acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

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316 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
count the difficulties ; I saw it as a scramble, with a
way yet to be found, and thought lightly that an
hour would do the whole thing. But I wished Ighsan
to go with me. He, however, saw the matter in
another light ; he was never fond of scrambling
besides, he owned a horse of value to himself if not
to me ; so he looked at the rock, and taking the
project in all its bearings, extinguished it with the
single word "^^," which he drawled into " A-a-a-a-t."
He was ever a master of brevity, and could supplement
a word with eye and gesture, and attitude
and tone, till it conveyed not merely sentences but
paragraphs ; but he never did better than he did
now. ''At" means horse—a horse, the horse, that
horse, any horse,—but now it meant " my horse."
It meant also that his horse could not go to the
Kale ; that he did not wish it to try ; that he could
not leave it here on the road ; that there was no
place near in which it would be safe ;
that he did
not wish to go to the Kale himself; and further, that
he saw nothing but foolishness in the proposal of
any one who did wish to go. All these thoughts
and others he packed into the word, and knowing
that the arguments it contained were unanswerable,
he stood, with blinking eyes, waiting in patient
silence for my reply. It was that we would go on
to Gulek Boghaz Khan, five or six miles down the
Mediterranean slope.
So we passed through the Gates along the road,
whose width is partly snatched from the stream
and partly hewn in the rock : the identical road
of all the ages. It had been trodden by Persian
bowmen, by phalanx and legion, by Byzantine
lancers, Arab horsemen. Crusading knights and menat-arms,
and the medley of races and armies which
have ebbed and flowed through this main door in
the wall during uncounted centuries. Precipice and
rock and snow and scattered pines rose for thousands
of feet on either hand, and though on the
eastern side they went up to rosy sunlight, evening