aking the toe, of the giant you will get
off with prose.

I embarked on the eleventh, in the afternoon, in a small Turkish
vessel, and a fresh north wind carried us in four hours to the rocky
promontory of Posidonium (today Bosburun, the point of ice), a
distance of eight miles. Here the sea was running very high, and our
_reis_, or helmsman, who was squatting on the high and delicately
carved stern of the ship, was beginning to chant his _Allah
ekber_--God is merciful--when the wind died down so completely toward
dusk that we did not reach Mudania before eight o'clock next morning.

The horses were soon ready, and up to Brussa I passed through a
country that was doubly charming after the lonesomeness of Roumelia,
which had been all I had seen for six months. Everything is under
cultivation, planted less with corn than with vines and mulberry
trees. The latter, which serve as food for the silkworms, are trimmed
low like bushes, with the crowns cut off, as we do with willows. Their
large bright green leaves cover the fields far and wide. The olive
trees grow here in groves of no mean size, but they have to be
planted. The whole richly cultivated country reminds one of Lombardy,
especially of the hilly landscape near Verona The distant view is as
magnificent as the foreground is lovely. On one side you see the Sea
of Marmora and the Princess Islands, and on the other the glorious
Mount Olympus, whose snow-clad peak rises above a broad girdle of
clouds. The flowering vineyards filled the air with rich scent,
assisted by caprifolium blossoms in luxuriant growth, and a yellow
flower the name of which I do not know.

When we had crossed a ridge of low hills, we saw Brussa stretched out
before us in a green plain at the foot of Mt. Olympus. It is indeed
difficult to decide which one of the two capitals of the Ottoman
rulers is more beautifully situated, the oldest or the newest, Brussa
or Constantinople. Here the sea and there the land bewitches you. One
landscape is executed in blue, the other in green. Relieved against
the steep and wooded slopes of Mt. Olympus, you see more than one
hundred white minarets and vaulted domes.

The mountain rises to the regions of almost perpetual snow, and
supplies the inhabitants of Brussa with wood to warm themselves in
winter and with ice for their sherbet in summer. A river, called
Lotos, winds its course through rich meadows and fields of mulberry
trees, where giant nut trees with d