I was resolved to find him, however, and so spent some days tramping up and down the terrible alleys and streets of Stamboul, inquiring at every Muhammadan hotel and doing the round of all the caravanserais I could find, asking for the Shaikh ul Islām of Sina, a question that evoked considerable merriment among most of the Turks to whom I succeeded in communicating my meaning in the few Turkish words I knew. As is always the case in Turkey, inquisitiveness was the greatest impediment and nuisance. Anyone of whom I asked would put a string of questions as to why and wherefore, and who and whence, which my ignorance fortunately prevented my answering. At last, however, by dint of getting a list of caravanserais, and taking them one by one, I found the Shaikh’s habitation. This particular serai was like most in Constantinople, a two-storeyed building of tiny, windowless rooms round a courtyard, amid which a small house was erected, equally containing separate cells. The first floor had a gallery running round it upon which the rooms opened, and I found my man in a corner cell, or rather found where he was when at home. All this time the weather was indescribably awful, daily blizzards, rainstorms and blizzards again, freezing hurricanes from the plains and uplands to the north and west; and I wondered how this native of sunny Persia, a stranger to these terrible days of darkness, could live, and what is more, raise the courage to go forth into the mire and filth of Constantinople streets. His servant I saw, a Kurd of Sina, who spoke a little Persian, and who was so astounded at hearing a European speak Kurdish that he quite lost his tongue. However, we made an appointment, and two days after saw me once more facing a blinding snowstorm to shuffle for half an hour from Pera through Galata across the Golden Horn, now a funnel where all the winds of all the ice on earth seemed to blow into Stamboul. Crawling over the heaps of snow in the caravanserai courtyard, where not a soul was visible, I ascended the rickety staircase and knocked at the low door at the gallery end. Some one shouted in Persian “Kī a” (“Who is it?”), and getting a reply in the same language, told me to walk in--which I did.