Page:Englishwomaninan00elli.pdf/177

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

Turkish he is an orator. Here, then, are the face and the expression of a conqueror, but the voice is the voice of a cultured man of the world.

Next morning Mustapha Kemal sent his car (a present from the people of Smyrna) that I might be driven to his villa at Tchan-Kaya, almost twenty minutes' ride from Angora. This is the best road in the district; the others are just rows of holes and bumps on which someone has thrown some cobbles and, incidentally, some houses! Though Tchan-Kaya was given to him by the people, he has handed over this property to the army, and lives there as their guest—surely an unusual, but charming, example of brotherly love. I wonder whether the Pasha will do the same in the house I saw, also presented to him, at Broussa, which an historian and architect came over from Constantinople to redecorate.

From Tchan-Kaya one obtains an excellent bird's-eye view of Angora; whether at midday or at sunset, sprinkled with, or buried in, snow, always picturesque. We get a few hours of sunshine every morning until quite late in the year; enough to welcome the beautiful white minarets, so marked a feature in every Eastern scene, whence the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer five times a day. Dotted over the hills of Tchan-Kaya we see the Pasha's special guard—the Lasz—wearing a uniform our ladies would be delighted, I think, to copy in velvet or satin. The fashion, however, would only suit those who, like these soldiers from Trébizonde, are tall, slight, and well-built.

At the door one gladly accepts the vociferous greeting of a fine brown retriever. Then comes the aide-de-camp, Mahmoud Bey, always ready with a gay smile for his chief's guests, who leads one straight into the house.

The kiosk is large and well-built. In the combination of hall and anteroom a white marble fountain is always playing. One of the two pianos in Angora stands in a corner; these are both, alas, more ornamental than useful, made, one could guess,