When therefore, one morning, seated on the deck of the steamer as it entered Samsoon roads, she was told by Mr. Dean that the white path, climbing past the squalid little houses up the mountain side, winding in and out like a ribbon, was the way to old Baghdad, the ancient city of Haroun-al-Raschid and Sinbad the Sailor, she wondered whatever her people, far away at home, would think when they heard she was travelling in these fairy-tale lands. The only real things in her amazing life were John and his father and mother. She looked at John as he sat swinging his brown legs on the side of a box, and wondered that such a morsel of life should drag her across the world into strange and terrible lands. The passage ashore was made in a small boat, and the adventure was a somewhat perilous one, for the frail craft was swept by the waters. They were finally landed on the beach some distance away from the town. Here a small crowd of customs officials and Turkish luggage porters met them; then they were driven along the front of the town in an _arabya_, a native conveyance with curtains for warding off the sun, drawn by one horse in the control of a Turkish driver. And now the irresistible glamour which the East throws over the hearts of all who venture into her domain, entranced the small party as it was driven for some two miles along the edge of a sandy yellow beach into the town of Samsoon. The buildings were low and inelegant; the streets narrow and filled with that accumulation of smells and filth that are to be found in all cities under Ottoman rule. But there was, despite these disadvantages, a definite charm in the little town of forty thousand souls. Samsoon is the one accessible port lying on the fringe of a tableland containing the richest cornfields and tobacco country of the world. The city itself was built at the great gate of the mountains over which the roads wind through the few low passes along that impregnable coast. It was the gate of that great historic highway running through Turkey in Asia, along which all the traffic had rolled for centuries. It was traffic that had scarcely altered in any detail since the day of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid; the sight which met the eyes of Charles Dean and his family was one that had greeted the traveller for the last ten hundred years.