acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

438 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
Aleppo, stands at the edge of the narrow plain extending
from Marash to Autioch, by nature a stretch
of rich land, and at one time densely peopled.
Indeed there is a tradition that from the region
between Antioch and Marash and the Mediterranean
and Aleppo, Alexander drew 100,000 men for his
march on India. Here and there the surface of the
plain is broken by low green artificial mounds said
to mark the sites of ancient towns, and affording
proof of the great earlier population. But much of
this lower part of the plain, watered by the Kara
Su, has now become a marsh, and for miles beyond
Hammam the road goes on a raised causeway. More
than neglect, however, has gone to the ruining of a
district which once helped to support ancient Antioch.
The Kara Su and Afrin both fall into the Ak Deniz
near to Antioch, and the fisheries of that lake, which
are let by the State for about £3000 a year, depend
upon the level of water being maintained—the
bigger the lake the more value the fisheries. So
the outlet has been dammed and raised, and by
that act, securing with slight outlay a small regular
revenue, the lower twenty-five or thirty miles of the
plain has been rendered almost uninhabitable.
During the whole day a string of broken-down,
home-going soldiers, many scores of them, in twos
and threes, all returned from the Yemen, had been
filing along the road from Hammam. Owing to the
Italian blockade making transport by sea impossible,
they had been sent by railway to Aleppo as the
best that the State could do. There they were
given travelling money at the rate of threepence a
day, and turned adrift to cover on foot the road
to Adana, or to the railway again at Ulu Kishla,
or even to districts yet farther. They were human
wrecks before leaving Arabia, and now made figures
pitiable as the marching wounded of a retreating
army, and still more hopeless. Without boots, their
feet often wrapped in blood-stained cloths, their khaki
uniforms torn to rags, starved, haggard, ill, exhausted