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CHAPTER XL
Tokat—Dagger-wearing people—A pleasant khan—Armenian soldiers—
On yoghourt—Achmet as kitchen-maid—A Greek visitor—Tokat
Castle—Osman Pasha—Death of Henry Martyn—Achmet and the
sentry—Breaking into a Turkish house—Commercial khans of Tokat
—An Armenian pastor— Rumours of massacre on my road.
ToKAT stands in the meeting of two deep valleys, the
greater not more than three-quarters of a mile in
width. One promontory of the intersection runs out
among the buildings in a precipitous tongue of rock,
five or six hundred feet high, on which stands an
exceedingly picturesque castle. The town has about
half the population of Amasia.
I retain strangely vivid recollections of Tokat, all
of them pleasant, all of them in colour. It remains in
mind as a bright, clean little town of sunlight and
cloudless skies ; of red roofs and greenery and winding
river between bold steep hills ; and of many
sword- and dagger-wearing people in the streets, for
there are wild districts in the east and north-east.
By his arms and the way he wears them you may
very nicely assess a man's vanity ; and not only his
vanity, but his position and character. An hour's
wandering in the streets of Tokat provided many
studies of this kind.
But more than anything else my impressions of
Tokat were coloured by the khan at which I stayed.
It was the best I ever found—not only in accommodation,
but also in its air of distinction. Among
the many khans of Tokat it was the first, without