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At Constantinople there is a naval school for Turkish engineers and mechanics in the arsenal, to help on the Pan-Turkish ideal, and with a view to that all the instructors are German: a floating dock is in construction at Ismid, and the order has been placed with German firms.
The country between Scutari and Ismid surpasses in agricultural advantages any part of Asiatic Turkey through which we passed. Its fertile soil, and the luxuriant vegetation it supports, are, as we afterward learned, in striking contrast with the sterile plateaus and mountains of the interior, many parts of which are as desolate as the deserts of Arabia.
What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing, for no formula can embrace the variety of the countries marked "Ottoman" on the map: the High Yemen, with its monsoons and tropical cultivation; the tilted rim of the Hedjaz, one desert in a desert zone that stretches from the Sahara to Mongolia; the Mesopotamian rivers, breaking the desert with a strip of green; the pine-covered mountain terraces of Kurdistan, which gird in Mesopotamia as the hills of the North-West Frontier of India gird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as the Pamirs, which feed Mesopotamia with their snows and send it the soil they cannot keep themselves; the Anatolian peninsula an offshoot of Central Europe with its rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, but nursing a steppe in its heart more intractable than the Puszta of Hungary; the coast-lands Trebizond and Ismid and Smyrna clinging to the Anatolian mainland and Syria interposing itself between the desert and the sea, but all, with their vines and olives and sharp contours, keeping true to the Mediterranean; and then the waterway of narrows and land-locked sea and narrows again which links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and the Russian hinterland, and which has not its like in the world.
Since the opening of the Trans-Bosporus Railway, the wagon-road to Ismid, and even the Angora military highway beyond, have fallen rapidly into disrepair. In April they were almost impassable for the wheel, so that for the greater part of the way we were obliged to take to the track.
Like the railway skirting the Italian Riviera, and the Patras-Athens line along the Saronic Gulf, this Trans-Bosporus road for a great distance scarps and tunnels the cliffs along the Gulf of Ismid, and sometimes runs so close to the water’s edge that the puffing of the kara vapor or “land steamer,” as the Turks call it, is drowned by the roaring breakers.
Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the "Amazons." And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair. "Ismid," the eye-powder before noticed. "Shaib al-inghaz"=lit. a gray beard who shakes head in disapproval. "Ayat" = the Hebr. "Ototh," signs, wonders or Koranic verses.
We had already passed through Ismid, the ancient Nicomedia and capital of Diocletian; and had left behind us the heavily timbered valley of the Sakaria, upon whose banks the “Freebooter of the Bithynian hills” settled with his four hundred tents and laid the foundation of the Ottoman empire.
Our guide to the road to Ismid was the little twelve-year-old son of an Armenian doctor, whose guests we had been during our sojourn in Stamboul.
The first from Constantinople to Ismid, Angora, Yuzgat, and Sivas: the works on this have been already carried to Sabanja, between Ismid and Angora. The second section, from Sivas to Moussoul: the works on this line are in a state of favorable preparation, and the line will be actively gone on with.
We are now exactly on the meridian of 30 degrees East longitude, so our friend Mildmay informs me; and by following this meridian southward we shall cross Asia Minor, hitting the coast some fifty miles to the eastward of the Black Sea entrance to the Bosporus, shave past the head of the Gulf of Ismid which is the easternmost extremity of the Sea of Marmora and leave the coast again about halfway between the island of Rhodes and Gulf of Adalia.
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