A young, English-speaking, fanatically devoted Muslim police commandant whom I was brought before in Eleskirt, a military-ringed town 20 miles from the end of my Turkish journey, may have provided a glimpse of what would have awaited me in the present Iran, had I gained permission to cross into it. At the very least he was a good example of the condition a man's soul can take when he refuses to learn about others firsthand but, instead, relies only on his own emotions and on what others tell him.

The commandant's Gestapo-like subordinates found me in a dark tea house on a side street choked with horse-pulled buckboards and shouting schoolboys in dark suits and ties. I was busily working on my notes at the time, which apparently gave them the excuse they needed to raise their voices and show how intimidating they could be. While the others in the room slunk past the grimy windows and back out into the street, the officers fired away with questions like: "Why are you here?" "Why aren't you in a part of Turkey where the tourists go?" "What have you seen?" "What are you writing?" "Whom have you spoken to?"

My explanation that I was walking around the world and that their town simply happened to be along my route seemed to fall upon deaf ears. Even my newspaper clippings, my journals and the signature book failed to make an impression. I was perplexed. Why didn't they want to believe me--or even listen to me, for that matter?

At the police station their commander's words and actions provided me the answer. To my embarrassment, I was brought to his office with a policeman close on either side of me, as if I were a criminal. Before I could sit, his first question was hurled in a mocking voice at me: "You (Americans) think you are first class citizens?"

When I answered yes, he flung my passport at me and then spat, "I think you are fourth-class citizens!"

He continued with much disgust. "Every day I read in the newspapers how your country is all homosexuals and drugs. You are perverts--you think only of money and sex!" Then after a sick laugh came from his muscular chest, he snarled with much delight, "And I think your President Reagan is the biggest pervert of them all."

So that was why his men had refused to listen to me in the tea house. Like their commander, they hated Americans and relished the thought of having a chance to bully one for a while. In all likelihood I was the only American to have stopped in their little domain in years, certainly the most vulnerable and accessible one.

My fears became all the more certain, the more the commander spoke.

"Where is your permission from our government to write about us and take photographs?" he asked. Of course I had no such papers--something I hated to admit, because he had let me know that he had information from his government stating I was a journalist.

He smiled arrogantly and tapped my journals. "I think I will lock you up for a few weeks. How do I know you are not a spy?"

I told him that what he was saying was not only obviously absurd but also potentially embarrassing to both him and his government.

He laughed all the more loudly.

"Every day people write bad things about Turkey. What is one more bad story?" he said angrily. "If I want to, I will lock you in prison for years and not tell anyone! This is Turkey. You are under my power now."

No, I thought sadly to myself, this is not Turkey, not the warm and gentle country of smiles and new friends I'd been walking through the past two months. This was something else, an extension of Khomeini's hell perhaps, but no, not Turkey.

The rest of his profanities and mockeries seemed aimed at provoking me into some angry response or action that would give him a real excuse to toss this "enemy of his beliefs" into a cell to rot. But I remained calm. I had seen for myself, both growing up and in my walking, what my own society was like, and it was nothing like what he had so foolishly let others convince him it was.

I became very much alarmed when the commandant placed me under house arrest, and I realized things were getting seriously out-of-hand, when two guards armed with machine guns marched me away to a separate, isolated concrete building. There they left me alone in the empty, darkened bunker. One of the guards remained stationed outside the front door.

Much later that night, when I found to my amazement that a rear window was open and not being guarded, I took it upon myself to make an escape. My heart pounded, as I wondered if it was just a "set-up," where they were out there in the dark night waiting for me, so they could shoot "an American spy trying to escape." All the same, I decided that I must take my
chances. I slipped out into the freezing blackness, then crawled on my hands and knees away from the jail and made my way out of town to some nearby mountain peaks.

I walked all night, carefully avoiding the roads. When I arrived at Agri, 20 miles away,and on the backside of the mountain range, it was under the grayest clouds I'd seen in my 55 days of walking across Turkey. I was exhausted, injured from a beating at the hands of the police, and feeling sick. But at the same time I was happy: I'd escaped what I'd felt was certain death at the hands of that madman. And to make it all the better, I was now at the end of my walk through Turkey...and more than halfway home.

Steven