acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

240 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
ourselves completely. I wished to get to the rock,
an object in sight not three hundred yards away,
yet for any progress towards it that we made we
might have been caught in a maze. A passage would
end in a door, or a flight of steps leading up to a
dwelling, or descend into the hillside. Nor was there
ever any certainty whether we were on solid ground
or no. More than once I discovered, with the heavy
uncomfortable feeling of serious trespass, that the
whole party, horse and men, had somehow got upon
a stranger's roof At length a woman saw our difficulty,
and voluntarily put us on the right way, and
came a little distance, and watched us till out of
sight to make sure that we should not go wrong
again. She was old, and I oft'ered her baksheesh for
her kindly service ; but she declined the money
pleasantly, having acted out of the goodness of her
heart.
Up a steep winding alley, past masonry that had
the appearance of age, and a fragment of Roman
inscription— as it seemed to be— built into a wall,
we passed under an archway, and then came out
upon an open space at the top of the hill. Men of
the village had gathered here sitting on low stools,
smoking and drinking cofiee in the sunlight of an
afternoon that already had in it more than a touch
of frost. Above them the rock rose like a tower,
pierced with openings near the top, some of which
were closely stuffed with straw and looked as if the
instincts of underground dwellers rebelled against
the fresh air of these upper chambers.
The afternoon had an extraordinary quality of
brilliancy which caused all distant objects to seem
crystalline and much nearer than they really were.
The sky was cloudless save in the north - east,
where a few far -off pearly cirrus hung low above
Topuz Dagh, the sunlight strong, and the dry
rarefied air perfectly still. Amidst these conditions
the massive yellow rock, splashed with contrasting
light and shade on its irregular surface,