has been left behind, and I am again traversing a narrow, rocky pass between the hills.  Among the rocks I discover a small open cave, in which I determine to spend the night.  The region is elevated, and the night air chilly; so I gather together some dry weeds and rubbish and kindle a fire.  With something to cook and eat, and a pair of blankets, I could have spent a reasonably comfortable night; but a pocketful of pears has to suffice for supper, and when the unsubstantial fuel is burned away, my airy chamber on the bleak mountain-side and the thin cambric tent affords little protection from the insinuating chilliness of the night air.  Variety is said to be the spice of life; no doubt it is, under certain conditions, but I think it all depends on the conditions whether it is spicy or not spicy.  For instance, the vicissitudes of fortune that favor me with bread and sour milk for dinner, a few pears for supper, and a wakeful night of shivering discomfort in a cave, as the reward of wading fifty irrigating ditches and traversing thirty miles of ditch-bedevilled donkey-trails during the day, may look spicy, and even romantic, from a distance; but when one wakes up in a cold shiver about 1.30A.M. and realizes that several hours of wretchedness are before him, his waking thoughts are apt to be anything but thoughts complimentary of the spiciness of the situation.  Inshallah! fortune will favor me with better dues to-morrow; and if not to-morrow, then the next day, or the next.

CHAPTER XVII.

THROUGH ERZINGAN AND ERZEROUM.

For mile after mile, on the following morning, my route leads through broad areas strewn with bowlders and masses of rock that appear to have been brought down from the adjacent mountains by the annual spring floods, caused by the melting winter’s snows; scattering wheat-fields are observed here and there on the higher patches of ground, which look like small yellow oases amid the desert-like area of loose rocks surrounding them.  Squads of diminutive donkeys are seen picking their weary way through the bowlders, toiling from the isolated fields to the village threshing-floors beneath small mountains of wheat-sheaves.  Sometimes the donkeys themselves are invisible below the general level of the bowlders, and nothing is to be seen but the head and shoulders of a man, persuading before him several animated heaps of straw.  Small lakes of accumulated surface-water are passed in depressions having no outlet; thickets and bulrushes are growing around the edges, and the surfaces of some are fairly black with multitudes of wild-ducks.  Soon I reach an Armenian village; after satisfying the popular curiosity by riding around their threshing-floor, they bring me some excellent wheat-bread, thick, oval cakes that are quite acceptable, compared with the wafer-like sheets of the past several days, and five boiled eggs.  The people providing these will