acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

MEHMET 161
and no more. Decidedly he was not the sort of man
I wanted ; but no driver liked to make the journey
at this season, and I had small choice : rather than
lose more time I engaged Mehmet—as he called himself—and
doubtingly hoped for the best. And yet
when I came to eye him more closely there was something
in his looks that reassured me. I thought at
first it was a confident manner, and next I read it
as a devil-may-care spirit, and supposed that in this
feeble body there might be, after all, much capacity
and courage. But with all my judging I did not
guess exactly what Mehmet afterwards proved to be.
Light rain had fallen for three days previously,
but I set out on a morning of sunshine and mild
southerly wind, when great balloons of white cloud
were sailing in a blue sky. It was the 21st of
November, and my good fortune in the matter of
weather had become surprising.
The narrow road out of the city was filled with
a column of half a hundred springless waggons,
going the same way as ourselves, crowded with
Turkish recruits. The men said they were going
to Samstin. They were in boisterous spirits this
fine morning, and so made rather unpleasant company
for a foreign traveller. They urged their drivers
to bump the araba, and after the first attempt had
failed and two waggons collided instead, one noisy
recruit seized the reins of his vehicle to demonstrate
how the thing should be done. At length a blank
wall appeared beside the street against which, with
some manoeuvring, it seemed possible to get us
satisfactorily pinned. And now waggon called to
waggon with shouting and excitement enough for a
riot. But the heavy vehicles, driven at a hard jolting
trot, were clumsy in movement ; and though the
intention was always there, and every one full of
advice, we evaded the blow, and beyond the wall
made our escape. In this hurly-burly Mehmet did
very well. Sometimes he slashed his own horses to
good purpose ; but more often those in the waggons,
L