With the Serbs in Macedonia

CHAPTER II
A CALAMITOUS CITY
Salonica — that two-thousand-year-old city
whose finger had been in so many historical
pies —how we stared as our ship slowly warped
her way to the quay !
It took one's breath away right from the start.
What with the English, French, Russians, Serbs,
and Italians and its own population of Greeks,
Turks, Spanish-Jews, and various brands of
Macedonians, stale though the image is, Salonica
was remarkably like an old-fashioned kaleido-
scope,
of which most of the little bits of
coloured glass were very faded and dirty.
Soldiers black, brown, and white, Ali Baba,
with many, many more than forty thieves,
Cassim and his donkey (poor beast), Fatima,
Haroun al Raschid, and Shylock, they were aU
in these malodorous, crowded streets. And the
women !
Women
of all kinds—
fat, slim,
bundles of
veiled, and unveiled ; shapeless
rags and dirt ; elegantly gowned figures with
picture hats ; women
barefooted, high-heeled
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