High Yemen, with its monsoons and tropical cultivation; the tilted rim
of the Hedjaz, one desert in a desert zone that stretches from the
Sahara to Mongolia; the Mesopotamian rivers, breaking the desert with a
strip of green; the pine-covered mountain terraces of Kurdistan, which
gird in Mesopotamia as the hills of the North-West Frontier of India
gird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as the Pamirs, which feed
Mesopotamia with their snows and send it the soil they cannot keep
themselves; the Anatolian peninsula--an offshoot of Central Europe with
its rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, but nursing a steppe in
its heart more intractable than the Puszta of Hungary; the
coast-lands--Trebizond and Ismid and Smyrna clinging to the Anatolian
mainland and Syria interposing itself between the desert and the sea,
but all, with their vines and olives and sharp contours, keeping true to
the Mediterranean; and then the waterway of narrows and land-locked sea
and narrows again which links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and
the Russian hinterland, and which has not its like in the world.

The cities of Turkey are as various as the climes, with the added
impress of many generations of men: Adrianople, set at a junction of
rivers within the circle of the Thracian downs, a fortress since its
foundation, well chosen for the tombs of the Ottoman conquerors;
Constantinople, capital of empires where races meet but never mix,
mistress of trade routes vital to the existence of vast regions beyond
her horizon--Central Europe trafficking south-eastward overland and
Russia south-westward by sea; Smyrna, the port by which men go up and
down between Anatolia and the Aegean, the foothold on the Asiatic
mainland which the Greeks have never lost; Konia, between the mountain
girdle and the central steppe, where native Anatolia has always stood at
bay, guarding her race and religion against the influences of the
coasts; Aleppo, where, if Turkey were a unity, the centre of Turkey