acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

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186 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
without it—why then, indeed, His Majesty being
willing, a British Columbian proposed to conduct him
to the summit of the greatest mountain in Asiatic
Turkey, and enable him to look over territory from
the Black Sea to the Mediterranean,
One afternoon I accompanied my host, the American
doctor, to a village among the hills behind Talas.
His professional business over, he asked a boy of
the village if he knew of any " written stones "
for in this region you never know what you may
come upon in the way of ancient inscriptions. The
boy knew of some, and after a stiff climb of four
or five hundred feet among boulders and brambles,
brought us to a hole in the hillside, partly masked
by a large stone. The opening looked like the lair
of a wild beast, and was so low that even the boy
had to crawl to enter. Twenty yards of horizontal
passage, never higher than four feet, brought us to a
chamber which, by the light of matches, proved to be
an abandoned ancient chapel. Perhaps it was twenty
feet in diameter, or a little more, with two small apsidal
chambers opening from it. The ceiling was an
Sand
irregular dome, twelve or fifteen feet in height.
lay deep upon the floor and ledges, evidently due
to disintep'ration of the friable volcanic stone in
which the cave was hewn. But above a ledge, seemingly
the altar, was a projecting surface of plaster, on
which crude paintings of human figures could be discerned—as
grotesque in proportions and artless in the
representation of features as the work of a child. In
this chapel and others like it which abound in Cappadocia,
the rude paintings ever recalled for me the
story of the juggler found juggling before a statue
of the Virgin,—both sorts of artists had offered their
best, and no more could be said.
Instead of returning to Talas by the way we had
come, we continued farther up the valley to see an
Armenian monastery of some note which stands there.
The valley narrowed to a rocky gorge enclosed by
cliffs, with the path and a brawling stream at bottom.