acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

326 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
counted for little. In enviroment—of scene and air
and climate— lay the true secret of their excellences
and defects. Who that has looked curiously at the
hill of Assos, at the sites of Cnidos, Clazomene, Chios,
Rhodes, or any other of the little Greek states of
Asia Minor, does not suspect that situation and
climate gave the inhabitants their intense localism,
their mental and physical activity, their love of the
beautiful, their light intelligence, their quickness of
mood, and also their treachery and guile and fantastic
instability. Sunlight and blue sky and sea they
had always, and soft air and distant glamorous
mountains of mainland and island. They could not
look by day from their houses or familiar haunts
without seeing white sails creeping among warm
purple islands set in a gulf or strait of blue. And
that as a daily sight, one thinks, would of itself
account for much in their character.
Such ideas as these became convictions as I forced
my way amid the myrtle scrub, and knew that I
breathed the same scented air as ancient Greeks
when they marched or camped and slept and kept
watch under the stars in similar myrtle coverts.
But why these thoughts should come so vividly at
this time and m this place I do not know. Perhaps
it was that the native influences of the land were
at work upon me, and that without suspicion I was
falling under their spell.
When I stepped out of the scrub again it was to
the sight of timber being taken to the plain. Horses
were coming briskly down the road, each dragging
two young pine-trees stripped of their branches. The
thin end of each log was slung, one on each side of
the animal, and secured to the collar, and the butts
dragged and bumped heavily upon the road. And
this sight too, I thought, seemed to belong to a
far-ofl"
past.
Though these Cilician hills are not the hills of a
classic land, they are of the same region, and their
flora is the same. The streams were bordered always