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—
SCENES FAMOUS IN HISTORY 445
Cilician plain, and the coast becomes a low, blue line
fading into the horizon.
From north, all the way round to west, beyond the
hills and plains, and showing clear above them, are
the summits of snow-covered mountains enclosing the
Cilician plain. The serrated peaks of Ala Dagh can
be recognised, and next them westward the long level
barrier of Taurus, which shows at last as a white
cloud far south of any visible coast-line.
Standing here you gaze also over scenes famous in
history. The battlefield of Issus is somewhere upon
that strip of coastal plain in the north, under the
shadow of Amanus, and looking hence you may follow
the movements preceding the battle. Through the
narrow opening in the hills at the farther end of
the gulf, Alexander marched coming to Beilan, with
Darius and the Persians two or three days' journey
behind him. The Macedonians reached Beilan Pass,
and there Alexander heard that the Persians were in
his rear, and then filing down to the sea the way he
had just come, and at this news counter-marched his
army, and regained the plain of Issus the same night.
That narrow passage between mountains and sea
aflforded no space for numbers to deploy, and there,
what was in efiect a Macedonian line defeated a deep
Persian column.
But after recalling these ancient scenes you come
to a time when the name of this gulf— called then
the Gulf of Scanderoon—was much more familiar in
England than it is now. To the gulf and port of
Scanderoon—now the port known as Alexandretta
came English merchant ships in the romantic days
of commerce, when a trader combined fighting with
peaceful trading. Books of the time give many picturesque
details of this early traffic in the glamorous
Levant. You may read, for instance, of how the ship
Thames, Captain Willoughby Marchant, on the voyage
to Scanderoon, took the '' LInvincible of Marseilles,"
and after arriving in the roadstead snapped up also,
as inconsiderable trifles, the St Francis and St Jean