The Amanus range slopes very abruptly to the plain on the opposite side. It was not till the tenth day after leaving Adana, owing to our delay at Hamidieh, that we reached the gap in the trees at the summit of the pass which gives you one short glimpse of Aintab on the plain below. The muleteers stopped here to throw stones on a cairn beside the track and greeted the town with expressions of endearment and praise.
"Give us a coin for luck, Pashas," they said, "and that no evil may befall us in the place."
We rode straight into the Mission compound at Aintab, and found ourselves at once in a very academic atmosphere. The mission has been established here over sixty years and has a brave show of buildings: a college with five professors, a hospital, an orphanage, a girls' and a boys' boarding school, and a church. The women missionaries are mostly graduates of some American University, and one feels rather behind the times in conversation. Their work fills one with respect: there is no proselytising about it; their idea is to civilise by education.
From Aintab it is two short days' journey to the Euphrates. We were now in a country of rich red soils covered with olive groves and vineyards. Near the villages small sized black and yellow cattle, brought in from the pastures, munched maize straw in the rough enclosures of reed or straw round the houses. The road was lined with signs of primitive cultivation and luxurious crops, evident even in these winter months. But the peasants seemed miserably poor. They were partners mostly of city men, who provided the seed and the stock and took two-thirds of the produce in payment.
The Euphrates is visible a long way ahead as it winds southwards. At first you see it as a streak of light across the plain; then slowly you differentiate the banks, the alluvial shores, the flow of the waters. Then Birejik appears on the opposite side. Its houses, built on a limestone cliff four hundred feet high, rise up above the river tier upon tier; then the black marks on the face of the rock below the houses take on the shape of rock tombs. We descend a long, gentle slope towards the ferry, and find a few buildings on this side also. We wait while great herds of oxen and sheep going to the market at Killis are ferried across in the great, clumsy, flat-bottomed, flat-sided boat, whose one end rises up in a high, curved keel. Then our turn comes, and one by one our horses plunge into thick mud and up the slippery end of the boat, which lets down to form a gangway. Surely they are not going to take us all at once? Our horses get jammed up tighter and tighter at the far end as each animal enters the boat; they begin kicking and biting at one another. We draw our feet out of the stirrups and hunch them up on our horses' necks to be out of harm's way. There is no room now for the horses to kick--they are wedged too tight--but they struggle hard. We are shoved off the mud with long paddles, the cranky old boat lurches and wobbles, and we seem horribly near the water. The stream catches us and we are wafted down to a lower point on the opposite shore. Hassan, his great legs stretched up high and dry on his mule's neck, fumbles in his pouch and brings out the little bit of paper on which he writes down our expenses. He slowly puts on his spectacles and proceeds to write, holding the paper on the top of his thumb, and apparently oblivious of the struggles of his steed to kick the horse who is biting his flank behind. Then the gangway is let down and a terrific pandemonium ensues as each animal strives to get its saddle disentangled from the pack saddle of its neighbour and jump ashore. The hindmost land on the first, who have stuck hopelessly in the mud, the muleteers hit and shout, and we climb slowly on to firmer ground and wind up the steep path to the street at the top.