ioo SPORT AND TRAVEL 



host was most hospitable, and soon provided us with 

 a meal of hard-boiled eggs and thin sheets of unleav- 

 ened bread, made, I should think, by compressing the 

 kneaded dough between two hot sheets of iron. He 

 also brought us some home-made syrup of grapes, and 

 prepared us coffee in the Turkish style from beans, 

 which were roasted and crushed before our eyes. The 

 carpet on which we sat had been made, he told us, in 

 the village, and was the only home-made article I saw, 

 that was not of the most primitive description ; and 

 indeed wherever I have travelled in Asia Minor, put- 

 ting aside the beautiful carpets which are made in 

 Ouchak and elsewhere, I have been struck with the 

 conservatism of the people in their arts and handi- 

 crafts. Their wooden ploughs, their houses, their cart- 

 wheels, made of a solid sphere of wood, the materials 

 of which their clothes are made, the entire surround- 

 ings, in fact, of their daily lives, are to-day exactly what 

 they must have been a thousand years ago. The art 

 of carpet-making has not been evolved under Turkish 

 rule, but is a survival from pre-Turkish times. Rail- 

 ways are to-day creeping eastwards through Asia 

 Minor, but they have but little civilising influence on 

 the lives of the people of the country, whose old world 

 ploughs and carts are often to be seen in the imme- 

 diate proximity of that triumph of human mechanical 

 skill, a modern locomotive engine. The station-mas- 

 ters, telegraph clerks, and indeed all the employes on 

 the railway lines are Greeks, a people who are as in- 



