CHAPTER V.
HOW SEIGNEUR KÉRABAN DISCUSSED HIS JOURNEY, AND HOW HE QUITTED CONSTANTINOPLE.
Turkey in Europe actually comprehends three principal provinces, Roumania (Thrace and Macedonia), Albania, and Thessaly, and a tributary province, Bulgaria. It is only since the treaty of 1878, that the kingdom of Roumania, with the principalities of Servia and Montenegro, have been declared independent, and Austria occupied Bosnia, less the "sanjak" of Novi Bazar.
Seigneur Kéraban, when he made up his mind to follow the littoral of the Black Sea, perceived he would have to proceed by the coasts of Roumelia, Bulgaria, and Roumania to reach the Russian frontier. Thence crossing Bessarabia, the Chersonese, Tauridis, or even the Tcherkess country, over the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, the route would turn southward and eastward by the Euxine to the limit which separates Russia from the Ottoman Empire.
Afterwards, by the littoral of Anatolia to the south of the Black Sea, the most headstrong of Ottomans would reach the Bosphorus at Scutari once again without having paid the newly imposed tax.
In fact, he had to make a journey of six hundred and fifty Turkish "agatchs," which are equal to about two thousand eight hundred kilomètres, or to reckon by the Ottoman league—that is to say, the distance which a horse will ordinarily walk in an hour—the tour embraced a distance of seven hundred leagues, twenty-five to a degree. Now, from the 17th of August to the 30th of September, there are forty-five days; so Kéraban must make fifteen leagues in four-and-twenty hours, if he wished to return by the 30th of September, the last day on which the marriage of Amasia could take place if the conditions of the will
