Modern Suverek is a mean town of one-storeyed houses of black stone, inhabited by sedentary Kurds and Armenians, who are, I believe, permanently on bad terms, as these two races always are. There are no streets as we know them; the hovels are clustered together, leaving alleys of a particular filthiness between. The traveller perforce puts up in a ruinous caravanserai which is situated fortunately on the edge of the town, and looks out through its broken doorway to the desert. The people are peculiarly surly and ill-mannered, and despite the size of the place nothing seems to be purchasable. When we arrived it was quite within the nature of things to find all my sugar finished, and so, leaving my room in charge of an aged Arab woman I found cupping herself outside in the courtyard, I set out to explore. My first question to the Armenian who acted as doorkeeper, elicited the fact that there was a shop round the corner. So round the corner I waded through pestilential mire, and found the shop. It was an open booth--the shop of the East--and the stock-in-trade just required three glances to sum it up. There was a small boy playing with a greyhound. Behind, upon a sloping shelf, a bag of stones, called cheese in these parts, where last year’s cheese is a delicacy, and the fresh article scorned. Two bunches of onions and a few boxes of matches completed the emporium. So I took my trousers up one more turn, and set forth among the alleys, displacing Armenian infants from mud-baths, disputing the right of way with armed Kurds, and finally finding myself in a mosque courtyard, where I was promptly accosted by a priest, who asked my religion, and receiving the answer “Islam,” still doubtful, called upon me to repeat the creed, which done to his satisfaction I made use of him as a guide, and with his assistance found a shop similar to the first, where the owner was more enterprising and kept not only sugar--and sold at a fanciful price--but tea and cigarettes. Bread, too, I found, but solely by the priest’s goodwill, for, taking compassion upon this strange Haji, he took me to someone’s house where bread was being cooked in an earth-oven, and procured for me ten flaps for twopence.