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And so it has proved. I have now discovered that to the moment when she saw me, she had tasted only her mother's milk, dates, and that white wine of Ismidt which the Koran permits.
After looking at the cyclometer I begin figuring up the number of days it is likely to take me to reach Teheran, if yesterday and to-day have been expository of the country ahead; forty and one-third miles yesterday and nineteen and a half to-day, thirty miles a day-rather slow progress for a wheelman, I mentally conclude; but, although I would rather ride from " Land's End to John O'Groat's " for a task, than bicycle over the ground I have traversed between here and Ismidt, I find the tough work interlarded with a sufficiency of novel and interesting phases to make the occupation congenial.
In this particular gulf, at the head of which stands the ancient town of Ismidt, gulls, though plentiful in the open sea, are rarely in evidence, being replaced by herons and pelicans. I had not therefore set eyes on a seagull for many weeks, when early one morning I heard, from the farther side of a wooded headland, a new note suggestive of a wild cat or possibly a lynx.
I have received friendly warnings from several Constantinople gentlemen, that a band of brigands, under the leadership of an enterprising chief named Mahmoud Pehlivan, operating about thirty miles out of Scutari, have beyond a doubt received intelligence of this fact from spies here in the city, and, to avoid running direct into the lion's mouth, I decide to make the start from Ismidt, about twenty-five miles beyond their rendezvous.
Besides the loveliness of the situation, the little mountain-sheltered inlet makes an excellent anchorage for shipping; and during the late war, at the well-remembered crisis when the Russian armies were bearing down on Constantinople and the British fleet received the famous order to pass through the Dardanelles with or without the Sultan's permission, the head-waters of the Ismidt gulf became, for several months, the rendezvous of the ships.
Our friend the Frenchman is quite delighted at the advent of a bicycle in Ismidt, for in his younger days, he tells me with much enthusiasm, he used to be somewhat partial to whirling wheels himself; and when he first came here from France, some eighteen years ago, he actually brought with him a bone-shaker, with which, for the first summer, he was wont to surprise the natives.
There is quite a number of them aboard, and they now appear at their best, for they are going to take part in wedding festivities at one of the little Greek villages that nestle amid the vine-clad slopes along the coast white villages, that from the deck of the moving steamer look as though they have been placed here and there by nature's artistic hand for the sole purpose of embellishing the lovely green frame-work that surrounds the blue waters of the Ismidt Gulf.
Haidi, haidi, haidi." being repeated with a vehemence that is intended to impress upon them little less than flying-Dutchman speed. The deck of a Constantinople steamer affords splendid opportunity for character study, and the Ismidt packet is no exception. Nearly every person aboard has some characteristic, peculiar and distinct from any of the others.
Earlier in the evening, while taking a look at Ismidt and the surrounding scenery, in company with a few sociable natives, who point out beauty-spots in the surrounding landscape with no little enthusiasm, I am impressed with the extreme loveliness of the situation. The town itself, now a place of thirteen thousand inhabitants, is the Nicomedia of the ancients.
Accordingly nine o'clock on Monday morning, August 10th, finds me aboard the little Turkish steamer that plies semi-weekly between Ismidt and the Ottoman capital, my bicycle, as usual, the centre of a crowd of wondering Orientals.
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