acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

238 ACROSS ASIA MINOK ON FOOT
in stepped tiers, each plot surrounded by a bank of
earth perhaps a foot in height. The plots were
Hooded in turn, and the grass cut for feed while
green.
I had meant to stay an hour in Nar, but ended by
staying four, which left no time for Cliat, seven or
eight miles beyond. Besides, I had a conviction that
neither Chat nor any other of these cave villages
would equal Nar in interest, and more likely would
be quite inferior ; I would therefore let this place
stand for the others, and be satisfied with what I
had already seen. Another reason also influenced
me, for as one now hanging upon weather signs
I was influenced by trifles. I had wandered into
this high country temerariously, a sense of stolen
pleasure added to its charm, but all the same I
felt like a truant who is ever on the watch against
discovery. So now, as the day wore on, when
I noticed low down in the north-eastern sky a
white cloud, and below it, between cloud and
mountain, a strip of clear green, I recognised the
warning of snow. Chat and Tatlar, and other places
which I had fondly hoped to visit—Soghanli Dare,
with its cliffs hewn into facades sixteen stories in
height, and Melegob, whose villages are altogether
underground in level country and reached by vertical
shafts like coal mines— I decided to leave unvisited.
We went back to Nevshehr, and thence set out for
Urgub the same afternoon, to spend one other day
there before returning to Injesu.
On the way to Urgub, when crossing a low ridge
after leaving the road and taking to a path, a distant
finger-top of rock began to rise slowly over the skyline.
It seemed to be pierced with openings like a
great dove-cot, though Ighsan failed to recognise it
as marking any place known by him. It lay to the
east, somewhat off our road, in country sinking to
the valley under Topuz Dagh. We went towards
it, however, and after an hour and a half of crosscountry
tramping were near enough to see it as a