acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

Ff:EDING CAMELS 409
wonld do credit to any country. Mustapha, unfamiliar
with such highways, called it at once the " (hm.ir yol,"
or iron road, and complained that it was bad for the
feet. It went between red, gently undulating do^-ns,
planted with lentils, pistachio, vines, and wheat, and
in the west were glimpses of the Araanus mountains
and the lower parallel range of Kurt Dagh. All day
long on leaving Aintab we travelled southward upon
this splendid road, through the same pleasant fruitful
country, in a brilliant atmosphere that was cool,
with three thousand feet of elevation yet filled with
hot sunlic'ht And then as the sun huncf low over
Amanus, and the wheat -fields rippled under the
stroncjer breeze of eveninf>:, we reached Besh Geuz
Ktian (the Khan of Five Eyes) standing among
rolling wheat.
A great and unusual uproar among camels in the
yard took me out at dawn next mominsr to learn the
cause, for the noise they made would have supported
any theory of disaster or battle. They were merely
being fed, however, in a way I had never seen till
now, though I had heard about often. The regular
winter food of camels upon the road is dough made
into balls large as a fist : but now for some reason,
though other food was plentiful, these beasts were
still getting dough, and objected strongly- By the
screaming, ^-oanincr, and snortincf that went on, one
would have said they were hieing tortured. And
torture the process of feeding looked indeed. With
ricfht arm bared to the shoulder, a camel-man would
take a ball of dough from the heap in a great pan
and thrust it down the camel's gullet as far as he
could reach. It was necessarv to get the ball beyond
a certain point, he explained, or the beast would be
unable to swallow it.
The crood road, the t^lorious weather, and limitless
wheat, which grew taller and taller the farther I went
south, continued aU the next dav. Olive orchards
now began to appear on low slopes facing the sun.
The trees were planted in rows, and many looked