Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/24

 await the end of the session. It was the room in which I had first met him, a large room with a flat-top desk in the center of one side, with a row of chairs around the four walls, and a sheet-iron stove with a pile of cut wood beside it, in the middle of the carpet. I waited possibly a half-hour, listening to the noise from the Assembly's chamber and making guesses as to what the trouble was. I had hoped to secure an hour or two with Kemal and had been listing, during the month I spent at Angora, a number of subjects on which I was anxious to secure his opinions. But he is not only difficult to find but difficult to hold for long. I had applied to the Foreign Office a week before and I believe they were not only willing but anxious to secure the appointment I wanted. My application, however, happened to coincide with a crisis in the Assembly and I had to make the best of a half-hour.

The session had no sooner broken up and the clamor of the deputies begun to overflow from the chamber into the corridor, than the aide summoned me. We crossed the corridor into a small room with a flat-top desk and, in the corner behind the desk, the limp folds of a tall green banner inscribed with Turkish letters of gold. From his chair at the desk, the military figure of Kemal himself in civilian clothes rose to greet me—a man with a face of iron beneath a great iron-gray kalpak. He spoke in French and the flash of much gold in his lower teeth gave sparkle to the military incisiveness of his manner, a manner which conveyed an instant reminder of cavalry.

His face is one of severely simple lines. The lower line of the kalpak comes down close to the