Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
No matter whether the empire be semi-civilized and despotic, or free and enlightened, the obscure and struggling individual is usually rated 0000. Russia "permission refused." England paternally "must not attempt;" cold, offish language this for a lone cycler to be confronted with away up here in the northeast corner of Persia, from representatives of the two greatest empires of the world.
At the supper table mine host and his brother both lavish attentions upon me; knives and forks of course there are none, these things being seldom seen in Asia Minor, and to a cycler who has spent the day in pedalling against a stiff breeze, their absence is a matter of small moment.
This road is found to be most excellent, and the enterprising people who have walked, ridden, or driven out there, in order to see me ride past to the best possible advantage, are rewarded by witnessing what they never saw before a cycler speeding along past them at ten miles an hour.
The Persians seem to do little more than play at soldiering; perhaps in no other army in the world could a lone cycler demoralize a general review twice within two days, and then be greeted with approving smiles and cordial salutations by the commander and his entire staff.
Men are solemnly squatting around the benches of the mehana, smoking nargilehs and sipping tiny cups of thick black coffee, and they look on in wonder while I devour a substantial breakfast; but whether it is the novelty of seeing a 'cycler feed, or the novelty of seeing anybody eat as I am doing, thus early in the morning, I am unable to say; for no one else seems to partake of much solid food until about noontide.
Leading citizens who have been to Paris or Vienna, and have learned something about what sort of road a 'cycler needs, have imparted the secret to many of their fellow-townsmen, and there is a general stampede to the highway leading out of town to the southward.
Whirlwinds of sand, looking at a distance like huge columns of smoke, are wandering erratically over the plains in all directions. The blazing sun casts, with startling vividness on the smooth white alkali, that awful scraggy, straggling shadow that, like a vengeful fate, always accompanies the cycler on a sunny day, and which is the bane of a sensitive wheelman's life.
One of the transient horsemen, a contemplative young man, the promising appearance of whose upper lip proclaims him something over twenty, announces that he likewise is on the way to Yuzgat; and after listening attentively to my explanations of how a wheelman climbs mountains and overcomes stretches of bad road, he solemnly inquires whether a 'cycler could scurry up a mountain slope all right if some one were to follow behind and touch him up occasionally with a whip, in the persuasive manner required in driving a horse.
One never minds a hilly road where one can reach the bottom with an impetus that sends him spinning half-way up the next; but where mud-holes or washouts resolutely "hold the fort" in every depression, it is different, and the progress of the cycler is necessarily slow.
I cannot think, however, that Fate, cruel as she sometimes is, has anything so outrageous as this in store for me or any other 'cycler.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking