The next two hours find me engaged in the laborious task of climbing a mere bridle-path up the rugged mountain slope, along which no wheeled vehicle has certainly ever been before.  There is in some places barely room for pack animals to pass between the masses of rocks, and at others, but a narrow ledge between a perpendicular rock and a sheer precipice.  The steepest portions are worn into rude stone stairways by the feet of pack animals that toiled over this pass just as they toiled before America was discovered and have been toiling ever since; and for hundreds of yards at a stretch I am compelled to push the bicycle ahead, rear wheel aloft, in the well-known manner of going up-stairs.  While climbing up a rather awkward place, I meet a lone Arab youth, leading his horse by the bridle, and come near causing a serious accident.  It was at the turning of a sharp corner that I met this swarthy-faced youth face to face, and the sudden appearance of what both he and the horse thought was a being from a far more distant sphere than the western half of our own so frightened them both that I expected every minute to see them go toppling over the precipice.  Reassuring the boy by speaking a word or two of Turkish, and seeing the impossibility of either passing him or of his horse being able to turn around, I turn about and retreat a short distance, to where there is more room.  He is not quite assured of my terrestrial character even yet; he is too frightened to speak, and he trembles visibly as he goes past, greeting me with a leer of mingled fear and suspicion; at the same time making a brave but very sickly effort to ward off any evil designs I might be meditating against him by a pitiful propitiatory smile which will haunt my memory for weeks; though I hope by plenty of exercise to escape an attack of the nightmare.

This is the worst mountain climbing I have done with a bicycle; all the way across the Rockies there is nothing approaching this pass for steepness; although on foot or horseback it would of course not appear so formidable.  When part way up, a bank of low hanging clouds come rolling down to meet me, enveloping the mountain in fog, and bringing on a disagreeable drizzle which scarcely improves the situation.

Five miles from the bottom of the pass and three hours from Geiveh I reach a small postaya-khan, occupied by one zaptieh and the station-keeper, where I halt for a half hour and get the zaptieh to brew me a cup of coffee, feeling the need of a, little refreshment after the stiff tugging of the last two hours.  Coffee is the only refreshment obtainable here, and, though the weather looks anything but propitious, I push ahead toward a regular roadside khan, which I am told I shall come to at the distance of another hour — the natives of Asia Minor know nothing of miles or kilometres, but reckon the distance from point to point by the number of hours it usually takes to go on horseback.  Reaching this khan at three