: but everything
has apparently been wrecked. We saw Kilid-Bahr, Chanak-Kaleh, Gallipoli,
Lapsaki in ruins; at the last place I landed, leaving her in the boat,
and walked a little way, but soon went back with the news that there was
not even a bazaar-arch left standing whole, in most parts even the line
of the streets being obliterated, for the place had fallen like a house
of dice, and had then been shaken up and jumbled. Finally we slept in a
forest on the other side of the strait, beyond Gallipoli, taking our few
provisions, and having to wade at some points through morass a foot deep
before we reached dry woodland.

Here, the next morning, I sat alone--for we had slept separated by at
least half a mile--thinking out the question of whither I should go: my
choice would have been to remain either in the region where I was, or to
go Eastward: but the region where I was offered no dwelling that I could
see; and to go any distance Eastward, I needed a ship. Of ships I had
seen during the night only wrecks, nor did I know where to find one in
all these latitudes. I was thus, like her 'Ablaham,' urged Westward.

In order, then, to go Westward, I first went a little further Eastward,
once more entered the Golden Horn, and once more mounted the scorched
Seraglio steps. Here what the wickedness of man had spared, the
wickedness of Nature had destroyed, and the few houses which I had left
standing round the upper part of Pera I now saw low as the rest; also
the house near the Suleimanieh, where we had lived our first days, to
which I went as to a home, I found without a pillar standing; and that
night she slept under the half-roof of a little funeral-kiosk in the
scorched cypress-wood of Eyoub, and I a mile away, at the edge of the
forest where first I saw her.

The next morning, having met, as agreed, at the site of the Prophet's
mosque, we traversed together the valley and cemetery of Kassim by the
quagmires up to Pera, all the landscape having to me a rather twisted
unfamiliar aspect. We had determined to spend the morning in searching
for supplies among the earthquake-ruins of Pera; and as I had decided to
collect sufficient in one day to save us further pains for some time, we
passed a good many hours in this task, I confining myself to the great
white house in the park overlooking Kassim, where I had once slept,
losing myself in the huge obliquities of its floors, roofs and
wall-fragments, she going to the old Mussulm