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To my thinking it was, indeed, time to be off; and I hopped away like the others, in and out among the charred ruins, at one moment catching my heel, at another tearing my skirt and coat. When, panting and breathless, we at last reached comparative safety, I laughingly asked my guide why he had given me no warning. “You could have no idea whether I could run like this at the last moment.”

“His Excellency told me that you were to be treated with the utmost respect,” was the solemn reply!

It was true that the day before I had been informed that it was forbidden to take photographs among the ruins, and I at once closed my Kodak. But in the evening an apology arrived from the Chief of Police.:—“I might photograph, when and where I pleased.”

I can only suppose my guide believed that “Allah would guard me” when the blasting began; at least, whatever was to be my fate, he was ready to share it!

We have been wandering about the muddy streets of the bazaar, immortalised by Pierre Loti. It is here, in these little Turkish booths—the tinker’s, tailor’s, and shoemaker’s, the meat-man’s, the baker’s, and the sweet-seller’s—that the inhabitants of Smyrna must do their shopping to-day. How can we think of Frank Street and its vast European “emporium,” now no more than a smouldering heap of crumbling ruins?