acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

GOATS AND THE SCRUB 27
innocence they had contrived to place themselves
between me and the gate, and maintained their
position there until I called them.
Beyond the khan the road soon began to ascend,
and as it did so the fog thinned, blue sky showed in
the rifts, and in a little while the sun appeared. For
a time we travelled in a narrow valley with scrubcovered
slopes, and a stream in the bottom ; but
presently the valley ended, and the road coiled itself
into long loops ^vith hairpin bends to reach the pass.
There was a steep direct track, going through low
scrub, on the mountain-side, and up this I went in
lightness of heart. Here was travellingf such as I
had often sought and not often found. A wild
land, a climbing mountain-path, sunshine and cool air,
and upon me a strong consciousness of having got
somehow into the world's earlier and more romantic
days. Not a little of my illusion was due to the
sounds that floated through the stillness of this green
mountain-side. For I could hear Achmet crooning a
plaintive Turkish melody to himself, and the jingling
of his ponies ; and with his distant falsetto across the
woods came the measured hollow beating of camelbells
as a caravan slowly wended down from the pass.
And while I stood to listen, a far-away tremulous
piping struck in, not from one point only but from
two—the reed-pipes of goatherd boys, sitting with
their flocks about them on the sunny hillside.
It is a story of that dignified and official body, the
British Levant Consular Service, that a Vice-Consul
began one of his official reports with this surprising
and seemingly irrelev^ant paradox: "The goat is one
of the curses of mankind."
Now although the writer in the fervour of conviction
may have plunged too abruptly into his subject,
yet it would appear that he had the truth of the
matter in him, at least as to parts of Anatolia. No
one can see without surprise and curiosity the oak and
beech scrub which covers so much of the country. It
seems to consist of some unfamiliar dwarf species.