acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

230 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
which therefore had been subject to the full effects
of weathering. The outer walls had gone in places,
and one could look into broken chambers as into a
house cut in two, and see winding steps and the
whole arrangement of the interior. Such forlorn cones
were of great size, and seemed to have been the
earliest inhabited and most embellished, for the lower
part was sometimes shaped into an octagon and even
showed signs of having been given an ornamented
base like a column. Other cones w^ere reeded on the
external surface by convex vertical flutings, and over
various doors and windows rough pediments had been
worked. Windows were few, and had the form of
small square openings like embrasures.
There seemed to be an inherent tendency in the
stone to form cones, for on the valley sides were
many tiny pinnacles, each with its hard cap sometimes
no larger than a walnut. It appears that on
the surface of this soft rock blocks of hard stone
had been deposited, or perhaps a thin sheet, which
eventually broke into fragments. Then denudation
and weathering began, and unprotected portions of
the lower rock were removed. The largest cones are
never higher than the level of ground on each side
of the valley, and coloured strata of the valley cliffs
extend from side to side through the cones themselves.
About two miles south of Matyan the valley comes
to an abrupt end. At this point a high columnar
mass of rock, which may be the plug of a volcano, rises
from the edge of the plateau in which the valley is
cut. Around it lies the village of Uch Hissar, whose
huddled flat roofs descend into the hollow and intermingle
with the great cones at the bottom. The
crag is bored with galleries, chambers, and tombs,
and seems to have been a stronghold from the earliest
times. The village dwellings are as much underground
as above, perhaps more so, for they honeycomb
the foot of the rock and the valley-side with their
excavations. Look into one of these stone-built