acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

340 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
of five weeks on the Cilician Plain I several times
found myself in Mersina from choice. There I discovered
an hotel, so called, a simple stone-floored
building, primitive in its appointments—they placed
Danish butter on the table in its large tin—but the
company was ever cosmopolitan and interesting. And
the dining-room overlooked the Mediterranean, which
splashed gently against the wall of a little terrace
to which the windows of the room opened ; and on
this terrace at evening the romance and glamour of
sea and a land eastern, and also of the hot
a classic
south, always made themselves felt. In these surroundings
one sometimes saw Germans as men not
yet in possession, but confident of inheriting, and
already projecting and executing improvements in
the estate.
By lingering in a busy market-place a visitor may,
I always think, learn more about the town and district
in a little time than by any other way of
seeing and hearing. Counting myself a connoisseur
of such scenes, I therefore went early into the
market-place of Mersina, and found it surprisingly
interesting although the town is of such recent origin.
The whole of the Near East is a region of many
races, but nowhere do they appear in such variety as
on the Levant coast. On this hot seaboard one may
get his daily bread and olives, and seasonable fish
and fruit, with little effort, so men of every race of
Western Asia and Northern Africa and Southern
Europe seem to drift hither and be at home. They
live and move and ply their callings without any
sense of being strangers, and seem to become at
once a part of the normal population.
I saw this market-place at Mersina in white sunlight,
filled with a crowd in coloured garments.
Vendors stood or sat beside their stalls, heaps of
goods were upon the ground, and buyers and loungers
filled all spaces, Turks and Armenians one saw, and
a Circassian and Kurd here and there, but these were
the few ; the greater number were Greeks—of main-