The old men, of whom there were not a few, and who, in spite of their grey beards and wrinkled faces, still looked hale and upright, bore for the most part in their hands the strings of beads, which their fingers moved mechanically to and fro as they repeated to themselves the attributes and titles of Allah, the one God of whom Mahomet is the prophet. Everywhere there were signs of the country being still inhabited by a Mahommedan population. The men in the fields, who drove the ploughs and watched the herds, were all wearers of the turban.

The villages were composed entirely of the square, white-washed houses, with low, overhanging roofs and lattice windows, which are to be seen in every Turkish hamlet For many a long mile I never caught sight of a church, but in every village there was a mosque, if not a minaret Outside the villages you could see the bare, unenclosed Turkish burying-grounds, where the sheep were browsing between the countless tombstones, which lay scattered over the ground, or stood inclined towards each other at every possible angle.

In warmer climes these Moslem graveyards, where the villagers sit smoking upon the tombstones, where the children are playing games, and where the bright-eyed lizards keep popping in and out between the headstones of the dead, always seem to me more cheerful and more homelike, if I may use the word, than the cemeteries of our Christian faith.

Burial grounds of the Mahommedan

But here, in this bare, bleak land and this chill wintry air, the burial-grounds of the Mahommedan villages look the very desolation of desolation. They will scarcely look more desolate in the days, which cannot be far distant, when the Tomaks have left their old homes for new abodes, where they will be surrounded by the people of the Prophet. I was told by a fellow-traveller that, even at present, the Tomaks get on comfortably enough in this part of the country so long as they are in sufficient numbers to form a community of their own in the villages in which they dwell. The difficulties arise as Christians begin to settle in their immediate neighbourhood ; and in nine cases out of ten the cause of quarrel is the presence of pigs.

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