a small, windowless, unventilated apartment adjoining the buffalo-stall, provides me with quilts, lights a primitive grease-lamp, and retires.  During the evening the entire female population visit my dimly-lighted quarters, to satisfy their feminine curiosity by taking a timid peep at their neighbor’s strange guest and his wonderful araba.  They imagine I am asleep and come on tiptoe part way across the room, craning their necks to obtain a view in the semi-darkness.

An hour’s journey from this village brings me yet again into the West Euphrates Valley.  Just where I enter the valley the river spreads itself over a wide stony bed, coursing along in the form of several comparatively small streams.  There is, of course, no bridge here, and in the chilly, almost frosty, morning I have to disrobe and carry clothes and bicycle across the several channels.  Once across, I find myself on the great Trebizond and Persian caravan route, and in a few minutes am partaking of breakfast at a village thirty-five miles from Erzeroum, where I learn with no little satisfaction that my course follows along the Euphrates Valley, with an artificial wagon-road, the whole distance to the city.  Not far from the village the Euphrates is recrossed on a new stone bridge.  Just beyond the bridge is the camp of a road-engineer’s party, who are putting the finishing touches to the bridge.  A person issues from one of the tents as I approach and begins chattering away at me in French.  The face and voice indicates a female, but the costume consists of jack-boots, tight-fitting broadcloth pantaloons, an ordinary pilot-jacket, and a fez.  Notwithstanding the masculine apparel, however, it turns out not only to be a woman, but a Parisienne, the better half of the Erzeroum road engineer, a Frenchman, who now appears upon the scene.  They are both astonished and delighted at seeing a “velocipede,” a reminder of their own far-off France, on the Persian caravan trail, and they urge me to remain and partake of coffee.

I now encounter the first really great camel caravans, en route to Persia with tea and sugar and general European merchandise; they are all camped for the day alongside the road, and the camels scattered about the neighboring hills in search of giant thistles and other outlandish vegetation, for which the patient ship of the desert entertains a partiality.  Camel caravans travel entirely at night during the summer.  Contrary to what, I think, is a common belief in the Occident, they can endure any amount of cold weather, but are comparatively distressed by the heat; still, this may not characterize all breeds of camels any more than the different breeds of other domesticated animals.  During the summer, when the camels are required to find their own sustenance along the road, a large caravan travels but a wretched eight miles a day, the remainder of the time being occupied in filling his capacious thistle and camel-thorn receptacle; this comes of the scarcity of good grazing