Altogether, I managed to have a very decent time of it. My pill of learning the most of the language in the least possible time was so ingeniously sugared that the business was one prolonged picnic. In fact, living in a _khan_, as I did at first, is nothing but camping. They're all about the same, you know. You can see the model any day over in Stamboul--a rambling stack of galleries round a court of cattle and wheels, and big bare rooms where twenty people could live. They often do, too. You spread your own bedding on the wooden divan surrounding two or three sides of the room, and your servant cooks for you in a series of little charcoal pits under the huge chimney. It's rather amusing for a while, if you're not too fussy about smells and crawling things. I suppose I must have been, for the _Mudir_ eventually persuaded me to rent a house from an absentee rose-growing pasha. It was about the only wooden one in the place--a huge rattlety-bang old affair that stood on the edge of the bluff, a little apart from the town. It leaked so villainously that I had to sit under an umbrella every time there was a shower, but the view and the garden made up for it. I used to prowl around the country a good deal, though. Everything was so strange to me--the faces, the costumes, the curious implements, the hairy black buffaloes, the fat-tailed sheep with their dabs of red dye, the solid-wheeled carts that lamented more loudly, if less continuously, than the water-wheels, the piratish-looking caravels strutting up and down the Gulf under a balloon of a mainsail. I took them by the day, sometimes, to go fishing or exploring. All of which must have been highly incomprehensible to my astonished neighbors. I believe my man had to invent some legend of a doctor and a cure to account for so eccentric a master. It was only when I came more and more to spend my days among the cypresses on the edge of the beach that I became less an object of suspicion; for while a Turk is little of a sportsman and less of mere aimless sight-seer, he likes nothing better than sitting philosophically under the greenwood tree.