prefers dime novels, if he must sit still, and there was none. And
besides, he was never what you could call really sedative.

He and I took up quarters at the European hotel--no sweet abiding-place.
There were beetles in the Denmark butter that they pushed on to the
filthy table-cloth in its original one-pound tin; and there was a
Turkish officer in riding pants and red morocco slippers, back from
the Yemen with two or three incurable complaints. He talked out-of-date
Turkish politics in bad French and eked out his ignorance of table
manners with instinctive racial habit.

To avoid him between meals Will and I set out to look at the historic
sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half
a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the
Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their
own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors
that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite
society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of
the facts have teeth, sharp and ready to snap, but visible.

We found a khan at last on the outskirts of the city, almost in sight
of the railway line, that well agreed with our frame of mind. It
was none of the newfangled, underdone affairs that ape hotels, with
Greek managers and as many different prices for one service as there
are grades of credulity, but a genuine two-hundred-year-old Turkish
place, run by a Turk, and named Yeni Khan (which means the new rest
house) in proof that once the world was younger. The man who directed
us to the place called it a kahveh; but that means a place for donkeys
and foot-passengers, and when we spoke of it as kahveh to the obadashi--
the elderly youth who corresponds to porter, bell-boy and chambermaid