acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

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334 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
must have perished. Nor had this been done without
loss of life among themselves. A busy, pathetic figure
in the College work was my host's widowed daughter,
whose husband, a young American not long entered
on his missionary career, had sacrificed his life in the
great massacre at Adana.
With some experience of Turkish towns, I had
not expected to find in Tarsus much that would remind
of former greatness ; but I had hoped to detect
at least the elusive consciousness of other days. Of
Arab Tarsus, for one thing, I had somehow always
understood that the walls and the " Gate of Holy
War " survived ; and most Ottoman cities preserve
traces of the Seljuks. But Tarsus— to its loss, it
seems—had never been ruled by Seljuks. It had
seen Greek and Roman rulers— Alexander for one
and Mark Antony for another, as all men know,
had been a great city under Haroun el Rashid, had
witnessed the quarrels of Crusading chiefs and the
fluctuations of Lesser Armenia ; but for all, its varied
and romantic history shows little indeed now to help
the imagination. Of the walls, of the Gate of Holy
War, on the base name of which I had built a whole
history of Arab dominion, not a trace remains. " St
Paul's Gate," claiming survival from the apostle's
times, may be old, but does not convince that its age
is quite so great as that. There is a St Paul's Well,
however, which perhaps may belong to that Roman
Tarsus which was " no mean city."
The great stone
bridge over the Cydnus is said to be Armenian. For
the rest, for existing Tarsus, the truth makes it a
very commonplace Turkish town of 20,000 souls, with
cotton-mills, and small, squalid shops and dwellings.
It has not even a typical Eastern bazaar worthy the
name. The historical stock-in-trade of modern Tarsus
is no more than its name, or, better still, three names
—Tarsus, St Paul, and Cydnus ; attach these to any
other Turkish town, and it would do as well.
But out of sight is a city of which many fragments
appear now and then, all bespeaking its ancient