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CHAPTER XXXIII.
Marash—Fanatical Moslems—A hair of Mahomet's beard— Industrious
Armenians—An American school—A German Mission and Hospital
— Leo the Isaurian —The Governor of Marash—On the road to
ZeitCin—Gorge of the Zeitfin Su—The slippery hills— Fighting
expected at Zeitiin — Zeitfm town and scenes — The Jerusalem
battalion—Zeitiin gunsmiths—Deeds of the Zeitilnlis.
Marash is one of those Ottoman cities which lie
out of the usual way of travellers. It stands upon
no great road, and therefore cannot be seen in passing
;
you go to Marash for itself, or do not go at all.
And it has the further disadvantage that you cannot
or do not get to it by wheel ;
you may ride on camel
or horse or ass, or may walk, but no formed roads
come to the city, so vehicles stay away ; they have
been seen in its streets, one hears, but only as rare
sights.
With intercourse limited by these conditions
little is heard of the city in Anatolia, and still less
in the outer world.
And so the traveller who reaches Marash is likely
to be agreeably surprised, for as cities of the interior
go it is larger and cleaner and more pleasant than
many which are better known. It stands on the
steep slope of Akhar Dagh, part of the southern
escarpment of High Asia Minor—the abrupt descent
from the mountains of Albistan and Kurdistan to
the plains of Syria and Mesopotamia. Marash is
built just where the lower slope of the mountain
breaks into hollows and ridges and knolls before
going down into the plain as a glacis. The highest