acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

342 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
never more than a mile distant was the railway-
Not a third of the country seemed to be cultivated,
though credited with being the richest district in Asia
Minor, an alluvial plain more than a hundred miles
in length, where soil and water and climate combine
to make the growing of all things possible. Under
present conditions only the choicest and more accessible
portions are tilled, but they produce so much
that a hundred and fifty thousand labourers come
from the surrounding mountains each year for the
harvesting.
On the road were long lines of bullock-carts, camels,
and horses loaded with cotton, which is the chief crop
of the plain, and seems likely to remain so. When it
is remembered that Asia Minor produces, or can produce,
cotton on a belt round the coast from the Sea of
Marmora to Syria and thence on into Mesopotamia,
that in these regions cotton has long been grown, and
that at one time Smyrna was a greater cotton port
than New Orleans, one understands German hopes in
these regions better. Railways are needed, and
roads, and a good port, and irrigation— for which
there is abundance of water,—and the marshes require
draining. Then, indeed, on the Cilician plain there
might be four million souls where now are not an
eighth that number.
These developments would have followed the
Bagdad Railway inevitably, for the plain was recognised
as a district where German capital and
direction could work marvels. Somewhere here, one
is told and well believes, was to have been the
commercial centre of Germanised Asia Minor. The
Caliphate and the outward form of Ottoman sovereignty
would have remained at Constantinople, but
the chief port and headquarters of German activities
and commerce in the Near East would have been in
the happily placed geographical centre of Anatolia
and Syria and Mesopotamia, midway betwixt Constantinople
and Bagdad, somewhere on the Gulf of
Alexandretta. Large schemes were these ! and yet