acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

18 ACKOSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
a dead camel. And then it was a little group coming
down the slope which caught her eye. She looked
at it with extreme curiosity that presently passed
into something else and led me to look more closely
myself. I saw a portly able-bodied Turk riding comfortably
on a donkey and smoking, while his wife,
carrying two young children, trudged heavily in the
mud behind, and now and then managed to get in a
blow at the animal by way of driving it. As an
American girl my companion thought she would never
see a more astonishing sight anywhere.
In going up to the pass the road seldom hid itself
in hollows ; it therefore commanded wide views. On
the eastern horizon a thin blue line, dotted with blue
blocks like silhouetted buildings, rose gradually out of
the sea ;
and
beyond the extremity of the line were
similar blocks which appeared to be floating. It looked
like a mirage, but was, in fact, the delta of two confluent
rivers known in early times as the Iris and
Lycus. During ages the delta has pushed itself out
some fifteen miles from the mountains and formed a
little triangular plain, dotted now with isolated clumps
of trees. Looking on this low land we beheld, indeed,
the home of a famous legend. For on the farther
side of the plain a small river, now called the Termeh
Su, crosses it after coming from the mountains and
And the Termeh Su was of old the
falls into the sea.
Thermodon, from the mountains of Amazonia, and the
country around it the land of Amazons.
For miles our road climbed steadily, overhanging
the great ravine of the Merd Su ; a ravine so deep,
and whose slopes converge so steeply, that in dull
light the river below looked more distant than the
opposite slope. That bold scarp went up to a massive
rounded summit, and there showed a cap of forest
high above the spur on which we travelled. But its
lower slopes were formless and naked and brown,
except for wandering patches of brushwood and here
and there a thin waterfall hanging like a long wisp of
lace down the surface of rock.