acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

a
CONSCRIPTS ON THE ROAD 327
by oleander, and bare stony hillocks and spaces beside
the road were covered with green sprouting tufts
like the blades of young daffodils. At this stage
of its growth I could not name the plant, but in
a few weeks* time was to see it in blossom by
the square mile, and know it then for asphodel.
Somewhere hereabouts, too, the Mediterranean first
became visible. The road went up to a low rise,
and I saw, thirty miles away, a dark-blue space of
sea lit up by a sudden sunburst—for the day was
still cloudy. And then the road, still winding down,
went among occasional olive-trees and fig-trees, and
walnuts and pomegranates, with here and there a
hut and small patches of cultivation.
We came at last to a place where one looks down
on a narrow tongue of the Cilician plain, far below
between hills, with the road winding along it to begin
the ascent. For several miles this distant road was
dotted with groups of figures in white, as if in procession.
To us, coming from the mountains of the
interior, this was a strange and inexplicable sight—
glimpse of new things, a custom of the plain, perhaps
of Armenians going in white to a shrine on one of
their feast-days ; and I went forward confident of
meeting novelty. But when the head of the procession
came up to us we saw how great was our
mistake. Here were no devotees, but a thousand
conscripts of Tarsus and the plain marching to cross
the Taurus for Ulu Kishla and the railway. At their
head was an araha carrying an officer, a mounted
gendarme rode beside him as orderly, and behind
straggled irregular groups of fifties, twenties, tens,
as the fancy took them. They were barefooted,
barelegged, men in thin white cotton " shorts " and
open shirts—the everyday peasant garments of the
hot plain—lightly going to the ice and snow of the
Cilician Pass. Where this great artless company
would find shelter on the way, and how they would
be fed till Bozanti was reached, I could not guess ;
but how they would fare in snow and temperatures