After Gumysh Haneh, the next town on the road to Erzroum is Baiburt, once noted for its inhabitants’ fanaticism and hatred of all Europeans. Poverty, misery, and the visit of the Russians in 1828, have broken their spirit, and humbled them to the dust. Theirs was the last effort of resistance against Paskewitch, but all their fierce fanaticism did not qualify them to cope with the well-drilled Russian troops. “Is it true,” asked Saremba, with a little irony in his tone, of a white-bearded Turk, in the expression of whose hard and furrowed features something of the old spirit was still plainly to be read—“is it true that the _Moskof_ has come as far as this?” “_Geldi!_” (he came) was the old man’s laconic but melancholy reply. At Baiburt the traveller has a foretaste of the impoverished, decayed, half-ruined towns which extend thence through the whole of Asiatic Turkey to the Persian frontier, and to whose deplorable condition Erzroum constitutes the sole exception. Journeying south-east from Baiburt to the latter city, the first day’s march brings the traveller, by the usual caravan road, to no regular halting-place for the night. At Baiburt Dr Wagner parted from his Turkish travelling companions, and proceeded with only Saremba and a horse-guide, “a man of most horrible physiognomy, who professed to be a Turk, but whose long distorted visage, great crooked nose, bushy brows, dingy complexion, puffy turban, and ragged clothes, gave him more the look of a Kourd or Yezidee. The fellow spoke a Turkish,” continues the Doctor, “of which I understood nothing, and my servant, although well acquainted with the language of Stamboul, but little. He was very taciturn, and replied to the questions I occasionally put to him by croaking out inarticulate guttural sounds, something between the cry of a screech-owl and the snarl of a jackal. Then he twisted his ugly face so strangely, and grinned and ground his teeth in so hyena-like a fashion, that I was reminded of that horrible Texas Bob, whom Charles Sealsfield, in his Cabin-Book, has so graphically sketched.”