crossed the dry bed of the river and prepared for the hill in front
of us. Suddenly Mike's horse plunged into a bog. The poor beast sprawled
in the treacherous green up to its stomach, and, thinking its last hour
had come, groaned loudly. Mike threw himself from the saddle, and with
great effort at last extracted his horse, which emerged trembling and
dripping with slime. Mike grinned ruefully.

"I orter remembered," he admitted. "Sirdar, 'e get in dere one day
'imself."

This day's riding was the worst we had yet experienced. Our horses were
fagged, the road abominable, great stones everywhere on the degenerated
Turkish roads.

The Turkish road is a narrowish path of flat paving-stones laid directly
upon mother earth: but that is the first stage. In the second stage the
paving-stones have begun to turn and lie like slates on a roof; in the
third they have turned completely on edge, like a row of dominoes, and
the horses, stepping delicately between the obstacles, pound the exposed
earth to deep trenches of semi-liquid mud. In the fourth stage the
stones have entirely disappeared, leaving only the trenches which the
horses have formed, so that the path is like a sheet of violently
corrugated iron. Most of the tracks are now between the third and fourth
stages of degeneration. One never knows how far the horse will plunge
his legs into the trenches, for sometimes they are very shallow, and
sometimes the leg is engulfed to the shoulder.

Jan's horse slipped over one domino, went up to the shoulder into a
trench, and off came the rider. Luckily he fell upon a heap of stones,
and not into the mud, but he decided for all that to walk for a bit.

Every now and then one came across traces of the construction of a great
road--white new stone embankments that started out of nothing, and went
to nowhere, and Mike confessed that he had lost the path once more--

"When I come out of dat confounded mod!"

After a hustle across country we found the road, and wished that we had
not, for it was a Turkish track in its most belligerent form.

At last we reached the top and rested awhile. Mike showed us his
revolver.

"He good revolver," he said. "De las' man I shoot he killin' a vooman. I
come. He run away. I tell 'im to stop, but he no stop, so I shoot 'im
leg. 'E try to 'it me wi' a gon."

The man got fourteen years.

We pushed on again, and on the road picked up an overcoat, which later
we were able to restore to its own