"I wish you comfortable sleep, and long lives, effendim!" he said
then, and swung himself out, closing the door behind him with an
air of having honored us, not we him particularly. And after he
had gone we were not at all sure that summary of the situation was
not right.

We lay awake on our cots until long after midnight, hazarding guesses
about him. Whatever else he had done he had thoroughly aroused our
curiosity.

"If you want my opinion that's all he was after anyway!" said Will,
dropping his last cigarette-end on the floor and flattening it with
his slipper.

"Cut the cackle, and let's sleep!"

We fell asleep at last amid the noise of wild carousing; for the
proprietor of the Yeni Khan, although a Turk, and therefore himself
presumably abstemious, was not above dispensing at a price mastika
that the Greeks get drunk on, and the viler raki, with which Georgians,
Circassians, Albanians, and even the less religious Turks woo imagination
or forgetfulness.

There was knife-fighting as well as carousal before dawn, to judge
by the cat-and-dog-fight swearing in and out among the camel pickets
and the wheels of arabas. But that was the business of the men who
fought, and no one interfered.