acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

234 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
tained the spirit of that earlier period, the spirit
which its illustrators have truthfully and unconsciously
caught and fixed upon their blocks.
Late in the afternoon we reached Nevshehr, a place
containing eight or ten thousand souls, and which,
like so many other towns in Anatolia^ has a castle on
a high detaclied rock, as if a defensible position had
always been attraction enough to gather a population.
Nevshehr is not a cave-town, and for me was to be
merely a halting-place whence I should go on to Nar
and Chat and Tatlar, other villages of the cave-men.
Most Turkish towns have a Yeni Klian (New Khan),
the name implying not only the latest improvements,
but chiefly a lesser plague of vermin. It is a name,
therefore, which means much in the way of securing
custom. At Nevshehr, for instance, knowing nothing
of the place, I told Ighsan to make for the Yeni
Khan. Sure enough there was one of the name, a
solid stone building, garish and white in its newness,
but reached through filthy narrow streets like alleys.
When entering I stopped suddenly, arrested by the
legend over the gateway, and almost doubting my
eyes. To a traveller who had eaten his lunch three
or four hours earlier on the rock of Uch Hissar, with
primitive dwellings at his feet, the superscription,
unexpected in itself, came with double force. At a
step I seemed to have passed from the ancient world
to the modern, and doubted if this could be a l^han
for travellers at all. In bold characters the legend
ran "
: Agence Commerciale du Chemin de fer Ottoman
dAnatolie." I entered the courtyard wondering
what energetic influence had produced this place of
commerce, for I knew that the nearest railway was
the Constantinople-Bagdad line a hundred miles away
among the Taurus mountains.
The khan was new indeed. It was so newly built
that oozing moisture stood like dew on the bare
stone walls of the room allotted to me. The wellknown
signs of vermin were absent, and I thought
of them almost with regret, as friendly tokens