Page:Islam, Turkey, and Armenia, and How They Happened.djvu/176

170 twenty miles a day. The animals are meanly fed in summer on grass, in winter on straw and very little barley. On winter nights the animals and the riders are sheltered together under the same roof of a khan (a rude, low and large building with only one room). There can be no fixed plan for the day. If you ask the muleteer the distance to the next town, khan or stream, he answers, "O, it is just here; about half an hour." You go on for hours and ask again, and get the same answer. You ask, "Where will you spend the night?" He replies, "Allah knows; I don't know; wherever the night comes we will halt there; don't worry about it; these places are very dangerous; the other day highwaymen killed three merchants and captured all their properties just in yonder valley."

In traveling, women, and especially children, are carried in mafa (two boxes), fastened one on each side of the horse. Owing to the constant dangers the travelers have to go in caravans (a large company of muleteers and passengers, with scores of various animals). They have carriages in the sea coast cities and in some parts of Anatolia, but for the lack of safety and regularity they are not of much use.

3. Language and Conversation of the Turks. The Turkish language, being composed of coarse Tartaric dialect and Persian and Arabic words and phrases, has its own beauty when spoken by the educated, but among the uneducated it represents the coarsest mode of speech. Turkish conversation is characterized by many and unnecessary adjectives,