acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

226 ACEOSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
and kept time to the words. It was the moruing air,
no doubt ; but a definite and considered purpose also
lay behind this avowal of age and unexpected show
of" activity. He had been a very weary man on
reaching Injesu, and again at Urgub, and now was
seeking to remove,, or at least reduce, any impression
then made to his disadvantage.
We soon dropped into a narrow ravine in which
trickled the beginnings of a stream with grass along
its edges. All flat ground in the ravine was carefully
cultivated and planted with fruit trees —
pear, apricot,
apple, almond—and here and there were patches of
vines. Nowhere in Turkey had I seen such careful
cultivation before. The ground had been deeply dug
by spade, by a digger who took professional pride in
his work ; the surface was even, the edge of the dug
ground finished with a neat line, and hardly a weed
appeared. It was possible to observe also the influence
of natural boundaries and surroundings upon the
cultivator's mind. In an open field of the same area
he might have been as orderly in his work, but the
results of loving attention there would not have been
so evident, either to himself or any one else, as in
this irregular space circumscribed by rock. Here he
had a little strictly contained estate, in all scarce
more than a straggling acre, and sought to make the
most of it. Only this morning he seemed to have
broken down an intruding bit of rock (the fragments
lay in a careful heap), and so doing gained a few feet
of ground, and also improved the shape of the patch.
Everywhere he had carried the dug surface up to the
very edge of the bank. You could declare with confidence
that he liked to see coloured rock rising
abruptly from dark freshly turned soil. You wished
to meet this careful tiller, for Turk or Greek, or, as
a cave-dweller, more certainly something of an aboriginal,
he had the right gardening instincts. His
burrow was in the rock hereabouts, but neither he
nor it was visible.
A little farther on, where the ravine opened out