acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

416 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
Aleppo ; and now Mustapha and his horse went off
to one of the lesser khaus.
By the kindness of the British Consul my earliest
wanderings in Aleppo were in the company of his
kavass, who knew the city like a native. I could
have had no better or more interesting guide than
this man Hector. No one howsoever familiar with
the peoples of the nearer East could have looked upon
Hector and made a confident guess at his blood. His
age might have been sixty. He was dark-skinned,
tall, lean, angular, upright in carriage, precise and
careful in manner. English might have been his
native tongue, influenced perhaps by long residence
in the East—so one guessed—but he spoke five or
six other languages as well, not counting dialects. In
his younger days he had accompanied various travellers
of note in Persia and Kurdistan as interpreter,
and now, full of information and experience, liked
nothing better than to tell of his wanderings. In
dark -blue uniform, with clanking sword, conscious
of his dignity as a British kavass, he walked unswervingly
before me through the crowded streets
and bazaars of Aleppo, and left it to others to get
out of the way. I saw him several times before
leaving the city, and he told me enough of his history
to make his picturesque figure and manner explicable.
His name, he said, had come to him not as a Greek
name but as a Scottish. On his mother's side he was
Persian ; his father, a Scottish wanderer who had
settled in Persia as a merchant nearly seventy years
ago ; and it was this Highland ancestry, and the consciousness
of it and pride in it, which made Hector
all that he was.
Aleppo is built in the shallow valley through which
the Kowaik flows, but the impression given is of a
city in a slight saucer-like depression, rising in the
west to gentle green downs covered with grey stones.
Gardens and orchards flourish beside the Kowaik, but
this is no city of pleasant foliage,—not a vestige of
forest exists within eighty miles,—but a great, compact,