced into Russia during the reign of Catherine II by Prince Orloff, whose descendants now own the largest and most celebrated stock farm in the world, although I believe it was badly used by the revolutionists several years ago. The ishvostchik, as a drosky driver is called, is another distinctively Russian institution and we were very glad to see him again.

The constitution of Russia hasn’t made any difference with the vigilance of the police, and it seemed as if the passengers of the good ship Euterpe were subjected to more than ordinary scrutiny by the police before they would allow us to land. The captain made the dock at daylight, which at that time of year is about five o’clock in the morning, and shortly before six o’clock all the passengers were awakened and invited to the salon. There we found a police officer with a couple of clerks examining passports. After we had presented ours and had explained our motives in visiting Russia, we were gruffly dismissed, but it was after nine o’clock before they would allow us to land. In the meantime they examined our luggage with great care in order, as were advised, to make sure that we were not importing arms or anarchistic literature to corrupt the Caucasians. When the examination was about half finished, I showed the chief inquisitor a general letter of introduction given me by the Russian ambassador at Washington, certifying to my respectability and innocence. He read it through carefully, scowled fiercely, shook his head, and then began to search more energetically than before, regardless of ambassadors or other outside influences who have nothing to do with the case. But we are taught that there is good in everything, and contact with Russian police officials certainly cultivates patience if nothing else.

CHAPTER III
RAILWAY CONCESSIONS IN TURKEY

Shortly after the overthrow of the despotism in Turkey, the new government formulated a comprehensive scheme of public improvements intended to promote the material development of the Ottoman Empire, which was forbidden for a third of a century by Abdul Hamid, the late sultan. He seemed to think that progress and prosperity were inconsistent with the welfare of a nation, or at least a menace to the authority of an autocrat, and as long as he kept his subjects in poverty and ignorance, his sceptre was safe in his hands. He adhered strictly to that policy. He forbade the development of mines or any other of the natural resources, and reluctantly consented to the construction of a few lines of railway, which were demanded by foreign commerce and were built by foreign capital. The Germans always had the preference in such matters, but there are also English and French railway lines in Turkey. The sultan would never permit a telephone or an electric light or a trolley car or any other modern necessity of commerce and social life, and his subjects were forbidden to travel from one place to another, even in their own province, without the permission of the police.

When the present government invited proposals for the construction of railways through the interior of Turkey in Asia, one of the most important plans was submitted by Admiral C. M. Chester of the United States Navy (retired) and his associates, who are organized under the title of “The Ottoman-American Development Company.” Their proposition was thoroughly investigated by the Turkish government, approved by the department of public works and the council of state and only required the ratification of the Turkish Parliament to be complete. This would have been done at the session of the Parliament in 1910 but for the intervention of Baron von Bieberstein, the German ambassador, who protested on the ground that the concession interfered with the mining rights of some German subjects and was in violation of a treaty made between his government and the late sultan guaranteeing that no further mining concessions would be granted in Turkey without the consent of the German government.

Baron von Bieberstein’s purpose seems to have been to secure command of the situation and to obtain additional favours for a company which was formed several years ago to extend one of the existing railway lines from its present terminus in the province of Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. It is suspected also that certain German and Belgian capitalists would be glad to secure a share of the Chester concession, which is very comprehensive and involves a variety of interests.

Although the Turkish ministry was exceedingly anxious to close the arrangement and obtain the credit of promoting such an extensive scheme of internal improvements, they were afraid of Germany—first, on account of the controversy with Greece over Crete, and, second, for fear the kaiser would object to a proposed increase in the Turkish tariff. This situation was complicated by the fact that the kaiser’s sister is the wife of the crown prince and the future king of Greece, and the Turkish administration cannot raise the necessary revenue by advancing duties on imported goods 5 per cent., as is now proposed, without the consent of the five European Powers.

The concession involves the construction of about fifteen hundred miles of track through Armenia, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia, and the vilayets of Trebizond, Sivas, Van, Diarbekir and Mossoul. The road begins at the port of Snedis, on the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the Orontes River, about sixty miles south of Alexandretta, and about thirty miles from the ancient town of Antioch. From there it runs eastward through Aleppo, Urfa, Diarbekir, Bitlis, and other populous cities to Lake Van and encircles that lake, which is the most important of all the interior bodies of water in Turkey. From Diarbekir, which is to be a junction, one branch of the road will run northwest to the city of Sivas and another southwest to the Persian boundary at Suleimanieh, crossing the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers and bisecting the province of Mesopotamia, which it is proposed to reclaim to agriculture by the reconstruction of the vast systems of irrigation which were used by the ancients, and for some mysterious reason have been allowed to go to waste.

The Turkish government is contemplating the construction of a railroad from Sivas northward to Samsoun and Trebizond, on the Black Sea, and intends to extend the existing railroad from Constantinople to Angora to connect with the tracks of the Chester syndicate at Sivas. The Russian government is determined to control all of the railway lines that touch the Black Sea, and has a treaty with Turkey which prevents any concession being granted to the Chester syndicate or any other except a Russian or Turkish corporation for a railroad into that territory. It is entirely probable, however, that some arrangement might be made for the construction of one and perhaps two lines between Sivas and the Black Sea by the Turkish government.

The Chester concession is for ninety-nine years, the government reserving the right to purchase the whole or any part of the property after a period of sixty years, on the basis of the average gross receipts for the previous five years. The syndicate agrees to complete the first third in five years, the second third in six years, and the entire system in ten years, the total cost being estimated at $100,000,000. The government reserves the right to regulate charges for freight and passengers, and the company agrees to transport mails, soldiers, and military supplies at a certain reduction from the regular rates. The property is to be exempt from taxation for a certain period. All materials are to be admitted free of duty, but the company must employ subjects of Turkey in the operation of the road as far as possible, and “they must wear the fez and such uniforms as the government shall direct.” The company is under obligations to give preference to the government in transportation of troops and supplies in time of war, or whenever necessary. The funds for paying the cost of construction are to be raised by an issue of bonds and at least one half of the total must be offered publicly to Turkish subscribers for a period of thirty-one days.

There is no subsidy or guarantee of interest or principal, and no financial obligation whatever on the part of the government, but the development company, which is organized under the laws of New Jersey, with the right to form subordinate companies, will have the exclusive right for ninety-nine years to exploit and work directly, or by leases to others, all mineral and petroleum deposits, all quarries, mineral water springs, known or unknown, within an area of twenty kilometres on both sides of the tracks for the entire distance, a total of about fifteen hundred miles through the heart of Turkey. It has the exclusive right to all water-power within twenty kilometres of the track on both sides for electricity or manufacturing purposes; it is authorized to furnish light and power to all towns and cities within a zone of one hundred kilometres on both sides of the track; it has the exclusive right to operate boats on Lake Van and build and operate smelters, furnaces, elevators, warehouses, wharves, machine-shops and a variety of other industries. One of the most important features of the concession is the right to establish stores to sell such merchandise as it may deem proper or useful to the public and to its own employés. The company is authorized to construct and operate telegraph lines for its own use, but it cannot do a commercial business, because that would interfere with the government telegraph, which is a part of its postal service.

The enterprise being of public utility, all property belonging to individuals can be appropriated whenever necessary for carrying out the provisions of the concession, and all concessions previously granted which may interfere with the conditions of the contract are to be terminated as speedily as possible. The government undertakes to indemnify the owners.

The resources of Turkey have never been developed. Nothing has ever been done by the government and very little by individuals, because, whenever a Turk discovered anything of value or acquired any wealth, he was robbed, blackmailed, and persecuted, and the government confiscated whatever it could reach. Abdul Hamid had a personal title to much valuable property, such as mineral deposits, petroleum wells, stone quarries, forests, and placed others in the names of his confidential men. The new government has confiscated all of these properties and the titles are now in the state. All such property lying along the line of the proposed road becomes subject to the concession.

The Chester syndicate thus obtains the exclusive right to work certain coal deposits that have been operated more or less by the government. They are of unlimited extent, and the quality of the coal is said to be as fine as that of Cardiff. There is a deposit of copper at Arghana, which has been worked in a rude way for several thousand years and is believed to be one of the most valuable in the world. It belongs to the Turkish government and has been producing about $750,000 worth of ore a month for the benefit of the sovereign. Several syndicates have been organized from time to time to get hold of it, but the sultan would never let it go.

Other extensive copper deposits are known to exist, but they have never been developed or even explored. There is a very large oil territory in the neighbourhood of Mosul, in the valley of the Tigris, which has been known for centuries. So long ago as the reign of Alexander the Great the people used the seepage for lubricating purposes, for liniments, and for fuel. There is oil in other localities along the line, and no end of lead, zinc, and other minerals of greater or less value. The mountains through which the railway will pass have been the source of silver supply of the Armenians and the Kurds for twenty or thirty centuries, but the mines have never been worked by modern processes.

It is believed that the mineral deposits alone represent hundreds of millions of dollars in the territory covered by the concession, without regard to other interests of value. The development company, which will own the concession, proposes to divide and separate these interests among several subordinate companies—one to build and operate the railway, another to operate the coal mines, another to operate the copper mines, another to develop the oil deposits, and others to undertake the development of the various other interests. Numerous propositions have already been received from syndicates and individuals, who are aware of valuable mineral, timber, and other resources along the proposed line, and have been trying in vain to obtain concessions from the Turkish government to develop them.

Mr. W. W. Masterson, American consul at Harpoot, who has served in this part of the world for many years and knows Turkey thoroughly, made a horseback journey of 800 miles over the proposed routes of railways and reported to the secretary of state that he found no serious difficulties of construction. The chief line proposed, he says, would follow the Euphrates River almost its entire length without a heavier grade than one foot to the mile, and there are no great engineering difficulties to the other lines.

“The valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the coves bordering on Lake Van, are cultivated to a degree,” Mr. Masterson says, “and enough is raised with their primitive farming implements to feed the people in that region. But little is exported because of the difficulties and cost of transportation. With an outlet to market, proper methods of cultivation, and modern farming implements, the land is capable of producing many times more than is now raised. For example, take the Mush Plain, through which the Euphrates winds its sluggish course. While the plain is wonderfully productive and well fitted in soil and climate for raising crops of all kinds, and every acre is fit for cultivation, yet not more than one third is cultivated. The land is so abundant that a field is cultivated one year, and the next year, possibly for several years, it is left fallow. The method used for breaking up new ground is slow, laborious, and unsatisfactory. A wooden plow on wheels is used, to which often eight or ten yoke of oxen or buffalo are hitched, with a man sitting on the yoke of each team, and a man behind to guide the plow. Each furrow is turned so slowly that the amount plowed each day would not equal a few hours’ work with an up-to-date plow and a strong team of horses, while the furrows are never over six inches deep.

“In the neighbourhood of many of the villages around the shores of Lake Van is a considerable quantity of Circassian walnut timber, some of the trunks being of enormous size, upon which are knotty growths that would make them of great value if they could be shipped to market. Some little business is done in this line with Marseilles, but in the most unsatisfactory and wasteful manner, so that the returns are small.

“Lake Van is an unusually beautiful body of water,” continued Mr. Masterson, “about sixty miles long and thirty miles wide. The water is impregnated with a potash of some kind and has a soft, soapy feeling. The natives use it for washing their clothing without soap. Around the lake is much tilled land of great richness, and many villages, in addition to the thriving city of Van, are located upon its shores. There are a number of sailing boats, but they are so unwieldly that they can only go before the wind and frequently are compelled to wait a week or ten days for favourable weather. A boat run by steam power would be a paying investment, and some years ago the local government ordered a forty horse-power motor-boat from the United States through an American missionary, but it was delayed in the custom-house of Trebizond for more than a year and a half, and only reached Van last fall.

“It is the mineral wealth of the country, however,” continued Mr. Masterson, “that is destined to make it prosperous. While I could not investigate for myself, I was told by thoroughly reliable persons of rich deposits of coal, iron, and copper, which have been worked more or less at long intervals for many centuries, but only for local supply. An Armenian bishop told me of a vein of coal eight feet in thickness, which juts out of a mountain; a German told me that he knew of a bed of iron ore of such richness and purity that the blacksmiths of the villages in that neighbourhood have been using it for years in their work without having it smelted. There are beds of coal of excellent quality near the city of Van and every indication of petroleum. During the insurrection two years ago the revolutionists secured all their bullets from some wonderfully rich lead deposits in the neighbourhood of Van. While I was at Bitlas the governor-general showed me some fine specimens that looked like American anthracite and he told me of a sulphur mine near that city. Two days out from Bitlas I came across immense deposits of marble jutting out of the mountain, not only white, but dark red, green, and black.

“There is an extensive deposit of copper half way between Diarbekir and Harpoot that is being worked to some extent in three places, one by private individuals and two by the government. A smelter near the mine is operated with wood fuel, which is a very scarce and expensive commodity in this country, although the western branch of the Tigris River, a mountain torrent with a tremendous fall, passes only a few feet from the smelter and might easily develop enough electrical energy for all that country.

“The copper ore is very rich. There is a spring of water at the outcropping which is so strongly impregnated that a French prospector offered the government $25,000 a year for the privilege of converting the solution into solid copper, but the offer was refused and the overflow of that spring is still carrying its load of mineral into the Tigris River.”

Russia has already acquired about one third of Armenia by conquest, and has been pushing its southern boundary line farther and farther into Turkey and Persia every time there is a war. And now Turkey has given the Russians the exclusive right to construct railway lines from the ports of Asia Minor and Armenia on the Black Sea. Several short lines will doubtless be built. They will belong to the Russian government, and the next time an excuse is offered for hostilities the cars will be loaded with Russian troops and arms and ammunition, brought across the Black Sea from Sebastopol on Russian ships. The Turks have thus furnished their most dangerous and aggressive enemy the facilities for an easy and irresistible invasion of their own territory. In addition to its military importance, the Russians have obtained a commercial advantage of the greatest value. The country along the southern coast of the Black Sea is very rich and produces abundant crops, but the people of the interior have no means except camel caravans of getting their produce to market. The Russians are to furnish them the necessary facilities and will have the benefit of the results.

Furthermore, the mountains which skirt the coast are rich in minerals, but have never been developed or even explored, because the sultan of Turkey has always forbidden it. A French company has a concession for working a coal mine near the city of Kastamuni (you can find it on the map about thirty miles inland from the coast of the Black Sea), but they have no harbour and no railway and it costs as much to get the coal over that thirty miles to the coast as it does to bring it from England. If a railway could be built and a harbour provided, the mines would be a very profitable source of revenue. The coal is of excellent quality. It is easily worked and the nearest competition is Cardiff and Newcastle in England. The sultan has always opposed the development of these resources, but the new government is favourable. Russia and France are allies in all that concerns the East and it may be assumed that the Russians will not only encourage but assist the French concessionaires for this coal industry.

Although the Chester concession had been approved and signed by every authority of the executive branch of the government whose signature was necessary, and had been formally approved by a unanimous vote of the council of state, the grand vizier refused to submit it to the Chamber of Deputies whose ratification was necessary to make it complete. When pressed to do so by the American ambassador, he explained that it would first be necessary to make some modifications in the treaty of amity and commerce which has been standing for nearly a hundred years, in order that the officials and employés of the proposed railroad, and the adventurers it would attract to the country, might be placed under the jurisdiction of the Turkish courts. At present, as in all semi-civilized countries, citizens of the United States residing in Turkey are tried before the American consul on the theory that they cannot secure justice in the local courts. This is called the doctrine of extra-territoriality, and is also adhered to by European Powers. While there has been considerable improvement in the judiciary of Turkey, the government is not yet sufficiently secure and the laws have not yet been sufficiently modernized to justify the United States or the European governments in submitting the personal and property rights of their subjects in Turkey to such jurisdiction, and neither the merchants nor the missionaries now in the Ottoman Empire would consider themselves safe under such an arrangement.

The grand vizier also raised the objection suggested by the German ambassador, that the Chester concession interfered with the mining rights of a certain German subject, and with an agreement with the late sultan that no mining concessions would be granted in Turkey without the consent of the German government. But the real reason for the refusal to submit the concession for the ratification of the Chamber of Deputies appeared in January, 1911, when a secret arrangement entered into between Russia and Germany as to the future policy to be pursued by those two governments in Persia and Turkey became known. This agreement practically apportions the Turkish provinces in Asia and the northern provinces of Persia between those two governments, so far as transportation facilities are concerned, without even consulting the governments of Turkey or Persia. It is as follows:

“Article I.—The Imperial Russian government declares its willingness not to oppose the realization of the Bagdad Railway project, and agrees not to oppose any obstacle to the participation of foreign capitalists in this enterprise, it being understood that no sacrifice of a monetary or economic nature will be asked from Russia.

“Article II.—In order to meet the wishes of the German government to connect the Bagdad Railway with the system of railways to be built in Persia at a future date, the Russian government agrees, when this system has been constructed, to proceed with the building of a line to join, on the Turco-Persian frontier, the railway from Sadje to Khanikin, when this branch of the Bagdad Railway, together with the line from Koniah to Bagdad, shall have been completed. The Russian government reserves the right to determine, at a time to suit itself, the definite route of the line, which is to join up at Khanikin. Both governments will facilitate the international traffic on the Khanikin line, and will avoid all measures that might tend to hinder it; for instance, the establishment of a transit time or the application of differential treatment.

“Article III.—The German government agrees not to construct any railway lines in any other zone than that of the Bagdad line and the Turco-Persian frontier to the north of Khanikin, and not to lend its material or diplomatic support to any undertakings of this nature in the said zone.

“Article IV.—The German government once more declares that it has no political interests in Persia, and that it is only pursuing commercial aims there. It recognizes, on the other hand, that Russia has special interests in northern Persia, from a political, strategic, and economical point of view.

“The German government also declares that it has no intention of seeking, for its own profit, or of supporting in any way, either for its own subjects or for those of other nations, any concessions for railways, roads, steamship routes, telegraphs, or other concessions of a territorial nature to the north of the line beginning at Kasrihin, crossing Ispahan, Jezd, and Khakh, and ending at the Afghan frontier at the latitude of Ghasik. If the German government seeks such concessions, it must first of all come to an agreement with the Russian government.

“On the other hand, the Russian government will consent to recognize, with regard to German trade in Persia, the principle of absolute equality of treatment.”

The publication of this agreement naturally created a decided sensation in Turkey and Persia, and the grand vizier was questioned about it on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies at Constantinople. He had very little to say and was evidently very much embarrassed. He explained that the arrangement was made without preliminary conferences with his government, but assurances had been received from both Germany and Russia that the interests of Turkey would be completely protected. As the plans for transportation lines disclosed by this arrangement interfere directly with the rights granted to the Chester syndicate, it will be necessary for the government of the United States to take part in whatever negotiations may follow, or withdraw entirely from participation in the development of the material resources of Turkey.

What is known as the Bagdad Railway is one of the greatest projects decided upon by the Turkish government. The concession has already been granted. The work of construction has already begun; two hundred kilometres of track have been laid from Konia toward Adana, and the company has received $80,000 a mile for what has cost it less than $50,000. Now that the expensive part of the line has been reached, through the Anti-Taurus Mountains, the managers are holding up and making excuses for not continuing work. They want to change the route. They have already made between $5,000,000 and $6,000,000 profit, which has been divided among the concessionaires, and have thus gotten into bad habits. They are reluctant to undertake work that will cost every dollar they will get for it, and perhaps more, although the concession was accepted as a whole and not in parts. Instead of crossing the mountains where the road is needed they have asked the government to permit them to follow the coast line, where there will be little or no grade and where the track can be laid for less than one half of the guarantee per mile. If you will take a map of the Turkish Empire you can easily see the situation.

What is known as the Anatolian Railway begins at Haidar-Pasha, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, opposite Constantinople, and runs eastward, following a sort of zigzag course, to the city of Angora, in Asia Minor. A branch runs down to Murad, where it connects with a line from Smyrna, and a little farther south, at Alshehr, it connects with a line from Aidin. Both Smyrna and Aidin are on the Ægean Sea and are very important ports.

The railways I have described have been in operation for several years. They owe their existence to British enterprise and were built with British capital, but have passed into the control of the International Syndicate, which holds the concession for the Bagdad Railway, and are to be a part of that system. In other words, the present Anatolian Railway is to be extended through Asia Minor and Mesopotamia via Bagdad to the Persian Gulf, and there connect with a projected line across Persia and Afghanistan to join the railway system of India at Quetta or some other convenient place. This will connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas with the Persian Gulf, and, in the growing railway transportation system of Asia, will correspond to the Sunset line of the Southern Pacific in the United States, in the same way as the Great Siberian road corresponds to the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern, and the Central Asia Railway to the Union and Central Pacific route. Already 640 kilometres, or about four hundred and fifty miles, have been completed and about one thousand miles remain to be built.

The greatest difficulty in carrying out the scheme has been politics. The financial aspects are clear, but the political interests at stake are widespread and complicated. Five of the great Powers of Europe are involved in the undertaking. Great Britain acquiesced only upon the condition that it should be allowed to control that portion of the route between Bagdad and the Persian Gulf. The company is incorporated in Switzerland. The incorporators represent the Anatolian Railway Company of Constantinople, which, as I have already explained, is the first link in the line; the Deutsche Bank of Berlin, the Credit-Mobilier of Paris, the Imperial Ottoman Bank of Constantinople, the Weiner Bank Verein of Vienna, the Banca Commerciale Italiana of Milan, the Swiss Creditanstadt, and several British and Belgian interests. The Deutsche Bank of Berlin, through its branch at Constantinople, has immediate management, and by manipulation has obtained practically absolute control, so that, with the exception of the unbuilt but proposed section from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf, which may not be constructed for years, it is practically a German enterprise.

Although the other powers are involved, as I have explained, their representatives have taken no active participation in the work and have simply been content to have their names appear in the articles of incorporation, and to encourage their capitalists to invest in the stocks and bonds. With the exception of the Germans, therefore, the international representation which has been insisted upon from the beginning by Turkey, and by the Powers also, is merely theoretical. In case of war or any aggressive demonstration on the part of Turkey, it is likely to assume a practical character, however, and therefore, Austria, Italy, and especially England are contented to allow the Germans to do the work so long as they have a voice in controlling the politics of the road.

As you will see by looking at the map, the city of Adana, Turkey, is some distance in the interior; but it is connected with the Mediterranean by a short line of railway to the port of Mersina on the southern coast of Asia Minor. At present, Mersina is only an open roadstead and offers no shelter to vessels, but the situation is such that a harbour will not cost a large sum of money and the engineering features are not difficult. The railway from Mersina to Adana was constructed by a British company in 1886, but has since passed under the control of the Germans and is doing a good business. The country back of Adana, known as the Cilician Plain, is very favourable to cotton culture, and a considerable quantity of that staple is already produced there. Under the encouragement of the new government the industry will doubtless develop rapidly, but so long as Abdul Hamid was in control of affairs it was scarcely worth while for anybody to develop profitable enterprises, because they would invariably tempt the cormorants who surrounded the sultan to spoliation.

The Bagdad Railway has now reached the town of Bulgurlu, beyond Eregli, in the foothills of the Anti-Taurus Mountains, and about fifty miles from Adana; but, as I have said, it is the most expensive piece of construction on the road and the German managers hesitate to undertake it. After they reach Adana there is another stretch of a hundred miles or more which is also very heavy and expensive work, requiring many cuts, embankments, rockwork, and tunnels. The managers have put in an application for a change of route along the coast by way of Alexandretta and Antioch and from there approach the valley of the Euphrates by way of Aleppo. This route would be a great advantage as a measure of economy, but as the Turkish military authorities have pointed out, it exposes the railway to any foreign fleet that may enter the Gulf of Iskanderoon, on which Alexandretta is located. If the track lay back in the mountains, it would be more difficult to interfere with traffic in time of war.

The Bagdad Railway is expected to follow the valley of the Euphrates or that of the Tigris, the two great historic rivers which encircle that mysterious country known as Mesopotamia, where, according to the Scriptures, was the cradle of mankind, and the first inhabited section of the earth’s surface. Mesopotamia was formerly dotted with prosperous cities and supported a large population, but it is now practically uninhabited. The cities are in ruins, the population has perished, and the entire area has become a desert because of the destruction of irrigation systems which were built before the birth of Abraham. The government has already undertaken a scheme of reclamation at a cost of $10,000,000. Sir William Willcocks, who built the Assouan dam on the Nile, made the survey and furnished the estimates. He declares that there is no difficulty in the reclamation of the entire area between the Euphrates and the Tigris that money cannot remove.

In January, 1911, Nazim Pasha, governor-general of Bagdad, on behalf of the Turkish government, signed a contract with Sir John Jackson, of Westminster, London, for the erection of a dam at the head of the Hindia branch of the Euphrates, as the first step in carrying out these recommendations, and the work is to be pushed forward as rapidly as possible.

Mesopotamia is that portion of Turkey lying between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers—an area about three hundred miles long and varying from fifty to two hundred miles in width. Within the oval, according to the estimates of the engineers, are about 12,000,000 acres, of which 9,000,000 is desert and 2,500,000 fresh-water swamp, and they estimate that 6,000,000 acres can be reclaimed. There are several large, shallow lakes fed by the annual overflow of the Euphrates and Tigris. Both are large rivers having their sources in the lakes and mountains of Armenia and emptying into the Persian Gulf about fifty miles below the town of Kurna, where they join their waters and become one.

Between those rivers are the oldest habitations of men; the birthplace of the human race; the supposed site of the Garden of Eden, and the ruins of the capitals and commercial cities of a dozen extinct civilizations. It is the most interesting field for archæologists on the earth’s surface and exploring parties from American, British, German, and French universities and scientific societies have been constantly at work for half a century or more uncovering the remains of the imperial magnificence of Babylon, Nineveh, Palmyra, and other cities.

Sir William Willcocks has contributed some interesting theories in connection with Biblical history and archæology, in addition to his recommendations for an irrigation system. He locates the Garden of Eden at Hairlah, a lovely and flourishing oasis in a delta of the Euphrates, about two hundred miles northwest of the city of Bagdad. At this point the four rivers of Eden mentioned in the book of Genesis have been identified by him, and other topographical features which he believes to be indisputable.

Sir William also gives us an interesting theory concerning the deluge, which he believes was merely the flooding of the plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris by the overflow of those rivers, which is caused by the sudden melting of the snows and the heavy rainfalls in the latter part of March and the first of April. These floods occur annually, and on the particular occasion referred to in the book of Genesis, Sir William believes an unusual volume of water came down because of a sudden “spell” of hot weather and an unusually heavy rainfall.

Sir William thinks Noah was inspired to build the ark in anticipation of such a flood, and floated around in it until he ran aground, not on the mountain of Ararat, but near the town of Ur of the Chaldees, in the province of Ararat and a part of Armenia. He believes that a careful reading of the Scripture story of the flood will justify this theory, which, indeed, is not new. Many Biblical scholars reject the tradition that the ark landed on a mountain and hold that the word “Ararat” in the book of Genesis refers to the province and not to the peaks of that name.

He declares that if Noah had been a hydraulic engineer he would have done much better by cutting a channel for the escape of the waters through the bed of the river Pison, for he might thus have saved the entire population. The Pison is one of the four rivers of Eden, the Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates being the others. All of them are really branches of the Euphrates and form a delta in which the Garden of Eden is believed to have been situated.

Nearly the entire area of Mesopotamia was once under irrigation, and the first known dams and canals were built by Nimrod of the Bible, who is identified as the Hammurabi of the inscriptions that are frequently found among the ruins. Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great saw Mesopotamia in its greatest prosperity. The decay of the country began with the invasion of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde and Timour the Tartar, who destroyed the dams and the ditches and plundered the people of all their wealth so that they had no means to restore the irrigation system. Hundreds of miles of the ancient canals can be easily identified, and Sir William testifies to the remarkable degree of genius shown by the engineers who designed and constructed them. In his report to the Turkish government he recommends that the old canals be restored as far as possible, which can be done at half the cost of constructing new ones.

The Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Caliphs added to the number of reservoirs and extended the canals that were built by the patriarchs of the Scriptures. The fabulous wealth of Babylon, Nineveh, Palmyra, Nippur, Kufa, and other great cities of ancient times was largely derived from agriculture, in a territory that is now a desert; from the cultivation of soil which for thousands of years has been celebrated for its extreme fertility. Sir William Willcocks declares that the greater part of the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and of the area between these rivers is as rich as the valley of the Nile. In his report he says:

“Of all the regions of the earth none is more favoured by nature for the production of cereals than the valley of the Tigris. Cotton, sugar-cane, Indian corn, and all the summer cereals, leguminous plants, Egyptian clover, opium, and tobacco will find themselves at home as they do in Egypt.”

There is a passage in Herodotus, written more than 2,000 years previous, about this same country, which sounds very much like the Willcocks report:

“This is of all lands with which we are acquainted, by far the best for the growth of corn. It is so fruitful in the produce of corn that it yields continually two hundred-fold, and when it produces its best it yields even three hundred-fold. The blades of wheat and barley grow there to full four fingers in breadth, and though I well know to what a height millet and sesame grow, I shall not mention it.”

The proposed reclamation, according to the Willcocks report, can be completed for $40,000,000, and bring under irrigation more than 3,000,000 acres, which he estimates would be worth at least $100,000,000, or $30 an acre. The Assouan dam system, which he has recently completed, cost the Egyptian government $25,000,000, and only about half the area was reclaimed.

Sir William proposes, by dams and canals, to store the floods that are brought down from the mountains in the spring, in enormous reservoirs for use during the summer, and has indicated locations for at least five, which will, he believes, answer every purpose. At least two of these locations were used as reservoirs by the Babylonians and probably by previous civilizations, and Sir William will adapt to modern use the same canals that were then used to distribute the water over the plains. Several dry river beds can also be made available and thus economize the cost.

After the 3,000,000 acres that will be first reclaimed have been sold and settled, the area available for agriculture can be doubled by the expenditure of $15,000,000 additional, and ultimately the gain would be 6,000,000 acres capable of producing annually, according to his estimates, 2,000,000 tons of wheat, 4,000,000 hundred-weight of cotton and fabulous quantities of other exportable products, in addition to whatever food will be necessary to support a population of a million people.

In addition to the agricultural products, he promises pasturage for millions of sheep and goats and hundreds of thousands of cattle in the delta, and he would build a railway from Bagdad to Damascus with branches here and there to tap the harvest fields. The total length of this road would be about five hundred and fifty miles and, according to his estimates, it could be constructed for between ten and eleven million dollars.

The high price of cotton has caused the manufacturers of Manchester and other mill districts of England to seek new sources of supply. The attempts to extend the volume of the products of Egypt have not been successful, notwithstanding the investment of $25,000,000 in irrigation plants. The trouble is chiefly the lack of labour, and the indifference and indolence of the fellahs or peasant farmers in the valley of the Nile. Nor can the product of Egypt be increased to any considerable degree without the importation of labour. Several planters have tried American negroes but they wilt under the climate of Egypt and soon acquire the habits of the peasants around them.

The experimental plantations on the west coast of Africa have also been a disappointment for similar reasons. In the British possessions on both coasts of Africa are millions of available acres for planting cotton, but they lie idle because there are no hands to cultivate them. The native African will not work. He and his ancestors have managed to survive until the present day without labour, and it is difficult to persuade him that the curse pronounced upon our common father applies to him as it does to other human beings. Nature has supplied him with sufficient food thus far and he cannot be induced to go into the cotton fields to earn money that he has no use for.

These facts, which have given the manufacturers of Manchester great concern, are the reasons for the interest they are taking in the development of Mesopotamia, and several schemes have been proposed for colonizing there the excess of human life in Italy that has been going to the United States and the Argentine Republic. It has also been suggested that the Jews, who are not wanted in Russia and Roumania, might also be induced to settle in Mesopotamia. These plans, however, will not be realized for the present. The members of the Turkish cabinet are so timid about granting concessions for more necessary public works that it seems scarcely worth while to seek their approval of such a comprehensive plan as Sir William Willcocks has offered. So long as they cannot be induced to give concessions for telephones, electric lights, electric cars, and other public conveniences in their own capital, it is not likely that they would authorize the expenditure of $40,000,000 in reclaiming an uninhabited desert.

CHAPTER IV
THE CAUCASUS

If you will glance at the map, you will notice a mountain chain extending diagonally across what looks like a narrow strip of land between the Black and Caspian Seas, but it is not as narrow as it looks. It is more than five hundred miles between the two seas. The Caucasus range is one of the most remarkable of all geological phenomena. It is the boundary between Europe and Asia, and an almost impenetrable wall which can be crossed by vehicles or horsemen in only two places, known as the Dariel and the Manisson Passes.

From the beginning of history until the Middle Ages it was the boundary of the world. Beyond, all was mystery and fable, and for that reason the ancients made the Caucasus the scene of much mythological activity and the home of many marvels. They called the country Colchis, and it was there that Jason and the Argonauts found the Golden Fleece. Prometheus was chained to one of the peaks by the gods to punish him for giving fire to the mortals. Within the Caucasus dwelt man-hating Amazons of whom scandalous stories were told, with treasures of gold and silver and precious stones unlimited but unattainable, because they were guarded by griffins and one-eyed monsters called Arimaspians.

The Cæsars led their legions as far as the foot of the mountains; Pompey fought a battle under the shadow of the highest peak; Alexander the Great reconnoitred through the foothills seeking a passage to the unknown regions beyond, but did not find it until he reached the Caspian Sea. All the great invaders of the prehistoric period smote the Caucasus with their impotent swords, but never passed beyond; and the first Europeans to find their way through the rocky labyrinths were Greek and Genoese traders, who crawled through the cañons on foot in the Middle Ages in search of customers. Much was risked for gold and glory in man’s struggle with nature that lasted many centuries here, and it was not until the territory was added to the Russian Empire early in the nineteenth century that the Caucasus became passable. For military purposes the Russians have built wagon roads through the two cañons at a cost of many hundred thousand rubles, over which its armies and their supplies have since passed into the hinterland.

Shakespeare shared the awe of the ancient Greeks, and was also inspired by the romance attached to these impassable barriers. He frequently alluded to them in his plays.

“For who can hold a coal of fire in his hands

While thinking of the frosty Caucasus.”

Prometheus was one of the Titans, a gigantic race which inhabited the earth before the creation of men. To him and his brother Epimetheus was entrusted the duty of providing man and all other animals with the faculties necessary for their comfort and preservation. Epimetheus proceeded to bestow upon the animals gifts of strength, intelligence, courage, and swiftness. He gave wings to one class, claws to another, horns to a third, and fur to those that were to inhabit the colder parts of the earth; but when man came to be provided for, Epimetheus had been so generous in giving away his treasures that he had nothing left to bestow upon him. In his perplexity he appealed to his brother Prometheus, who, with the aid of Minerva, went up to heaven, lighted a torch from the sun, and brought down to man the gift of fire which made him superior to all other animals. It enabled him to make weapons wherewith to subdue them, tools with which to cultivate the earth, material for the arts and trades and commerce, and heat to warm his dwelling and cook his food.

Jupiter, seeing this state of things, burned with anger and summoned the gods to council. They obeyed the call and started for the palace of heaven along a road which any one may see on a clear night. It stretches across the face of the sky, and is called the Milky Way. Having considered his offence, Prometheus was declared an enemy of the gods and Jupiter had him chained to a rock at the summit of Mt. Kazbek in the Caucasus, where a vulture preyed forever upon his liver, which was renewed as fast as devoured. This state of torment might have been terminated at any time by Prometheus if he had been willing to submit to Jupiter, but he disdained to do so. He was a friend of mankind, who had interposed in their behalf when the gods were incensed against them, and had taught them civilization and the arts. He has therefore been used as a symbol of magnanimous endurance, of unmerited suffering, and strength of will to resist oppression.

The range is about seven hundred miles long, although the distance looks much shorter on the map, and it bisects the Russian province of the Caucasus northwest and southeast, dipping so low as it approaches the Caspian Sea that for thirty miles the coast is only a few feet above tide-water.

The territory north of the mountains is known officially as the Caucasus, and that south of it as the trans-Caucasus. Both belong to Russia. Formerly, and the names can be found on all of the old maps, the territory north was divided into independent states—Circassia, Daghestan, Astrakan, and the steppe of the Kalmucks—but they have lost their identity, and the thrones of their former rulers may be found in that marvellous collection of trophies of conquest in the Kremlin at Moscow. South of the Caucasus is the ancient kingdom of Georgia, and beyond that Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Azerbaijan province of Persia.

The geological interest in the Caucasus Mountains is due to the fact that they rise abruptly from two flat plains, similar to our western prairies, known as steppes, and are unique because of the simplicity of their structure, the regularity of their outlines, the steepness of the declivities, and the narrowness of the range. It is not split up, as other great mountain chains are, into secondary and parallel ranges, and has no buttresses running at right angles, nor outlying peaks. The greatest width of the range is only about 120 miles; all the loftiest summits are on the single watershed, which for several hundred miles does not sink below seven thousand feet. Elburz, the highest peak, rises 18,493 feet above the Black Sea and overtops all others in Europe. Kazbek, to which Prometheus was chained, according to the legend, is 16,523 feet. There are seven other peaks exceeding 15,000 feet and nine peaks exceeding 14,000 feet, which make the Caucasus by far the highest mountains in Europe. The gorges are more savage, the cañons are deeper, the peaks are steeper and sharper and more difficult of ascent than those of any other range in the world. The Caucasus Mountains are not as beautiful as the Alps, but are more imposing and majestic.

A Georgian Prince and his sons

A Georgian beauty

There is supposed to be great mineral wealth in the Caucasus, and the natives in ancient times, on both sides of the range, possessed much gold and an abundance of rough jewels. The crowns and sceptres of the Georgian and Circassian kings in the Kremlin at Moscow are richly decorated with jewels, some uncut and others rudely cut. The nobles and warriors of both countries loaded themselves with silver and gold ornaments. Their guns and pistols and their swords and daggers had handles of gold and silver set in precious stones. The vessels they used in their households, the ornaments in their churches, the gifts they presented to their friends, and the loot that was taken away by the Persians, Russians, and other invaders, testify that there must have been much profitable mining in ancient times: and the story of the Golden Fleece is not a mere legend, because even to-day the mountaineers are in the habit of anchoring fleeces of wool from their sheep in the streams, as traps to catch the grains of gold that float down in the water.

The Caucasians have always been famous as goldsmiths and silversmiths, and in every museum of Europe you can find examples of their skill and taste. Even to-day in the bazaars of old Tiflis, long streets are occupied exclusively by cunning artificers making cups and flagons, handles for swords and knives, pistols and guns, ornaments for the body and the household, bowls and dishes for the table, and all sorts of decorative and useful objects of the precious metals. They are especially skilful in combining iron and silver, and iron and gold, although this art has never reached the same perfection there that is found in similar products in Toledo, Spain.

There are rumours of coal mines, and they probably exist, but the abundance of timber has not encouraged the people to work them. Iron and copper are found frequently, from which the ancients always had an abundant supply. About twenty-five miles up the railway from Batoum is an extensive operation by the Caucasus Copper Company, an American-English syndicate. They are getting out a good deal of copper, an average of 120 tons a month, which is shipped to Moscow and St. Petersburg for local use. About eight hundred hands are employed in the mines and in the smelters.

Petroleum has been known in the foothills and along the sea coast at the eastern extremity of the Caucasus Mountains from the earliest times.

There is a railway on each side of the Caucasus Mountains. That on the northern side runs from Baku, the oil centre, to the city of Rostov, at the mouth of the river Don and the head of the Sea of Azov. That on the south runs from Batoum to Baku, and is the principal thoroughfare for the shipment of oil to other parts of Europe than Russia. The annual shipments of refined petroleum from Batoum to the rest of the world have averaged about four million barrels, but the Russian refiners cannot compete with the Standard Oil Company, either in the quality or the price of their product. Russian oil has practically been driven out of all the European countries except Turkey, Roumania, Hungary, and Russia, and the Standard Oil Company is now “the Light of Asia” without a rival flame.

At the time of the revolution in Russia in 1905, the employés of both oil companies at Batoum struck. Fifteen hundred men on the Nobel dock, and a thousand more who were working for the other companies, quit work because the new constitution of Russia, as they construed it, granted them liberty to do as they pleased. The oil companies, assuming that they possessed similar rights, closed their warehouses and have never resumed business. After the strikers had enjoyed all of the liberty of this kind they desired, they asked to be taken back, but the operators shook their heads and said there would be no more work for them. Hence the population of Batoum has been reduced by several thousand since that time.

In 1863 the Russian government built a broad highway, with a gentle grade, from Tiflis, the capital of the Caucasus, through the southernmost of the only two passes by which the Caucasus Mountains can be crossed. It is called Dariel Pass, and it crosses the grand divide between Europe and Asia at an altitude of 7,698 feet. The other pass, about eighty miles farther north, is called Manisson and crosses the divide at 8,400 feet. On the European side of the Caucasus, at the northern end of the pass, is the city of Vladicaucasus, sometimes spelled Vladikowkaz, and in various other ways—a Russian word which means “the master of the Caucasus,” and from a military sense it answers that definition.

Mount Elburz, 18,493 feet high, the highest peak in Europe, is on the northern side of the grand divide, but cannot be seen from either Tiflis or Vladicaucasus. Kazbek, 16,523 feet, the second peak in height, 112 miles almost directly north of Tiflis, can often be seen from that city, and at one point of the military road, for a few rods, a splendid vista can be had of the monster when its snow-clad summit is not hidden in the clouds.

The pass is crossed daily by an automobile omnibus similar to those which run between hotels and railway stations in our cities. The passengers occupy slippery longitudinal seats inside, and their luggage is carried on top. It is a most inappropriate vehicle for pleasure riding and those who are unfortunate enough to cross that way see a little of the scenery on one side of the road. It is much better to take an open carriage, a “tsetvioria,” as they call it, a sort of landeau drawn by four horses hitched abreast. That is open to all that may be seen above or below, and has a cover that can be drawn over it in case of rain. The journey across the pass by carriage requires two days, being 135 miles, but you have to start at daylight both mornings. There are rest houses on the way where one can eat and sleep if he can put up with a good deal of dirt and discomfort, but the best way is to make an excursion down from Vladicaucasus to the village of Kazbek at the foot of that mountain, which will permit one to see the finest part of the scenery and return the same night.

A railway has been planned and surveyed, and will doubtless be built, through the pass. Indeed, we understand that construction has already been begun by the Russian war department. It will not be a difficult or very expensive task, because the cañon is wide, except in a few places, and the engineering problem is nowhere nearly as difficult as many that have been encountered in other parts of Russia.

The scenery will attract many tourists, although the Russian government cares little about that. There is nothing in Europe grander or more savage than the cañons and gorges and mountain peaks of the Dariel; they equal, if they do not surpass, the boldest forms of nature in the Alps. One cañon is 4,000 feet deep, with almost perpendicular walls, and for seventy-five miles or more the cliffs and crags on both sides rise to a height of 1,500 and 1,800 feet. From the time the cañon is entered at the north until the traveller emerges from it at the south the distance is about seventy-five miles, and there is not one mile without peculiar interest and attraction. The Terek River, which finds its source among the everlasting snows of Kazbek, dashes northward in a tawny torrent and the carriage road follows its bed. On the southern slope the river Kur, born in the glaciers of Kazbek, is followed to the city of Tiflis. For three fourths of the distance the cañon is wide enough to admit half a dozen railway tracks without trenching upon the river or having to blast a roadway out of the rocky mountain side, but in two or three of the narrower places some heavy stonework will be necessary. The scenery will remind you of the fiords of Norway more than anything you have ever seen in Switzerland or the United States, and its greatest attraction is due to the forests and underbrush, with which every mountain side is clothed up to the snow line.

Twenty-seven miles from Vladicaucasus, going south, the road suddenly turns a sharp corner around a point of rocks and the traveller finds himself face to face with Kazbek, a steep, glittering dome of snow rising 16,523 feet above the sea. There is a little village of the same name at the snow line, which is about 9,000 feet, in the most savage part of the range, and the Russian government keeps a rest house there for the shelter of those who wish to make the ascent.

According to local tradition, Prometheus was chained to a certain precipice on the slopes of Kazbek. The guides will show you the exact spot, just as visitors to the Chateau d’If in the harbour of Marseilles are shown the exact dungeon in which the hero of Alexander Dumas’s famous novel, “Monte Cristo,” was imprisoned. They forget that both were heroes of fiction, and Æschylus, in writing his tragedy, evidently did not know the geography of the Caucasus, for he describes the rock as overhanging the sea, which is more than three hundred miles distant. There are several magnificent glaciers in sight of the roadway, those of Dievdorak being among the largest in the world and altogether the most extensive in Europe. There are none in Switzerland that will compare with them.

This road was built by the Russian government for purely military purposes, in order that troops, artillery, and supplies may be hurried across into Turkey or Persia or wherever else they may be needed, and Manisson is the only other route by which the highest range in Europe can be crossed. Otherwise, it would be necessary to go as far east as the shores of the Caspian or as far west as the Black Sea.

The native costume of Georgia

Head-dress of a Georgian lady

The road is fortified from end to end. There are half a dozen garrisons stationed at different points and a stronger military defence can scarcely be imagined. A few rapid-fire guns could hold back an army of millions. Nobody has ever tried to force the pass and nobody ever will. The Russians usually allude to it as “the famous Georgian military road,” and it is better known to military students than geographers, and to strategists than to the public. The grand divide, called “Krestovaia Gora” (the Crest of the Cross), is forty-one miles from Vladicaucasus, and upon a ledge above it, at an altitude of 8,015 feet, is an obelisk surmounted by a cross attributed to Queen Tamara, who ruled Georgia in the Middle Ages: and there, it is said, when that amiable lady became tired of a lover, she would have him thrown over the precipice.

Section of the road in Dariel Pass

Going north from Tiflis the first place of interest is Mtskheta, the ancient capital of the Georgian kings, which is now a humble and uninteresting village of two or three hundred people with the ruins of a large castle, two ancient Greek churches, and other evidences of former greatness. The place is fourteen miles from Tiflis on the railway to Batoum, and people who care to do so can shorten their journey by taking a carriage there, although there is no decent place to stop. The surrounding country was inhabited by a prehistoric race of cave dwellers, even before the European invasion. Chambers have been chiselled out of the limestone cliffs of the foothills similar to those in the cliffs of Arizona and were evidently inhabited by a large population.

The Georgians claim to be the oldest of races and Mtskheta is one of the oldest cities in the world. It was founded, according to the tradition, by Karthlos, who was the son of Thargamos, who was the son of Gomar, who was the son of Japhet, who was the son of Noah, and came up here from Ararat after the flood to settle down in that lovely country. (See Genesis x. 3.) From him the royal line of Georgia sprang and Mtskheta was their capital. The city is described by Ptolemy, the Egyptian; by Strabo, the Greek; and by Pliny, the Roman geographer; and its wealth and power and influence in his land caused it to be called Dedakhalakhy which being translated into English means “the Mother City.” Christianity was introduced among the Georgians by St. Nina during the reign of King Meriam, in the year 322–324 A.D., and she persuaded them to tear down their pagan altars, to abandon their human sacrifices, and to accept the gospel of peace and love, although they have not always lived up to it very closely. Of all the peoples in the world, the Georgians have been the most consistent sinners.

King Meriam after his conversion built a church wherein to deposit “the seamless garment” of our Saviour, which was bought at the crucifixion by a Jew named Elioz. He purchased it of a soldier who won it by lot at the foot of the cross. It was kept in that church for many centuries, and in 1656 was presented by the king of Georgia to the czar Boris Godunof of Russia, who placed it in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin at Moscow, where it may be seen to-day.

In the sanctuary where this precious relic was formerly kept, is a pillar called the Samyrone (a Georgian word meaning “whence issues sacred oil”) which possesses the miraculous power of supplying the Holy Chrism with blood that oozes through its pores. This miracle occurs every year or two, and, although the Georgians are not noted for their piety, thousands come every year to worship and to touch the pillar with their fingers. In that way, they believe, they can cleanse themselves from all diseases of the body and the soul.

This old church was the burial place of the kings of Georgia for centuries, and although the tombs are not well kept and are neglected in a shameful manner, many of them are still splendid specimens of the art of carving. In front of the tabernacle, where the robe of the Saviour was kept, is a reliquary containing what is believed to be a monk’s habit worn by the prophet Elias. Tradition claims that he was a native of Mtskheta, although there is no documentary evidence of that fact.

The dust of the last king of Georgia lies in a beautiful marble sarcophagus bearing the following inscription:

“Here rests the Tzar George; born in 1750; ascended the throne of Georgia in 1798. Desiring the welfare of his subjects and to secure them forever in peace he ceded Georgia to the Russian Empire and died in 1801.

“For the purpose of preserving to future generations the memory of the last of the Georgian tzars, the Marquis Paolucci, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, caused this monument to be erected in the name of His Majesty the Emperor Alexander I in the year 1812.”

The renunciation of the crown and the cession of the territory of Georgia to Russia, as described above, were not approved by his family or his subjects. His queen accused him of cowardice and denounced him to the people. When the Russians attempted to take her to Moscow to prevent her from raising a rebellion, she drew a dagger from her breast and drove it into the heart of Gen. Ivan Petrovitch Lazareff, who expired immediately.

While she was being conveyed to Russia by General Toulthkoff an attempt to rescue her was made in the Dariel Pass and nearly every one of her escort were killed in the fight.

Among the other tombs is one bearing the following touching inscription:

“I, Miriam, daughter of Davian, and Queen of Georgia, have taken possession of this little tomb. You who look upon it, remember me in charity and pray for me, for the love of Jesus Christ.”

One of the early Christian kings of Georgia, named Ivane, who in 1123 delivered his country out of the hands of the Moslems, is identified as the mysterious Prester John who attracted a great deal of attention during the Crusades and was the subject of much speculation and frequent discussion. He was first brought to the notice of Europe by Pope Eugene III as having been the saviour and defender of Christianity in this part of the world, but from the indefinite information it was impossible to identify the original among several petty sovereigns in the East.

Sir John Mandeville, knight, in his “Narrative of Marvells,” written in 1332, tells us more about this mysterious character than we have from any other source. He says:

“The Emperor Prester John has been christened and a great part of his land also. They believe well in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Emperor Prester John, when he goeth to battle, hath no banner born before him, but he hath born before him three crosses of fine gold, large and great, and thickly set with precious stones. And when he hath no battle, but rideth to take the air, then hath he born before him a cross made of a tree.”

In all their history there seems to have been only one of their sovereigns of whom the Georgians are proud, and that was Queen Tamara, who ruled all the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, south of the Caucasus Mountains, from 1184 to 1212. That was the golden age of Georgia. Tamara seems to have been a mixture of masculine energy and courage and feminine loveliness and grace, a Cleopatra and a Joan of Arc in the same woman, combining the virtues of Queen Elizabeth and the vices of Catherine II. Her portraits are found in every household, she is credited with founding every monastery and every church of age, and seems to have had a castle in every corner of the country. Her throne may be seen in the Kremlin at Moscow.

Prince Aragva, the present representative of the Georgian dynasty, a great-great-grandson of George XIII, who renounced his authority in favour of the Russian emperor in 1799, lives at Donchet, at the southern entrance to the Dariel Pass, an agricultural town of about 3,500 inhabitants. He has large estates and an abundance of money and the Russian authorities treat him with distinction. He spends most of his time in St. Petersburg and Paris, but cultivates, through his agents, a large and productive estate. He is said to have no ambition but pleasure and realizes a good deal of that.

The railway across the Caucasus from Batoum, the port on the Black Sea, to Baku, on the Caspian, is 558 miles long, although from the map the strip of territory between those two bodies of water does not seem half so wide. The track follows the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains through the ancient state of Georgia on the southern and Asiatic side, and snow-capped peaks are in sight from the car windows nearly every day in the year during half the journey. The highest point reached by the train is 3,027 feet, where it passes through a long tunnel. The railway was built by the Russian government for military purposes about forty years ago, and is still under military control and managed by military methods. All the material and rolling stock came from the government shops at Moscow; the engines burn oil for fuel and the tracks are five feet gauge.

A squad of soldiers accompanies every train and occupies a car immediately back of the locomotive, to guard the mails and the express car, which often contains treasure and always many valuable packages. This guard has been maintained ever since the revolution. The functions of the civil governor-general have been practically suspended for years; the military commander exercises autocratic authority, and martial law is enforced according to his judgment. That is, all crimes which he construes as being political are tried by military courts and punished by the military authorities, who have practically filled the prisons with political offenders. Other crimes against person and property, which, in the judgment of the military authorities, have no political significance, are committed to the jurisdiction of the civil courts.

No part of Russia suffered so much from fire and sword during the revolution of 1905–6 as the Caucasus, and many revolting stories are told of the barbarities and horrors committed on both sides. But there is no use in reviving those disagreeable things. The terrible prison in the citadel that crowns a hill overlooking the city of Tiflis is still crowded with patriots whose zeal outran their judgment, and whose ideas of civil liberty are somewhat broader and more radical than we are accustomed to concede.

A Georgian Peasant

A Georgian gentleman and wife

Russian anarchists who throw bombs at their rulers and blow up barracks filled with sleeping soldiers in the name of God and liberty are not quite sane and are entitled to no sympathy. That is the most charitable way to regard the awful crimes that have been committed in the name of patriotism and liberty. The leaders of the insurrection here look upon the French revolution as sacred history, and the province of the Caucasus has been the scene of many similar occurrences.

The land troubles in Ireland have not been a circumstance to those that have occurred there, and the same fanatical spirit has been carried into education and religion as well as into business. The Georgian church is a branch of the orthodox Greek, with some minor and technical differences in theology and ritual. I have never been able to learn just what they are, and, indeed, no one seems to know, but the Georgians refuse to commune with the Russians and would burn the Russian churches and massacre their priests if they could accomplish anything thereby. They are ultra fanatical in racial prejudice.

The Russians are not altogether blameless for this terrible situation, because they have attempted to force the Russian ritual and Russian priests upon unwilling parishes in many places, and have insisted that the Russian language instead of the Georgian language shall be used in the schools. Therefore the children are growing up in ignorance. No Georgian parent will allow his children to attend a school where the Russian language is taught. He would probably suffer ostracism, if not a worse punishment, if he did.

The railway from the Black Sea enters the mountains about 150 miles from Batoum and climbs up very slowly with two locomotives over a solid track between timber-crowned hills. There are forests of locust trees white with blossoms, whose perfume fills the air. The locust seems to be popular and is not only planted around every station on the railway but around all the dwelling houses, farm houses and the cottages in the villages along the way. The farm houses look like timber claims in our Western states, and all the trees are locusts. There are a good many orchards and the quince and apple trees were in bloom when we made our journey. They seem to be well trimmed and cared for. The rocks along the cañons are decorated with rhododendrons and yellow honeysuckles, which are in blossom in April, and you can fancy how beautiful a railway right of way can be where the walls are covered with such foliage on both sides. But the scenery is not so wild as I expected from the printed descriptions I had read.

We crossed the divide through a long tunnel at an elevation of 3,027 feet and dropped down rapidly into a lovely, wide, level valley, every acre of which is covered to-day with a carpet of living green. The city of Tiflis is 1,355 feet above the sea, about the same latitude as Rome, and has an annual rainfall of nineteen inches, which is sufficient to raise all kinds of staples of the temperate zone without irrigation. Notwithstanding the restless and turbulent disposition of the Georgian and other races who make up the population, the farming element seem to be industrious and prosperous, and although their houses and the manner in which they live, their tools and implements would not be tolerated by an American farmer, their standards of comfort and luxury are not high; they would be, no doubt, contented if they had political liberty and were not so constantly reminded that they are the subjects no longer of a Georgian king, but of a Russian czar. If the government would do something for them to promote their material interests they might be more contented, but the Russian official regards the Georgians as an undisciplined and rebellious race, and as long as such relations continue there cannot be much improvement.