acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

440 ACEOSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
Adana outbreak, one of the worst massacres in the
country. Few indeed of the Armenian portion of
its inhabitants had escaped. These flimsy new shops
with their somnolent Moslem shopkeepers and flyblown
goods represented one of the changes produced
by massacre—the dispossession of a race apt in the
competition of trade by another more apt in the
competition of killing.
While I looked thus from my window a stringed
instrument began to play, and with that I went out
into the street to see and listen. In the green shade
of a trellised vine the stools of the village cafe stood
round a rough stone fountain, and there were seated
Mustapha and Mehmet, village gossips, and tired
soldiers, while an old blind minstrel played and sang.
He sang one of those tuneless Turkish songs which
are the very negation of music in Western ears.
But his listeners were pleased with him and themselves,
and drank coffee, and rolled and smoked
cigarettes incessantly, and laughed and talked, and
seemed to think that on this eastern slope of Amanus
the world went very well indeed.