Just as darkness is beginning to settle down over the landscape I arrive at one of these unpromising-looking clusters, which, it seems, are now peculiar to the country, and not characteristic of any particular race, for the one I arrive at is a purely Turkish village.  After the usual preliminaries of pantomime and binning, I am conducted to a capacious flat roof, the common covering of several dwellings and stables bunched up together.  This roof is as smooth and hard as a native threshing-floor, and well knowing, from recent experiences, the modus operandi of capturing the hearts of these bland and childlike villagers, I mount and straightway secure their universal admiration and applause by riding a few times round the roof.  I obtain a supper of fried eggs and yaort (milk soured with rennet), eating it on the house-top, surrounded by the whole population of the village, on this and adjoining roofs, who watch my every movement with the most intense curiosity.  It is the raggedest audience I have yet been favored with.  There are not over half a dozen decently clad people among them all, and two of these are horsemen, simply remaining over night, like myself.  Everybody has a fearfully flea-bitten appearance, which augurs ill for a refreshing night’s repose.

Here, likewise I am first introduced to a peculiar kind of bread, that I straightway condemn as the most execrable of the many varieties my everchanging experiences bring me in contact with, and which I find myself mentally, and half unconsciously, naming — " blotting-paper ekmek” -a not inappropriate title to convey its appearance to the civilized mind; but the sheets of blotting-paper must be of a wheaten color and in circular sheets about two feet in diameter.  This peculiar kind of bread is, we may suppose, the natural result of a great scarcity of fuel, a handful of tezek, beneath the large, thin sheet-iron griddle, being sufficient to bake many cakes of this bread.  At first I start eating it something like a Shanty town goat would set about consuming a political poster, if it — not the political poster, but the Shanty town goat — had a pair of hands.  This outlandish performance creates no small merriment among the watchful on-lookers, who forthwith initiate me into the mode of eating it a la Turque, which is, to roll it up like a scroll of paper and bite mouthfuls off the end.  I afterwards find this particular variety of ekmek quite handy when seated around a communal bowl of yaort with a dozen natives; instead of taking my turn with the one wooden spoon in common use, I would form pieces of the thin bread into small handleless scoops, and, dipping up the yaort, eat scoop and all.  Besides sparing me from using the same greasy spoon in common with a dozen natives, none of them overly squeamish as regards personal cleanliness, this gave me the appreciable advantage of dipping into the dish as often as I choose, instead of waiting for my regular turn at the wooden spoon.