The Eye of Zeitoon | Page 2

took the fever of the place, although the
stage was pretty nearly set for it and most of the leading actors were
waiting for their cue. No more history was needed than to grind away
forgotten loveliness.
Fred's is the least sweet temper in the universe when the ague grips and

shakes him, and he knows history as some men know the Bible--by
fathoms; he cursed the place conqueror by conqueror, maligning them
for their city's sake, and if Sennacherib, who built the first foundations,
and if Anthony and Cleopatra, Philip of Macedon, Timour-i-lang,
Mahmoud, Ibrahim and all the rest of them could have come and
listened by his bedside they would have heard more personal scandal of
themselves than ever their contemporary chroniclers dared reveal.
All this because he insisted on ignoring the history he knew so well,
and could not be held from bathing in the River Cydnus. Whatever
their indifference to custom, Anthony and Cleopatra knew better than
do that. Alexander the Great, on the other hand, flouted tradition and
set Fred the example, very nearly dying of the ague for his pains, for
those are treacherous, chill waters.
Fred, being a sober man and unlike Alexander of Macedon in several
other ways, throws off fever marvelously, but takes it as some persons
do religion, very severely for a little while. So we carried him and laid
him on a nice white cot in a nice clean room with two beds in it in the
American mission, where they dispense more than royal hospitality to
utter strangers. Will Yerkes had friends there but that made no
difference; Fred was quinined, low-dieted, bathed, comforted and
reproved for swearing by a college-educated nurse, who liked his
principles and disapproved of his professions just as frankly as if he
came from her hometown. (Her name was Van-something-or-other, and
you could lean against the Boston accent--just a little lonely-sounding,
but a very rock of gentle independence, all that long way from home!)
Meanwhile, we rested. That is to say that, after accepting as much
mission hospitality as was decent, considering that every member of
the staff worked fourteen hours a day and had to make up for attention
shown to us by long hours bitten out of night, we loafed about the city.
And Satan still finds mischief.
We called on Fred in the beginning twice a day, morning and evening,
but cut the visits short for the same reason that Monty did not go at all:
when the fever is on him Fred's feelings toward his own sex are simply
blunt bellicose. When they put another patient in the spare bed in his
room we copied Monty, arguing that one male at a time for him to
quarrel with was plenty.
Monty, being Earl of Montdidier and Kirkudbrightshire, and a privy

councilor, was welcome at the consulate at Mersina, twenty miles away.
The consul, like Monty, was an army officer, who played good chess,
so that that was no place, either, for Will Yerkes and me. Will prefers
dime novels, if he must sit still, and there was none. And besides, he
was never what you could call really sedative.
He and I took up quarters at the European hotel--no sweet
abiding-place. There were beetles in the Denmark butter that they
pushed on to the filthy table-cloth in its original one-pound tin; and
there was a Turkish officer in riding pants and red morocco slippers,
back from the Yemen with two or three incurable complaints. He talked
out-of-date Turkish politics in bad French and eked out his ignorance
of table manners with instinctive racial habit.
To avoid him between meals Will and I set out to look at the historic
sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half a day
(for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the Turks have
never cherished monuments that might accentuate their own
decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors that
we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite society
and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of the facts
have teeth, sharp and ready to snap, but visible.
We found a khan at last on the outskirts of the city, almost in sight of
the railway line, that well agreed with our frame of mind. It was none
of the newfangled, underdone affairs that ape hotels, with Greek
managers and as many different prices for one service as there are
grades of credulity, but a genuine two-hundred-year-old Turkish place,
run by a Turk, and named Yeni Khan (which means the new rest house)
in proof that once the world was younger. The man who directed us to
the place called it a kahveh; but that means a place for donkeys and