About two hours from Angora I pass tbrough a swampy upland basin, containing several small lakes, and then emerge into a much less mountainous country, passing several mud villages, the inhabitants of which are a dark-skinned people-Turkoman refugees, I think-who look several degrees less particular about their personal cleanliness than the villagers west of Angora. Their wretched mud hovels would seem to indicate the last degree of poverty, but numerous flocks of goats and herds of buffalo grazing near apparently tell a somewhat different story. The women and children seem mostly engaged in manufacturing cakes of tezek (large flat cakes of buffalo manure mixed with chopped straw, which are "dobbed" on the outer walls to dry; it makes very good fuel, like the "buffalo chips" of the far West), and stacking it up on the house-tops, with provident forethought, for the approaching winter.

Just as darkness is beginning to settle down over the landscape I arrive at one of these unpromising-looking clusters, which, it seems, are now peculiar to the country, and not characteristic of any particular race, for the one I arrive at is a purely Turkish village. After the usual preliminaries of pantomime and binning, I am conducted to a capacious flat roof, the common covering of several dwellings and stables bunched up together. This roof is as smooth and hard as a native threshing-floor, and well knowing, from recent experiences, the modus operandi of capturing the hearts of these bland and childlike villagers, I mount and straightway secure their universal admiration and applause by riding a few times round the roof.

I obtain a supper of fried eggs and yaort (milk soured with rennet), eating it on the house-top, surrounded by the whole population of the village, on this and adjoining roofs, who watch my every movement with the most intense curiosity. It is the raggedest audience I have yet been favored with. There are not over half a dozen decently clad people among them all, and two of these are horsemen, simply remaining over night, like myself. Everybody has a fearfully flea- bitten appearance, which augurs ill for a refreshing night's repose.

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Adapted from Thomas Stevens, Around the World on a Bicycle