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Asia Minor rising in enormous folds up to bloated white clouds that float in slaty reaches of mist. The wind stirs my hair and whispers in my ears; under my face the deck trembles warmly to the throb of the engines. There’s no past and no future, only the drowsy, inexplicable surge of moving towards the sunrise across the rolling world. There’s no opium so sweet as the unguarded sunny sleep on the deck of a boat when it’s after lunch in summer and you don’t know when you are going to arrive nor what port you will land at, when you’ve forgotten east and west and your name and your address and how much money you have in your pocket.
    And then awake again looking up into the shimmering blue sky, thinking of Constant’ and the interallied police strutting about and the bedbugs at the Pera Palace and long lines of ragged people waiting for visas for their passports, and the blue eyes of Russians, blue as the sky in sagged tallow faces; Russians standing at every corner selling papers and kewpie dolls, cigarettes, sugar buns, postcards, paper flowers, jumping jacks and jewelry; and the long-nosed Armenians sitting on squares of matting in the courtyards of falling down palaces, and the Turks from Macedonia sitting quiet under trees round the mosques in Stamboul, and the Greek refugees and the Jewish refugees and the charred streets of burnt-out bazaars; and late one night the onelegged man sobbing into his knotted hands.
    Groggy with sleep and sun I got to my feet. Gulls were circling about the ship. Here the air was clean of misery and refugees and armies and police and passport officers. The Russian soldiers in the bow of the boat looked very happy. It was like looking down into a pit full of bear cubs. In their cramped quarters they played and wrestled and rolled each other about, big clumsy towheaded men in dirty tunics belted tight at the waist. They throw each other down with great bearlike swats, pick each other up laughing as if nothing could hurt them, kiss and start sparring again. They are restless like children kept in after school.
    In a corner a bunch of Tatars squat gravely by themselves, broadfaced men with black slits for eyes. They sit motionless looking over the bright plain of the sea; a few of them play cards or cut up their bread in strips to dry it in the sun.
    The captain, a tall man with white Umberto Primo whiskers, has come up gravely beside me and looks down into the hold, making a clucking noise with his tongue—They smell bad, those Russians. They have no officers. What’s the use of sending them back just to make more Bolsheviki? I Alleati son’ pazzi … tutti. They’re crazy, the Allies, all of them. Aren’t there enough Bolsheviki?
    2. Angora
    It was a surprise to find six Turkish army doctors in uniform sitting on the bench in the companionway. They certainly had been nowhere visible when we left Constantinople. They were worried about the Greek cruiser Chilkis that was sinking fishing boats and taking potshots at villages along the coast. They had the set faces of men with their backs to the wall. They treated me with jerky and very cold politeness.
    â€”You Europeans are all hypocrites. When Turkish soldiers get out of hand and kill a few Armenians who are spies and traitors, you roll your eyes and cry massacre, but when the Greeks burn defenseless villages and murder poor fishermen it’s making the world safe for democracy.
    â€”I’m not a European, I’m an American.
    â€”We believed your Meester Veelson.… All we want is to be left alone and reorganize our country in peace. If you believed in the rights of small nations why did you let the British set the Greeks on us? You think the Turk is an old man and sick, smoking a narghile. Perhaps we are old men and sick men, but originally we were nomads. We are sober and understand how to fight. If necessary we will become nomads again. If the Allies drive us out of