CHAPTER XIV
ALI BABA, MY CAÏQUE-TCHI
Our return journey to Constantinople
was uneventful. There we found our
mother, who had decided to spend the
winter in the town and not on the island. I was
not supposed to be well enough yet to resume
my studies seriously. My brother left us shortly
for Europe again.
It would have been a dreary and miserable winter for me, away from my home and the country, separated from my playmates and cooped up in small city rooms, with only buildings to look at on all sides, had it not been for a discovery I made. By accident I stumbled upon a big volume of Byzantine history, a history, till then, practically unknown to me.
As page after page gave forth its treasures, my interest in the people of which it wrote increased, and loneliness and boredom departed, not to return again that winter. After I finished the book it came over me that all these marvellous things I had been reading about had taken place yonder, at Stamboul, half an hour from where I sat. Instantly the
