acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

8 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
the Black Sea, and later became the capital of Pontus,
and seat of Mithridates' Court ; and in spite of being
cut off from the interior by exceedingly difficult
mountains, was the great port of northern Asia
Minor. Into beautiful old Trebizond, too, a city that
saw the Ten Thousand, and, long afterwards, the
Empire of Trebizond, comes another of these immemorial
highways. By this road you may go to
Erzertim and Persia and the Farther East.
And yet another road is that which comes winding
down the mountain-sides into Samstin, 400 miles east
of Constantinople—a road that had for me especial
interest. When proposing to walk from the Black
Sea to the Mediterranean, and considering my route,
this road had made an irresistible appeal. I had seen
it before, in the hot days of summer ; had caught
sight of it first as it came over the saddle of the
coast range at least a dozen miles away, and 3000
feet above the town. It came curving in and out
around the spurs, disappearing and reappearing between
fields of maize and tobacco, and smoking with
the dust of traffic. At last it entered the olive
groves ; and when I saw it again I w^as on shore,
and there found it descending steeply into the hot,
cobbled, tree-lined main street of Samstin, and bringing
in the strangest medley of Eastern traffic.
It is called the busiest highway in Asia Minor, and
certainly has the most alluring name. For it ia the
Bagdad Road which from Samstin goes for 1000 miles
through Sivas, and Malatia, and Diarbekr, and Mosul,
and at last to Bagdad, where Haroun el Rashid was
Khalif, and Sinbad the Sailor one of the citizens.
During a pleasant year spent in Anatolia I had
passed several times along the northern fifty miles
of this road. I had watched its caravans break
camp at dawn, and heard the camel- bells across its
valleys. It had shown me tracks twisting on far-off
mountain-sides ; the smoke of charcoal-burners' fires
rising above blue wooded spurs by day ; and the
glow of those same fires on warm velvety nights. I