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28 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
The bushes all grow to about the same height, and
there they stop, though to the eye the oak and beech of
the forest. It is a puzzle until you see the cause ; but
even then there is difficulty at first in realising that
the cause is so universal and unfailing in operation.
Pass through these districts and you find goats among
the scrub in thousands, each little flock of fifty or
a hundred in charge of a goatherd and fierce dog
and often, as you go, a sapient bearded head rises
above the bushes, and the animal, standing on its
hind-legs, nibbles oflf the topmost young shoots in
demonstration of how the universal goat controls
the scrub.
Within living memory these areas, or large portions
of them, were covered with heavy forest. Although
the forest has been recklessly felled, nature would
have restored it—has, in fact, begun to do so—but
after the felling came the profitable goat in m3^riad8
and arrested nature's process. As another result, a
land that never had too much rainfall now receives
less ; and much of what it does receive goes off
quickly instead of being retained. To this fact bear
witness washed-out roads, fans of shingle and detritus
spread at the foot of gullies, and many dry watercourses
showing high on their sides the litter of
sudden floods.
I reached the summit of the pass long before the
araha, and found there a little kahveh, a place of
welcome refreshment for man and beast. So I sat on
a bench before it, and took coflee with the kahvehkeeper
while awaiting Achmet, and looked over the
deep valley to the range of Kara Dagh which I was to
cross during the day. Larks were singing in a blue
sky. The fog had melted into thin wisps that rolled
and dissolved while I watched them in the wooded
glens below. The sun was hot, and the air clear and
fresh as spring. Winter seemed far off"—and so it
proved to be. This glorious weather of the Little
Summer into which I had come was to go with me,
almost without break, for more than six hundred miles.