These people are democratic, you know, to a degree of which we haven't an idea--for all our declaration of independence. Yet there are certain invisible lines which are sure to trip a foreigner up and which made me mighty uncertain what to do with the governor of a _mudirlik_ and the leader of a caravan. But the latter proceeded to look out for that. Such a jolly good fellow you never saw in your life, with his stories, and the way he had with him, and the things he had been up to. It turned out that he knew western Asia a good deal better than I know western Europe. Tabriz, Tashkend, Samarkand, Cabul, to say nothing of Mecca and Cairo and Tripoli--such names dropped from him as Liverpool and Marseilles might from me. Where camel goes he had been, and for him Asia Minor was no more than a sort of ironic tongue stuck out at Europe by the huge continent behind. It gave me my first inkling of how this empire is tied up. It seems to hang so loosely together, without the rails and wires that put Sitka and St. Augustine in easier reach of each other than Constantinople and Bagdad. I began to learn then that wires and rails are not everything--that there are stronger nets than those. Altogether it was a momentous occasion. To sit there in that queer old house, in a wild hill village of the Marmora, and speak familiarly with that camel-driver who carried the secrets of Asia in his pocket--it brought me nearer than I had ever dreamed to that life which was always so tantalizing me by my inability to get at it. When the man finally withdrew, and the _Mudir_ after him, I was in no mood to go to bed. They had opened to me their ancient world, with all its poetry and mystery, and I did not want to lose it again. I could see it stretching dimly beyond the windows where the water-wheels went moaning under the moon. I went out into it. The night was--you have no idea what those nights could be. They had such a way of swallowing up the squalidness of things, and bringing out all their melancholy magic. The rose season was at its height, and the air was one perfume from the hidden gardens. Then the nightingales were at that heart-breaking music of theirs. And the moon! It wasn't one of those glaring round things, like a coachman's button or a butcher's boy with the mumps, by which young ladies are commonly put into spasms; but it was an old wasted one, with such a light!