window, might admit him without vexatious delay. Most of those who were recently guests at German Christmas dinners were served with goose and not with turkey, German Christmas geese being raised in great numbers in Schleswig, Pomerania, and Thuringia, not to mention importations from Rumania, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The German Christmas goose is not just the ordinary barnyard variety. Weeks in advance forcible feeding is employed. Macaroni or noodles dipped in buttermilk are daily crammed down its throat until the day comes when the fatted fowl adorns the Christmas table, surrounded by red or green cabbage, potatoes, and brussels sprouts. ENGLAND RAVELERS who wish to impress their fellows TRAVE with a display of uncommon learning may say with an air of wisdom, when Johnson's Court and Boswell Court in Fleet Street, London, are mentioned: 'Of course you know that these localities were not named after Johnson and his biographer, dear me, no. The former was so named long before Johnson went to live there, and the name of the latter goes back to A PARAGRAPHIC WORLD TOUR Tudor times. It is only a coincidence that the two courts, so closely connected with the great doctor and his friend, should bear their names.' Then, condescendingly: 'It is, however, a very pardonable error to suppose that the courts derived their names from our two eighteenthcentury friends!' T SPAIN RAVELERS in Spain who are privileged to mingle with educated Spaniards will hear many personal anecdotes of General Primo de Rivera, the good-natured, easygoing, and popular dictator who is forever talking of resigning and who never resigns. Some of these narratives go back to General Rivera's Latin Quarter days, when he was a student in Paris. General Rivera himself recalls fondly this period of his life. One story declares that he once presented a cardinal with a portrait of himself as a student - with an étudiante on his knee! - this being the only photograph he then had. The latest anecdote refers to an occasion when he left a Paris gaming club absolutely penniless and acutely depressed. A beggar held out his hand for alms. I have lost everything,' said the young officer tragically. "Then here are a hundred pesetas,' said the beggar. 'Go back, and if 413 you win we will divide!' De Rivera returned and luck quickly favored him. In a few minutes he had won a thousand pesetas, so he left at once, and rushed out to surprise the beggar. But when he presented the five hundred pesetas the beggar began to abuse him, even threatening him with his crutch. The beggar was indignant, that, the young man's luck having 'changed,' he did not play longer and win a fortune! A TURKEY MOST extraordinary mosaic, one of the finest examples of Byzantine art of the fourteenth century, has just been uncovered by workmen engaged in repairing the walls of the little mosque of Kahrie, on the outskirts of Constantinople. The mosaic depicts the death of the Virgin Mary, who lies on her bier surrounded by saints. It had remained hidden under Moslem whitewash for five hundred years. Officials of the revolutionary government at Angora at once ordered the preservation of the mosaic, which will be completely uncovered and remain where it is. Moslems will, therefore, soon worship beneath the shadow of images whose representation has for centuries been forbidden by Moslem religion. ON THE BOULEVARD BONNE NOUVELLE, immediately in front of the offices of Le Matin, traffic is reputed to be very heavy. Americans will find the jam illustrated here mild in comparison to what they are accustomed to at home. The cries of the newsboys, who are issuing from the Matin offices in the centre of this photograph, are familiar to all. TEMPLE OF A FAITH which, due to Mustapha Kemal's efforts, no longer enjoys its old privileged position The Amazing City Clattering Steam Shovels Startle Leisurely Desert Camels in Angora, the Village Which Under Mustapha Kemal Has Become the Capital of the New Turkey T HE platform of the railway station at Haidar Pasha was crowded with platoons of school children. Stiff rows of little round-cheeked, blackeyed boys in tight blue suits and small, round caps, stiff rows of little blackeyed, round-cheeked girls in stiff darkblue middy blouses and long black stockings and stiff black braids, all very solemn. At one side stood a group of important-looking officials in frock coats By Webb Waldron Written Especially for THE LIVING AGE and derby hats, and, every now and then, as another ferry arrived from across the Bosporus, more officials hurried through the station and out upon the platform and there was much bowing, hand-shaking, and tipping of hats. Then a sudden murmur. I craned out of the window of my compartment. Two gentlemen in silk hats and two ladies in very Parisian gowns approached down the long platform. Every official took off his hat. The hand of every boy and girl went up in stiff salute. The four personages came to a pause at the steps of the wagon-lit. More bowing, hand-shaking, saluting. A fat man, darting forward, thrust two immense bouquets into the hands of the two ladies. The four mounted the steps. There was a shout. The locomotive squealed sharply. A cheer swept the length of the platform. The train began to move. A blond young man, evidently my camarade de nuit, entered the compartment, murmuring an apology in French, and swung his suitcase up into the rack. 'Who are these people?' I asked. 'That is the Minister of Public Instruction and his assistant,' was the answer. 'He has been in Europe -- Berlin, Munich, Prague, London, and Amsterdam studying modern methods of education. Now he is on his way back to Angora.' The train glided through the back streets of Haidar Pasha. Suddenly, down between two rows of houses I caught a sparkle of water. The line curved out along the shore. Fresh-ploughed fields, divided by neat fences made of bundles of brush, sloping down to vivid blue sea. A few miles off shore, the soft blue silhouette of the Princes Islands against the low, western sun. Then a village streets of tall, weather-beaten wooden houses with overhanging balconies and latticed shutters, a white minaret in a cluster of black cypresses. Red fields again, a man in a broad blue sash ploughing with a team of three white oxen. A long, high bridge over an intensely green valley, and beyond it a promontory thrusting out into the sea, crowned by an ancient ruin. Another village, a slender minaret twinkling against the crimson sunset, fruit trees in masses of white and pink bloom, mountains far away across Marmora looming vast and pale blue. Public Instruction and his party. A waiter hurried along the corridor with a tray crowded with bottles and glasses. My companion sat in the corner intent on a German novel, Das Fräulein und der Levantiner. Dark drew down. Occasionally the train came to a halt at a village picked out by twinkling lights. Little boys with big breadrings strung on their arms ran along the platform, shouting up at the car windows. The dining car was very gay. Flowers were massed on the table of the two government officials. Flowers wreathed the big portrait of the Ghazi on the wall at the end of the car. In the morning, I peeped through a frosted window at a landscape startlingly changed. The train was running straight into a crimson sunrise up a wide, barren, treeless valley that revealed not a mark of human life from brim to brim. Then, far off on hillside, a moving white patch. What was it? I Hardly had I asked the question when I saw on a distant hillside a huddle of flat-roofed houses with a few slender columns of smoke poised in the frosty dawn. The country grew wilder and rockier. The valley closed in upon us and we curved echoingly through a narrow gap between jagged red walls. The walls fell back suddenly. Far away in the south towered saw-toothed, snow-capped peaks. Then, surprisingly, close to the track, a rectangle of fresh-turned ground. A team of four black oxen dragging a plough which seemed to be made of a long, curved tree limb. Another village, mud houses with flat, thatched roofs, more ploughed fields, and beyond them De Cou, Ewing Galloway IN THE STREETS OF THE NEW TURKEY UNVEILED WOMEN, such as those in the centre of this photograph of the gate of the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, in Constantinople, were seldom seen on the streets in the days of the Sultans. To-day, Turkish women are fast gaining freedom. CONSTANTINOPLE, even before the fall of the Sultan, was rapidly becoming a modern city of trolley cars and tall buildings, because of its close contact with the West. It is Mustapha Kemal's object to develop Angora and other cities of Turkey similarly, though without aping European ideas. barrenness again, miles and miles and miles. 'Do you know why this valley is so bare?' My companion of the night sat opposite me at breakfast. 'It is because this has always been the path of the invaders pouring from Asia into Europe. The Persians came this way when they attacked Greece. The Tartars came this way. The Turks, when they conquered Constantinople. For thousands of years, armies have been marching westward down this valley using up the trees till not a scrap is left and none will grow. You see, the telegraph poles and the fence posts and the railway ties are all made of iron.' 'Is all of Anatolia barren this way?' 'Oh, no! North there,' he pointed, 'just beyond those mountains toward the Black Sea, there are immense forests. Immense. All they want is a railroad to exploit them. Turkey is a very rich country.' A hot sun came up and blazed on the barren plain. ND then, abruptly, an amazing AND thing. Out of the brown, empty desert of turbaned shepherds and thatched mud huts sprang a group of brand-new brick buildings with red-tile roofs. A paved road. A motor truck. A tractor nonchalantly moving across a smooth, fresh-turned field. Had we leaped miraculously from Asia into Iowa? 'It is the Ghazi's farm,' my companion explained. 'He is showing our people just what can be done in farming. 'Your people? I thought you were a German.' 'A German! Why? Because I was reading a German book?' 'And,' I stammered, 'because I thought you looked German.' 'No,' he said simply, 'I am a Turk.' Indeed, I had already discovered in Constantinople that it is not always easy for an outsider to distinguish a Turk from a European. We assume that Turks are all fat, dark, oily. To find them trim and blond is disconcerting. 'Do the people like the Ghazi?' He looked at me, evidently amused a little at the simplicity of my question. In Constantinople, though I had seen Kemal's picture framed, life-size, in banks, bars, hotel lobbies, restaurants, this did not seem by any means to express a universal enthusiasm for the Conqueror. Indeed, I found people almost as wary of comment upon him as Italians are wary of comment to an outsider upon the Ghazi of the West. 'Why shouldn't they like him? He has done everything for the country.' The train rounded a curve of hill. Square before us out of the plain lifted a tall rock crowned by ancient battlements. We clattered over an intricacy of switches into the station of Angora. A band on the platform struck up a martial air. Platoons of school children dressed identically like those on the platform at Haidar Pasha, raised their hands in stiff salute as the Minister of Public Instruction appeared at the window of his compartment. My taxi whirled up a broad new avenue toward the town, huddled half a mile away at the foot of the battlemented acropolis. The lower end of the avenue spanned barren wastes, but its upper reaches were flanked by handsome new brick-and-tile public buildings in the semi-Oriental manner. We swerved sharply across a public square in whose centre rose a massive pedestal which waited evidently to receive a statue of the Ghazi, and came to a halt in front of a hotel. I was led across a courtyard and on through a series of rambling passages which suggested the oriental caravansary of romance. For the next forty-eight hours I was in a continual mood of amazement. Never before had I encountered such a conglomeration of human things. No one knows how old is Angora. A man I met at tea at the American Embassy told me that it had been originally a fortress of the Hittites. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Tartars, Ottoman Turks have in turn possessed it. The citadel wall which THE AMAZING CITY nar dominates the town is an astonishing record of the past. It was built probably four or five hundred years ago, before the advent of artillery, but its materials are an indescribable assemblage of more ancient stone, headless statues, lintels bearing Greek and Latin inscriptions, fragments of friezes, segments of temple columns-woven together with discrimination solely as to their usefulness as stuff for a wall. The old town row, crooked streets of one-story houses, mud, wood, or stone, with a bristle of white minarets white minarets straggles down the westward face of the citadel rock toward the plain. Upon it the modern city, the capital of the new Turkey, is being directly imposed. Business blocks of reinforced concrete thrust ruthlessly athwart this tangle of ancient lanes, destroying as they climb. The handsome concrete Palace of Justice rises inside its scaffolding out of the ruin of an antique mosque and in the debris of excavation I spy a shattered marble column with Latin lettering on its base. 417 In from the desert come caravans of swaying camels which brush against American steam shovels and concrete mixers to pass on to the market place up on the slope of the citadel hill crowded with bartering peasants in their great, rectangular, white-wool ketchés. In the new half-finished streets, spick French limousines wind in and out among tall bullock carts with solid wooden wheels and, drawing up at the curb, disembark women in chic Paris gowns who mingle with women from the mountains in long, tight black trousers, varicolored sashes, and white turbans. This contradictory city, which looks something like a hustling suburban development on the outskirts of Cleveland and something like an Arizona mining camp and a great deal like the Orient, is really an accurate expression of the new Turkey. SLIM WHITE MINARETS and dark cypresses bristle above the narrow streets and one-story houses of the fast growing Anatolian village that to-day presents the appearance of a combination of an Arizona mining camp, a desert town of the East, and a booming American suburb. |