For forty-five days he moved on, often going as much as ninety miles,
and generally as much as sixty in a day. He slept in filthy inns where
fleas and lice abounded and mosquitoes tormented him. Horses, cows,
buffaloes and sheep would pass through his sleeping-room, and the
stench of the stables nearly poisoned him. Yet he was so ill that
often he could hardly keep his seat on his horse.
He travelled through deep ravines and over high mountain passes and
across vast plains. His head ached till he felt it would split; he
could not eat; fever came on. He shook with ague. Yet his remorseless
Turkish guide, Hassan, dragged him along, because he wanted to get the
journey over and go back home.
At last one day Martyn got rest on damp ground in a hovel, his eyes
and forehead feeling as though a great fire burnt in them. "I was
almost frantic," he wrote. Martyn was, in fact, dying; yet Hassan
compelled him to ride a hundred and seventy miles of mountain track to
Tokat. Here, on October 6th, 1812, he wrote in his journal:
"No horses to be had, I had an unexpected repose. I sat in the orchard
and thought with sweet comfort and peace of my God--in solitude my
Company, my Friend, my Comforter."
It was the last word he was ever to write.
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