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AN UNEXPECTED COMPANION 17
bumping noisily over the cobbles towards the foot of
the mountain-road. Kain had ceased, but the morning
was cold and gloomy and clouds were hanging
low. In a short while we reached the olive groves,
now encroached upon by the town, and said to be
only a remnant of what they once had been, even
in recent years. Ancient, and gnarled, and twisted,
the trees seemed to stoop wearily like aged forlorn
men without part in the times to which they had
survived. Some of these old grey trees must have
seen the decline and obliteration of Greek Amisus.
As events befell I did not set out along the Bagdad
Road alone. A party of Americans, on their way to
join the American Mission at Marsovan, had come
with me from Constantinople ; and they and I left
Samson tog-ether. We made a rather ill-assorted
company of travellers, for five were all for haste, and
I, the sixth, was all for lingering. But on the long
climb to the pass a pedestrian could go faster than the
arabas, so now and then I walked beside a most
pleasant and entertaining American girl. Here was
an unexpected sort of companion indeed to find on
the Bagdad Road. She was not long from college
(Wellesley I think) ; had rowed in the college eight,
and tramped and camped throughout the summer in
New England pine-woods. From these scenes she
had passed in six weeks to a mountain-road in Asia
filled with Oriental traffic, and throbbing with the
sound of bells ; and the road was the Bagdad Road,
with Bagdad somewhere at the other end ; and by a
turninof off it, as she remarked, mip^ht be reached
Jerusalem, and the Sea of Galilee, and the river
Jordan. She found thrills at every turn. Now a
long string of sneering betasselled camels with small
bells under their necks and great bells hanging like
stirrups. Now a party of fierce-looking gaily-dressed
men on foot, their faces burnt to blackness by the
sun on long journeying, their legs plastered with mud.
Next were two men at the roadside, their arms soaked
in blood to the elbows, absorbed in the work of flaying
B