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" This is an araba yole," they argue, "you are riding an araba; we have seen even our own clumsily-made arabas go up here time and again, therefore it is evident that you are not sincere," and they gather closer around and spend another ten minutes in coaxing.
Truly the place was a khan a great bleak building of four high outer walls, surrounding a courtyard that was a yard deep with the dung of countless camels, horses, bullocks, asses; crowded with arabas, the four-wheeled vehicles of all the Near East, and smelly with centuries of human journeys' ends.
They were lowered in their stretchers from the ship's side to the caiques which were brought alongside, pulled to the shore and carried by hand to the hospital. They were luckier in this respect than the majority of the men, who were huddled into the straw of the lumbering octagonal-wheeled arabas.
It was tremendous work getting up the guns, but soldiers and sailors willingly toiled away, pushing, and hauling, and aiding the teams, principally composed of bullocks, which had been brought up from Constantinople and other Turkish ports. Long lines of arabas, laden with provisions and stores, crawled slowly along between Balaklava and the front.
"The German has it." "The German has no right to it." "I will bring it." Rustum Khan strode off into the night, and Monty bent over the sobbing form of the self-appointed missionary. We were all alone in the midst of the courtyard, not even watched from behind the wheels of arabas, for a fight or a thrashing in the khans of Asia Minor is strictly the affair of him who gets the worst of it.
I helped to carry some of them from the train to the rough eight-wheeled springless arabas in which they were borne to hospital. In these wretched vehicles the wheel was not a cycle but an octagon, and the wounded, who were jolted along the street, filled the air with cries of agony.
Judging from the sounds, they appear to be making a bee-line for my position; but not caring to voluntarily reveal my presence, I simply remain quiet and listen. It soon becomes evident that they are a party of villagers, coming to load up their buffalo arabas by moonlight with these very shocks of wheat.
I am rolled up in my tent instead of under it, slumbering as lightly as men are wont to slumber under these unfavorable conditions, when, about eleven o'clock, the unearthly creaking of native arabas approaching arouses me from my lethargical condition.
I shall never forget the face of the haggard and fear-stricken wretch who crawled out of that hiding-place into the light of a solitary candle, or the enthusiastic protestations of gratitude on the part of his wife when I proposed that he should disguise himself as a farm labourer and should take a place amongst the men who were driving down for me a set of empty arabas to Philipopolis.
All the open space next the water was filled up with the clumsy arabas, or carriages of the Turks, in which sat the wives of the Pashas and other dignitaries. We took a caique, and were soon pulled out into the midst of a multitude of other caiques, swarming all over the surface of the Golden Horn. The view from this point was strange, fantastic, yet inconceivably gorgeous.
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