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—
THE CILICIAN PASS 275
at Chifte guard-house, where it
took to the mountainside
and cHmbed steeply by zigzags for five or six
hundred feet from one level stretch to another. Many
caravans and waggons were coming from the west,
and now^ and then an araha rattling down the gentle
incline. The road went in sunlight and shadow
round the spurs with a white film of dust from
traffic always above it in the distance. Here and
there the higher mountain-peaks showed snow, which
lay in wreaths along the shelves of precipices ; but
grey rock and crag and steep brown slopes, treeless
save for scattered pines and a Lebanon cedar or
two, were the main characteristics of the gorge.
As afternoon wore on and the sun became low and
the air frosty, peaks and snow were coloured in
pink and blue and purple, or faded to a ghostly
white. Sunshine and shadow lay side by side upon
the heights, and the pines grew black. On this
winter evening the Cilician Pass had its own distinctive
character ; but more than anything else it
seemed to retain a consciousness of its past.
One may well believe that no highway in the world
is so old or so crowded with historic memories as
that which goes through the Cilician Pass. Since the
earliest days of history it has been the easiest and
most direct land route between Constantinople and
the south-east, and, in a wider sense, between East
and West. North of this pass the Taurus and Ala
Dagh combine to bar any such passage until the foot
of Argaeus is reached. In the south-west, indeed, are
two other passes across the barrier of Taurus—Dumbelik,
west of Mersina, and Jambozlu, above Selefke
but neither has the directness and easy approaches and
gradients of the Cilician Pass. So it came about that
this has been the one chief way between east and west
and north and south for these regions of Asia Minor.
Doubtless it was used before the dawn of history
Hittites, for one, must have sent their armies through
it—and since then has known the armies of nearly
every race and Power which has appeared in this, the