acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

94 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
were also a boar's skin filled with white cheese, hanks
of cord such as pack-horse drivers use, matches, salt,
sugar, apples, barley—he was a universal provider of
the Bagdad Road, pitched under a shady tree.
The desire to buy seized me when I saw this wayside
shop, and I turned in beneath its tree. I bought
olives and cigarettes for giving away, and ordered
coffee, and tasted the salt white cheese, and the helva,
and ^3e^me2. While I sat thus, living the life of the
highway, a horseman rode up slowly from the south.
He looked at the shop, hesitated a moment, and then
alighted, hitched his horse to the tree, and buying
bread and olives and a cup of coffee, began to eat. He
told the shopkeeper he was from Divrik, a town in the
Dersim Kurd country, and on his way to Amasia. In
appearance he was tall and thin and Jewish-featured,
and like all Kurds shifty-eyed and stealthily observant,
and carried himself with swagger. His big revolver
was thrust into his many - coloured silk girdle only
just enough to keep it in position. With country
vanity he seemed sure that he, his fine horse and fine
clothes, made a combination for cities to look upon
with admiration. It struck me, indeed, that his halt
at this shop was to show himself to me, a foreigner.
Some people profess a liking for Kurds, and discover
in them all kinds of virtues,—I sometimes wish that
I could do so. Take stock of any group of Kurds,
and as you look from face to face, all alike as birds
of the same species, you receive a growing impression
of cunning and cruelty to be found in no other race.
So they always appear to me, and I do not think I
ever was in the presence of a Kurd without having a
strong inclination to quarrel with him.
At last the road left the valley of the Iris and
climbed over a low neck between hills dotted with
beech-scrub and Christ's thorn. The autumn foliage
of both was so brilliant that in the distance the
slopes seemed to be splashed with scarlet poppies.
The colour could not have been due to frost, for as yet
there had been none ; it had to do with drought and
heat and the dryness of air so noticeable in this