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12 ACROSS ASIA MINOK ON FOOT
and beasts, of cook-shops and tobacco and garlic and
the sea, combine in the narrow streets into a smell
that micrht g'o up to heaven. In this way arrive
wheat and barley and flour, boxes of eggs for Trieste
and Marseilles, bales of mohair, wool, and tobacco,
crates of live poultry for Constantinople, and walnuts
by the ton.
The conveyance of imports does not make the same
display ; one might, indeed, spend a month in SamsAn
and never see it. It goes on in the same way,
however, but for the journey inland all get off early.
The waggons and groaning carts, the asses and camels
hung with bells, all file away in the darkness of
early dawn, and are high on the mountain-side when
the day begins for Samstin. They carry bundles
of shovels, and iron rods and bars and pipe ; and
boxes of sewing-machines, and bales of cloth and
Manchester yarn, and countless tins of paraffin. One
may even see roofing-tiles from Marseilles, and steel
girders, and lengths of cast-iron water mains, being
dragged slowly inland across the mountains on bullockcarts.
In addition to being a busy port, Samstin is also
a tobacco town like few. A strip of seaward slopes
and valleys and deltaic plain hereabouts, sixty or
seventy miles in length altogether, contains the
famous tobacco lands of Baffra and Samstin, equalled
in value only by those of Kavalla on the ^Egean.
Some delicate combination of sun and soil and moist
sea air gives Samstin tobacco—which is regarded as
even finer than that of Baflra—a quality and character
not found outside a narrow favoured district.
Attempts have been made to produce this tobacco
in other places— in America for one, even to the
length of sending over quantities of Samsiin soil in
which to start the plants,—but leaf, possessing the
original nature, has never been obtained away from
these few hundred square miles of Anatolian coast.
And so this choice tobacco has become the district's
chief product ; and the annual value of the