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ROCK-HEWN HOUSES 221
mysterious from Topuz Dagh the previous afternoon
it was that so many buildings were merely fronts,
without visible flanks. Houses looking real enough
from the road changed into formless masses of detached
or projecting rock when seen from the side.
The town is built along the foot of the broken cliff,
from which great fragments of rock have fallen and
little spurs of rock project ; and the people's instincts
driving them to live in stone, the opportunities given
by these isolated masses have always been turned to
account. Any block of stone sufiiciently large, any
prominent little spur, has been hollowed out into
rooms. Earlier custom required no attempt to provide
a facade, merely one small opening for entrance,
and perhaps another higher up for ventilation and
light. But with more settled conditions of life, and
the example and advantages of built dwellings continually
before them, cave-dwellers hit upon a compromise.
They would still live like conies, yet
combine with that manner the benefits of more
ordinary dwellings. So they hollowed rooms out of
the solid, and hewed the fronts into forms resembling
those of constructed dwellings ; and because difiiculty
often arose in making the exterior suit the interior,
they next took to building fronts in the usual way.
This compromise is adopted now wherever possible
but many of these dwellings with hewn-out rooms
and fronts of masonry exhibit an awkward junction
between the real and the artificial. The town has
spread beyond the area whex'e solid rock is available,
and buildings there are constructed in the usual way,
but always with a curious memory for the earlier
style.
These Urgub people, indeed, are a race of stonehewers,
with little sympathy for wood, who use stone
in familiar and confident fashion, as their operations
in constructing a small bazaar I passed showed
clearly. A length of road, with an abrupt bank of
virgin rock on one side, and shops already on the
other, was being covered in. The builders made no