ABSTRACT
The Armenian provided me with an element of distraction amid the boredom of such a voyage, and I was pleased to see that his gaiety, his incessant flow of small talk, his stories and his observations, gave my poor Zeynab an opportunity—so appreciated by the women of those countries—to express her opinions with that flow of nasal and guttural consonants in which I found it hard not only to know what she was talking about, but even to recognise the sounds themselves.
