Excerpt from A Ride Through Western Asia One day, accompanied by an old Jew interpreter, I found my way to the great rambling police office in Stambul, where these tezkerehs are issued. Here after much struggling and pushing in one dirty room after another, each one full of Mussulman clerks writing on their laps and surrounded by clamouring Turks and Armenians, I managed to get a document with some Turkish characters on it, and the Sultan's signature lithographed at the top. This, the Jew told me, would take me to Angora, to which place there is a single line, and one train daily, the pace of which never exceeds sixteen miles an hour. Still it is quicker than either riding or driving. The chances were that I should be sent straight back to Constantinople from Angora, but I thought the attempt at getting further into the country from there worth making. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.