And so saying my aunt lovingly passed her arm on my wife's shoulders, in a graceful movement of all-embracing protection. They looked at each other with comprehending love. The girl of New Orleans smiled her grateful appreciation in the eyes of the woman of Turkey. V LIFE ON THE BOSPHORUS It was with real regrets that we left Erenkeuy. A visit in such a congenial atmosphere ends always too soon even if it has extended over two weeks. But I wanted my wife to know our cousins who lived on the Bosphorus, to whom we had already announced our coming, and I wanted her to come in close touch with the different aspects of home life in Turkey, to see the Turks from different angles. So we had to tear ourselves from Erenkeuy, after exchanging repeated promises of seeing each other soon and often in town, promises which--needless to say--were kept faithfully on both sides. In the strict sense of the word our cousins are not really cousins of ours and would not even count as relations in western countries. However, as I said before, family bonds are so strong in Turkey, the clan spirit is so developed, that we call cousins even the nephews of our aunts by marriage. We consider them as such and we are brought up to feel toward them as such. Our cousins live on the European side of the Bosphorus, at Emirghian, about half-way between the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, in one of those old houses built right on the edge of the water. Theirs is one of the few remaining typically Turkish country houses on the Bosphorus, most of the others have either been destroyed by fire, fallen in ruins, or else been replaced by modern structures--villas, apartment houses, warehouses and depots which have, alas, contaminated with their ultra-modern and commercial appearance the otherwise smilingly passive shores of the Bosphorus. Thus this waterway, unique in the world, this natural canal between two seas, which winds its way in graceful curves between the green hills of two continents, offers now the sad spectacle of charred ruins--where a few tumbling walls blackened by fire are all that is left of the beautiful estates which adorned it but a few years ago--with here and there a few pretentious buildings whose showy architecture is a patent proof of the rapidity with which their owners have accumulated wealth during the war and post-war profiteering period. Worst of all, the lower Bosphorus is now bristling with quite a few high apartment houses peopled with chattering and noisy Levantines. Such apartment houses, with their tenants, are as out of place on the wonderful shores of this peerless waterway as the corrugated roofs and asbestos walls of the coal depots and general merchandising warehouses, hastily erected in recent years under the guidance of interested--if inartistic--foreign business men.