Chapter 3: The Letter
I tell you, my friend, I don’t know if I am losing my mind or not. In any case, I want to tell someone, and I couldn’t think of a better person than you—as a record of my experience.
I was down in the Balkan Peninsula recently. They are trying hard to clean up after the war, and I was enjoying the culture. There are old railway lines going every which way, hold overs from the Turkish and Austrian Empires, no doubt, and I found myself rather reveling in the obscurity of some of the little backwater towns.
Anyway, one day I was traveling on a train toward a junction where I could pick up the train running straight down to Istanbul—for I had decided to have done with the region by then—when I came on with one of my terrible headaches.
It had been hot all day, and hea
