CHAPTER VIII.

THE SAJUR.

It rained in the Syrian March of 1908 when it did not snow, and wet or

fair it blew a gale. We came to Aleppo in a deluge, wallowed in mud at

Mumbij, found Euphrates swinging in full flood round his mighty curves,

crossed him before a wet gale, recrossed and rode all the way to Aintab

head down to the same laden blast. Sleet and snow, rain and hail spent

themselves in turn on that highland town during four miserable days.

But on the fifth morning the sky was clear. The tracks had hardened

in one fair night, and bush and tree were eager for spring. When we

wheeled on the crest of a low pass for a last look into the sunlit

valley, a far-away frame of dazzling peaks had risen where clouds were

hanging yesterday. Life was sweet once more, and the world seemed good.

The hope of hunters beckoned us ahead. A fortnight ago, while we lay in

camp by Carchemish, a friendly Syrian had promised two things, first,

“black written stones” near a village two hours to the north; second,

“writing like nails,” to be seen on the farther bank of Euphrates over

against the outfall of the Sajur. The first promise had been fulfilled,

and the black stones of Kellekli were put to our credit. The second

promise we were now on our way to prove. A mound called Tell Ahmar

was marked on our maps opposite the mouth of the Sajur, and there we

would look for the Syrian’s “nail-like” writing, which could hardly

mean other than the wedge-shaped script of the Assyrians. Cuneiform

records would be worth the finding on the frontier of the Hatti land.

[Illustration: EUPHRATES FROM THE MOUND OF CARCHEMISH.]

Moreover, there might be quarry on the road. On this first night we

should camp under Tell Bashar, known to historians of the Crusades as

a great mound by the Sajur, whither the Frank lords of Edessa betook

themselves when driven back across Euphrates. When I passed through

Aintab for the first time, fifteen years ago, I found in its bazars

and khans sundry Hittite seals and trinkets, which were said by their

vendors to have been found, one and all, on Tell Bashar. I doubted

their story then, knowing how natives will combine to say that small

antiquities come from the most notable ruin in their district, whatever

its age; but with wider knowledge of Syria I began to believe. Few or

no mounds so large as this was reported to be, have ever been built up

from the level by Franks. Rather as at Aleppo and Hamah and a score of

other places the Crusaders, like the Moslems before and after them,

set their towers on old mounds of the Hittites. It was worth while,

at least, to spend a night in some hamlet near the Tell, and enquire

diligently if such trinkets had indeed been found there by husbandmen

and shepherds, or were hanging yet on the neck-strings of their wives.

I had met with no record of any antiquary’s visit to Tell Bashar, and

the place was reported to us in Birejik and Aintab to be a spot where

a stranger would not be well received. The nearest village was a home

of outlaws with whom the Pasha meant to deal faithfully, _bukra_,

to-morrow, or may be next day, or may be next year. But the outlaw in

Turkey is more often a friend than a foe to wandering sahibs who may

make his peace for him some day, and we rode on. Many laden camels

were in the road--we were still on the bridle path which leads to

Aleppo--and their drivers greeted us in friendly fashion, as glad as we

of the unaccustomed sunlight and new-washed air: but each man carried

his ready gun. Presently our way parted from the main track, and bore

south by east over a deep hill-girt plain to the banks of a little

canal, unwonted sight in Turkey of Asia. Here at least men live who

take thought for the morrow, and in a land of ancient violence, hold

something better than to rob and kill. We sighted a few women, bent

over the wet earth in their daily quest for liquorice root, but no near

villages; and when we halted at noon by a double spring, no one came

near us except two curious herd-boys. The traveller in Turkey, who must

eat most of his bread at noon and night amid the odours of villages and

under the unflinching regard of scornful eyes, remembers with blessing

his rare meals by wayside fountains. There he has no questions to

answer and none to ask. The sunshine is his, and his the best of the

shade. Lolling at his western ease, with no eastern punctilio to bear

in mind, he forgets for a moment those twin spoilsports of the Levant,

suspicion and bakshish.

We had remounted and ridden forward for less than an hour, when the

low eastern range ran out into a second plain and a great mound sprang

out of the flats ahead. Needless to ask if it were Tell Bashar.

Longer, broader, and higher than the acropolis of Carchemish, it had

the same abrupt flat-topped form, and even at our distance could be

seen to rise between the horns of a low crescent of mounds, which kept

the line of some city’s buried wall. We rode over the Sajur by the

high-pitched bridge of Sarambol which has carried the mule-track from

Aleppo to Birejik for centuries; and, having cut across an elbow of the

meandering stream, we recrossed to the village of Bashar, and chose a

camping ground on sodden grass beyond its huts. The sheikh called us

to his upper chamber, and we took coffee amid a gathering throng of

peasants who seemed willing enough to further our desires, but could

muster only a defaced coin or two after a two-hour sitting, and tell us

nothing of Hittite seals. Our hopes sank low. But the evening and the

morning, when shepherds and women are home from the fields, often bring

forth that which the afternoon knows not; and we thought it well to

leave the village to talk us over, while we went on to the site.

Huge the Tell loomed near at hand, as we rode through a green gap

in the outer crescent of mounds, and the climb to its flat summit

proved very steep. All that was to be seen thereon was work of the

Franks--foundation lines of their halls and ramparts, choked cisterns

of their making, and two fragments of towers that had kept their main

entrance on the south side--with nothing of an earlier day unless it

were certain black blocks of basalt, worked here and there into their

masonry. From this height the outer mounds could be seen to enclose

west, south and east a site larger than Carchemish, but alas! ploughed

from end to end, and cleared of all stones, modern or ancient. On

the north the ground falls steeply from the foot of the mound and

stretches flat a hundred yards to the Sajur, whose sinuous reaches

gleamed in the sinking sunlight. The river passes Tell Bashar in

loops and counter-loops, fetching a wide compass to the east before

finding its southward way again, and probably it has shifted its course

continually in the soft, stoneless plain. The little fall of the land

at the northern foot of Tell Bashar may well, therefore, be a forgotten

bank, and the mound have risen, like other early fortresses, from the

water’s very edge.

It was an hour after sunset when the first-fruits of the harvest we

sought appeared at our tent-door. They were two seals of steatite,

gable-shaped and engraved, which had been strung on a woman’s necklace

in the company of modern charms to avert the ‘eye.’ No price was asked,

but what we chose to give. We paid well, and had not time to finish

supper before spoil of the Hittites--their cylinders, their beads,

their seals, gable-shaped, conical, scarabaeoid--flowed in from all

sides, and the source of the Aintab objects was beyond all doubt. So

thick became the throng of vendors at last that the sheikh, attended

by armed satellites, came up to close the market. He was nervous, and

begged we would not sleep. His village, he protested, was bad, and some

months before had fought a pitched battle for its lands, and killed

some Aintablis. The Pasha’s police had come to arrest the slayers, but

been driven off, and the ringleaders, yet at large, had nothing to lose

by an attack on our camp. He, the sheikh, would suffer if a hair of our

heads was touched. We promised to be wary, and he went off, leaving his

guards by the tents.

[Illustration: THE SAJUR VALLEY AT SUNSET FROM TELL BASHAR.]

The night was bitterly cold. The north wind, which had so cheered

our morning hours, did not die at sunset as is its wont, but blew

on through the dark in token that the weather was not yet firm, and

the sodden grass grew crisp under its breath. It was too chill for

stripping, and almost too chill for sleep, and had robbers come at

any hour of that night they would have found one or the other of us

awake. But they came not, and I doubt if any had ever a mind to come.

The peasants shewed us, first and last, as good hospitality as their

poverty allowed, offering again and again their little cups of bitter

coffee half filled in the Arab fashion, and at sunrise they came to the

tents once more asking no higher prices than overnight. Collecting was

too easy a business here to be a sport at all; but the bag consoled us.

When we rode off to the south we had gathered in nearly sixty Hittite

things. Few women in that little village had not hung a cylinder or

a seal on their necklaces to win ease in childbed, and make the milk

sweet in their breasts, and I trust they have found others of equal

virtue to replace those for which two Franks were so ready to pay their

silver.

Records of Shalmaneser II. mention a notable fenced place, situated

on the river _Sagura_ and taken once and again by the Great King on

his forays across Euphrates. He names it, in his long-winded Ninevite

way, Ashur-utir-asbat; but, he says, “the Hatti call it Pitru.” By the

latter name the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty also knew a strong

city of northern Syria, which lay on their way to Carchemish. The site

of Pitru on the Sagura has never been fixed; but no one before us with

Pitru in his mind had seen Tell Bashar, which is by far the largest

ancient site on the Sajur. If Til-Barsip, where Shalmaneser crossed

Euphrates, was indeed at modern Birejik, as Assyriologists believe,

be it noted that Tell Bashar lies on the straightest road from this

point to Halman, or Aleppo, whither the King marched from Pitru in the

year before Christ, 854. That diggers will prove some day that Pitru

and Bashar are one, I make small doubt; but I feel less sure that, as

some of those who study the geography of the old Hebrew world think,

Pitru was also the same town as that Pethor “in Aram in the mountains

of the east”; whence Balak the Moabite called Balaam to curse Israel.

Pethor is said elsewhere to have been of Aram Naharaim, or Mesopotamia;

but the Hebrew scribes were not scientific geographers, and I will

leave another dark saying of theirs concerning Pethor, that it was

“by the river of the land of the children of Balak’s people,” to the

Higher Critics. Nevertheless, if ever there be a plan afoot to dig Tell

Bashar, one might invoke reasonably enough the name of the son of Beor

to open purses which are usually closed to diggers unashamed to beg.

Our second day by the Sajur passed cloudless as the first, and the

land still kept the festival of yesterday. The ride over the treeless

rolling downs would be dreary enough in mirky weather; but on that day

the shallow dales rejoiced in the sun, the brooks laughed as we forded

them, the sheep flecked emerald slopes, and wherever there was tilth,

the young wheat showed an even brighter green. So crystal clear was the

air that the freshly powdered peaks of Amánus stood up boldly in the

west as though ten, instead of sixty miles away, and from every higher

swell of the downs we got a backward view to yet more distant snows on

Taurus. The very packhorses, sorry jades that they were, felt the spur

of spring: they hinnied, squealed, headed off the track to gallantry

and combat, till at last they broke into a frenzy of kicking and

galloping which brought their packs about their heels and their panting

drivers’ fists about their heads. A packhorse, who fancies himself

Pegasus, is the most laughable beast on earth till he begins to scatter

your bedding, your instruments, your garments and your food over a mile

of rock or bog.

Low bluffs of basalt ran for a long distance on our left, in which

quarries of the Hittites will be found some day; for tooled blocks of

their black stone were scattered over both a small mound passed on the

way, and a much larger acropolis which we spied at noon in the trough

of a tributary valley. Tell Khalid is the second site on the Sajur for

size, and must survive from some town known to Assyrian history. In a

hamlet on the farther bank of the stream, which was reached by plunging

through almost too swollen a flood, we were bidden rest and eat by

the Bey, a friendly Mussulman, rich in beautiful brood mares, which

were browsing unshackled with their young on lawn-like pastures; and

during this short stay, the peasants had time to bethink them of three

or four trifles picked up at one time or another on their mound--of a

scarabaeus in paste, two engraved seals, some haematite beads, and,

more welcome than these, a terra-cotta figurine of the Goddess of

Syria, pressing her breasts in the manner of Ishtar.

Well pleased we rode on in the early afternoon to the bridge of the

Sajur at Akjé, where rumour had it we might lodge in a khan. But the

khan proved ruinous, like the bridge, and empty of all but dung and

fleas, since the waggons bound from Aleppo to Mesopotamia have ceased

to pass this way; and we had no choice but to keep on, parted by the

stream from a chain of villages on the left bank, each built on or by

an ancient mound. After an hour and a half we reached a spot marked

on the maps a hamlet, Kubbeh, but in reality a large farmstead with

attendant hovels and a water-mill, owned by a wealthy Aleppine who

lives away till the summer-time. His bailiff, a grave, black-bearded

man, bade us welcome with respectful eyes, and abased himself even to

draw off our shoes. We lay comfortably in the Bey’s chamber, and on the

morrow went our way his debtors. The old feudal families may be extinct

or reduced to shadows in Turkey; but the spirit of feudal dependence

is as strong as ever in the country folk. Instinctively the peasants

gather about a rich man’s dwelling, be he only a tax-farmer--as indeed

were most of the “Deré Beys”; and they would rather be his vassals than

small proprietors on their own lands. Traditions of ancient lawlessness

and present fear of strong men, armed by the law, do something to

keep this habit alive: but its roots lie deeper--deep down in that

immemorial respect of persons which goes in the East with a fixed

belief that they are respected by the Most High.

The third morning broke grey, with a chill wind off the Mesopotamian

desert and a threat of rain; but the weather held fair till we halted

in the village of Dadat at noon. We had kept to the more mountainous

right bank, though, for more than one long stretch, we found no beaten

way. Most villages were seen, to-day as yesterday, on the farther side,

and it would have been easier to have crossed the stream and journeyed

on their linking paths. But the map showed an earlier traveller’s track

on the left bank, while it left the right blank, both of roads and

villages (although we lighted on two as considerable as the largest of

those opposite), and it seemed better to strike out a new route. The

river kept us company, tumbling down a long and gently inclined ladder

of rock, with short reaches of stiller water, in which herons waded,

careless of our passing by: but beyond Dadat we saw it bear away to

north, hugging the hills, and were warned that sheer bluffs would bar

any farther riding by its bank.

It had begun to rain when we struck off over the downs, in hopes to

reach shelter at the village of Chat ere the storm should become

heavy. Two Turkman camps lay on our way, and the elders of the tents,

as soon as persuaded we were no robbers, gave us guidance through a

maze of tortuous sheep-tracks. Cold looked the black booths flapping

in the searching easter, colder the rolling treeless down on which

the wanderers’ lives were led, coldest the scudding wrack in the sky.

All joy of yesterday had forsaken the world, and we hailed the hovels

of Chat as a sailor hails a port. But Chat did not hail us. We were

many men and more horses, and the best shelter was already over-full

of wives and children and cattle, among whom a narrow space was not

very willingly cleared for us. While he burned an armful of thorns in

the chimney, the Headman pointed to the thinning clouds, and protested

another village lay just beyond the hill.

Ready to be persuaded, we went farther to fare worse. Once on the downs

again we met the full fury of the soaking, freezing gale. There was no

pretence of a path, and the dusty hillsides were already become bog and

slime. A horse slid, plunged, and broke his girths, then another and

another; and the dusk came down so fast that only the very last of

the light served us into Avshariyeh, as mean a knot of cabins as one

may see even in Syria. The one guest-house was packed with travellers,

Circassian, Arab and Turk, who had been ferried over Euphrates in

the afternoon; and no man had so much as an empty stable to offer.

It was idle, however, to plead there would be better lodging in some

farther village, for, less than a mile ahead, the Great River barred

our way in the night; and there was but one course open--boldly to

enter the sheikh’s dwelling and occupy till he came in the sacred name

of hospitality, and the more potent name of the Frank. It was a large

stone-built barn, three parts stable, with a small living space raised

and railed, which we took for ourselves without more ado. The women

and children scurried into the dark of the stable end: their old lord

followed us, and accepting the inevitable, began forthwith, Arabwise,

to revolve in his slow mind how the chance might be turned to profit.

He too, it appeared, was a stranger in the land, going in fear of the

Circassian farmers on the royal estate of Mumbij, and he had a likely

son. Here were _Ingliz_ by his hearth, _Ingliz_ who, their escort said,

stood very near to the great Consul in Aleppo. If they spoke for his

boy, would he not be made _kavass_, and, by the custom of generations,

a rock of defence for all his kin in evil-doing as in well?

[Illustration: TELL AHMAR ACROSS EUPHRATES.]

The old man said nothing of this till the morning; but, as his purpose

grew, he waxed more kind, sending one for firewood and another for

milk, and a third to find lodging for our beasts. The air was pungent

with wood-smoke, and so laden with the ammoniac reek of the Augean

stable, that the fumes from the drying garments of a dozen unwashed

men could scarcely offend. A sudden blaze from a fresh tuft of waxy

thorn would light up the depths of the lower barn, and show us for a

moment our room-mates, a steaming throng of buffaloes, oxen, sheep and

goats: but it was not till we wished to sleep in the small hours that

we began to hear the intermittent ruckling of a camel. In the dawn

there he loomed, nearest of all the menagerie, chawing and blowing

forth his froth. Poor prisoned beast! We looked at the single low door.

Nothing of stature within many inches of his could pass that way. How

had he got in, and how could he go out? The old sheikh threw no light

on a problem which he seemed unable to appreciate, and we were left

to suppose his camel had led a cloistered existence ever since he was

found on some fine morning to have grown in the night the little more

that would mean so much.

The morning broke fair, if not fine. Our host, who had opened his heart

at last, took shadowy promises and solid silver with equal zest, and

sent his blessing with us as we rode towards a white bluff honeycombed

with ancient tombs, beyond whose butt a great water gleamed. Hollow

echoes awoke in the cliff, half a dozen eagles flapped from their

eyries, and we beheld Euphrates once more. Three or four mounds broke

the eastern line of horizon, of which the nearest, rising from the

river’s edge, was that Tell Ahmar, where we were to seek the “writing

like nails.”

Euphrates is not passed, however, in one hour or in two. For all our

shouting and firing of guns the two ferry boats lay motionless specks

under the farther bank till almost noonday, and we had ample time to

gaze at the promised land from far. Gradually a little company formed

about us, made up in part of Aleppine passengers, who had come down

in two waggons to the ferry, in part of roamers from the neighbouring

hills, who spied unfamiliar tents. A swarthy Bedawi sauntered up,

seated himself, saluted and said, “I have nothing. With two hundred

piastres I shall buy cattle.” “God give you!” I remarked, “why say you

so to me?” “You have them, and I have not,” he replied simply. He gave

place to the strange figure of a very old man, almost blind, who wore

a silken coat of polychrome patchwork and a green turban, and had the

delicate face and soft beard that one often sees among dervishes. The

company murmured he was mad, but received him reverently, and one who

was sick bowed while the thin lips muttered a prayer or charm over

his head. This patriarch, also, wanted piastres. Allah had shown him

in sleep the hiding-place of a great treasure, and for a little money

the rich _pashas_ might share the secret. Two days later we passed him

digging beside a great boulder a mile down stream, but we had bought no

right to share the gold he should find.

At last we descried twin high-pooped arks crawling upstream under the

farther bank, each towed by a dozen straining men. In an hour they

would cast off, and by grace of bare poles, unwieldy rudders, currents

and eddies, cunningly used, hit our point on the shore or miss it by

a hundred yards, by a quarter of a mile, by more or by less, as Allah

should will. Eight times I have crossed Euphrates in flood, and eight

times failed to see earthly cause why the ferry-boat should ever attain

the farther shore. Once cast off, I have lost all sense of headway, and

seemed to slide down a boiling race, which had the boat at its mercy,

keeping pace at its sides; and thus I have drifted into mid-stream.

Then suddenly there is great shouting and working of the huge tiller

to and fro, and behold the shore itself, rushing to the rescue, crashes

on the keel and the boat heels over with a groan. When I find my feet

again in the swaying bilge, I perceive, amazed, that I have crossed

Euphrates.

[Illustration: A EUPHRATEAN FERRY.]

We landed at the foot of the Tell itself, and climbed it forthwith.

Its flat top proved small and bare of ancient stones; but a few basalt

blocks lay pell-mell at the bottom of a deep cut in its flank, and

on the plain below a faintly outlined horseshoe of walls could be

descried, whose horns touched the river some distance to west and east

of the Tell. Within the western horn lay a few struggling huts, among

which we entered the ferry-master’s, to eat bread and learn what we

might: but for a long while we learned nothing. Those who sat gravely

round the low divan were, in the main, wayfarers like ourselves, come

to take the ferry to-night or to-morrow, and the two or three natives,

who came and went in the house, professed ignorance of all written or

sculptured stones. At last I sent our Syrian servant outside to talk,

for it was plain the peasants would not know what we wanted till they

knew who we were. He went no farther, I believe, than the shady side

of the hut, but in half an hour he re-entered with a man who would

show a stone. We rose and followed scarcely twenty paces, and there,

full in the open, lay a black slab, worn and polished by use as a

seat or stand, but still faintly relieved by two sculptured figures

shod with the peculiar Hittite boot. Bakshish changed hands; whispers

passed round; and the guide remembered another stone, which he said was

“written.”

He led us north-westward out of the village, towards a gap in the long

low mounds which hide the silted ruin of the city wall, and went on

for a hundred yards more to the crown of a low rise. There he stayed,

and, coming up with him, we saw half a dozen fragments of black basalt,

which bore raised Hittite pictographs, and some part of a sculptured

scene in which figured a great gross bull. The finders had broken the

stone, the guide said, but found no gold within. There used to be

another fragment, but where it might be now he knew not. We saw that

the well-preserved pictographs were in the fine style of Carchemish,

and more in number than on any one Hittite monument yet discovered,

and knew that we had not come in vain to Tell Ahmar. To get due record

of the monument, however, would be the work of hours. The sun was

westering, and idlers, who had followed our tracks, spoke of yet other

stones, and especially of “lions, written not thus, but otherwise--like

nailmarks.” To-morrow the camp could come over, but we must see those

lions to-night.

[Illustration: HITTITE INSCRIPTION AT TELL AHMAR.]

The men led us back by the corner of the hamlet, and stopped near the

river bank at a heavy block, on whose upturned face were carved two

winged horses supporting the sacred palm-tree. We did what we could

with camera and pencil, and then followed the guides inland across the

ancient site towards a conspicuous gap in the northern wall-mounds.

Through this, we were told, passed the waggon-track to Urfa, and a

group of tumbled stones half seen beyond the gate raised our hopes.

Nor were they to be disappointed. There lay two great winged lions of

heavy Assyrian style, each inscribed with a long cuneiform text on his

inner flank. The one was complete in all his parts but broken in

two, the other was in one piece, but without his head: when erect, each

had stood nearly ten feet high from claw to crest, looking up the road

towards Nineveh. Their inscriptions are of Shalmaneser the Second,

the Great King of the ninth century B.C. who crossed Euphrates from

Til-Barsip to Carchemish and Pitru.

[Illustration: FALLEN LION OF SHALMANESER II. AT TELL AHMAR.]

Yet another monument was shown to us that evening--a broken _stela_,

representing a king or god, some nine feet high, accepting the homage

of a puny adorer; and three more, beside a score of little objects,

cylinders and seals, both Hittite and Assyrian, we were to see on the

morrow.

We tramped a mile up stream, and were poled across Euphrates again

under the sunset, prize-winners in the lottery of antiquarian

discovery. For we had lighted on no mean city, forgotten by Euphrates.

Though passed seventy years ago by the British navigators of the river,

it had been visited by no western scholar till our lucky star led us

down the Sajur. What city it was and how named, its own cuneiform

inscriptions do not say. Was it that Til Barsip, chief stronghold of

“Ahuni, son of Adini,” which Shalmaneser renamed Kar-Shalman-asharid,

and made a royal residence for himself? Or, if this be placed rightly

by scholars at Birejik, was one of Ahuni’s lesser cities built at Tell

Ahmar? This much is sure--that in Shalmaneser’s day there was a city of

Mesopotamia, facing the Sajur mouth, larger in area than Carchemish,

where both the Hittite and the cuneiform characters were known and

used; and that diggers will search there some day for the bilingual

text which shall unlock the last secrets of the Hittite script.

Dark fell starlit and still by the river. The curious loungers of the

daytime withdrew presently to their caves and huts on the western

hills, and left us to solitary vigil. Even our muleteers, fearful

for their beasts, returned at nightfall to the doubtful shelter of

Avshariyeh, and the heavy silence about us was broken by nothing but

the thunderous splashes, which told of Euphrates at his age-long

Sisyphean task, taking from that bank to add to this. I lay uneasy with

a slight fever caught yesternight, and the strong murmur of the river

troubled my dreams. I seemed to drift helpless by shores that came no

nearer, in a strange company of mitred men with square, curled beards,

and stunt, long-nosed folk with tiptilted shoes. Then, without landing,

I would find myself ashore between winged lions scanning elusive

shifting symbols; but ever, before I read them, I was spirited back

to the stream, and struggling among trousered bowmen to reach a bank

piled with battlements and high, square towers. Suddenly the waters

shrank below the boat, and the archer host rushed past me; and through

a confused noise of battle and stamping hoofs, there rang in my ears

a cry, “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river

Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up that the way of the Kings

of the East might be prepared.” Whereupon I woke to find our mules

trampling about the tents in the dawn, while their drivers bandied loud

words with a knot of Turcomans, who were claiming the grass by the

river bank; and the sun rose on the mean mud walls of Tell Ahmar out of

an empty stream.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.

LTD.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a

predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they

were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation

marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left

unbalanced.

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and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support

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Accidents of an antiquary's life · 第 8 / 8 章