CHAPTER V.THE SATALIAN GULF.
Inthe early spring of 1904 the owner of the beautiful yacht, Utowana, invited me to a cruise in Levant waters. We coasted Crete, revisiting familiar spots, and then headed for Anatolia, where the long Carian fiords offer perfect shelter and much of present beauty and former fame, which you may not see easily except from a private ship. Didymi and Iassus, Bargylia and Budrum, Cnidus, Loryma, Rhodes and the Lycian cities, which I had visited seven years before, drew us to land day after day, and it was full April when we made Cape Chelidonia, and bore up into the Satalian Gulf.
The sky had cleared after some days of south-westerly weather, and morning broke in that rare splendour which persuaded the Hebrew poets, that perfect bliss will be perfect light. A long creaming swell heaved like opalescent satin, set with dusky pearls of islets; and the Norse deck-hands vented their joy of life in signalling ecstatically to the astonished crew of a caique, which was rocking on the fairy sea. The lust of movement grew in us also till we found the yacht too small. Where could we go ashore on that lovely land? One bethought him of the famous undying fire of Chimaera which few have seen in the Lycian forest,and begged that we might put into Deliklitash and range afield. The Owner was willing; a new course was set, and we slanted towards the shore.
THE UTOWANA AT CNIDUS.
THE UTOWANA AT CNIDUS.
For an hour we hugged the crags, then, as a broad bay opened below wooded steeps, wore round till the glittering pyramid of Takhtaly was on our starboard bow. A shelving bank of shingle appeared ahead, and behind it, a narrow ribbon of fields and garden grounds, divided by a stream, which issued from a black cleft in the horseshoe of cliffs. Half a dozen roofs peeped out of the trees, and presently, as a red ensign shook itself out on the single flagstaff to welcome the rare visit of what was thought a ship of war, we descried a little knot of eager figures gathering to the beach. Anchor was dropped far out (for soundings were none too frequent on the charts), and the whale-boat’s men had to pull long and strong before our bow grated on the shingle, and was hauled high and dry by willing hands. The Stars and Stripes had probably never flown before off Deliklitash. Our latest predecessor seems to have been the Crown Prince of Italy, now King, who called some years ago, and left a pleasant memory, which went for something in our reception. At any rate all ashore seemed glad of our coming, and emulously offered guidance toYanár, the Fire, assuming without further question that, like our royal forerunner, we were come to see Chimaera.
The path led northward at first, across the shallow stream, into gardens where we threaded our way among irrigation ditches, in defiance of protesting hounds, and through and under a various vegetation rioting for room. The little plain, which faces south-east below gigantic firebricks of red rock, must grill in summernoons in the climate of a hot-house; and even on an April morning, after a spell of storm, it seemed a valley where snow could never come nor any wind blow coldly. Certainly none was blowing then, and our gait of emulous exhilaration sobered gradually as the sun rose higher, and the path sloped upwards over the short turf of a ravine where camels were browsing. Once through the gardens, we were to see no human being except a herd-boy, feeding his kine near the sea, and little sign of the hand or foot of man. The forest straggled to meet us in clumps of holm-oak and plane on the floor of the ravine, but spread a thicker mantle of pine and fir up the steepening slopes, till checked by cornices of angry volcanic crag. It is not often that one walks in Turkey so free of police or fear of land-lopers, among unfamiliar flowers and birds and butterflies. The guide talked of the chase as a Lycian farmer, sportsman in grain, will always talk, telling tales of bears which come down into the little plain to forage on winter nights; of boars which rout in the garden grounds; of myriad partridges and francolins, of which, however, we saw and shot but one; of leopards, and also of lions, which he believed might yet be found in the wilder hills. No European has ever shot in Lycia, or so much as seen, alive or dead, the royal beast whose effigy is so often carved on Lycian tombs; and maybe, thisarslánof Deliklitash was no more than the panther, which ranges other Anatolian mountains, less unknown than the Lycian Alps.
Arrived abreast of a ruddy patch on the northern side of the ravine, which he said was the dump-heap of an ancient copper mine, the guide bore away to the left, and led us up the steep slope among pines.There was no track but such as goats make, and the rock-steps made long striding for booted and gaitered men; but our Lycian, who was shod with close-bound layers of hide and wool, the most suitable gear in the world for rocks, light as a mocassin and pliable as a sock, bounded up them like his goats. Some of us would not be beaten by him; others frankly refused to keep his pace; and in very open order we came up at last, breathless and crimson, into a little dell, about a thousand feet above the ravine, bare of trees, and floored with an ashen crust. A huddle of mean ruins lay in the desolate clearing, which looked like the tailing of a furnace, and smelt of leaking coal gas. “Ishté”! said the guide, “There you are!Yanár!”
What disillusion! Where were those eternal fires of Chimaera? The sun beat pitilessly on the little hollow, which seemed burned out, blanched, dead. Was this what we had come up to see? The last arrived of us, the least cool and most disgusted, made a bee-line for the ruins, cried out, and jumped aside. We followed with more wariness, and, behold, the Fire was at our feet. Tongues of flame, spirituous, colourless, well nigh invisible in that white glare, were licking the mouths of a dozen vents—flames inextinguishable, inexhaustible, fed by nothing seen or felt. The guide said other fires would break out wherever water was poured, and drawing from a mountain rivulet hard by, we found it so. The largest vent opens almost beneath the main group of ruin, which has evidently once been a church, raised with the stones of some older building. A Greek inscription is encrusted in the blistered wall, and surely some pagan temple has stood here to the Spirit of the Fire. On the edge ofthe clearing, half hidden in thorn scrub, rise ruins of another building of many chambers, to whose crumbling walls mouldering frescoes of saints still cling. Here, doubtless, dwelt the monks who served the church. Trees and bushes on all hands were hung with rags, vicarious vouchers for former wearers. That was all. A second patch like this and similar ruins, said the guide, were to be found higher up the mountain; but we did not go to the place, and thus saw no more of Chimaera than that half-acre of pallid slag, with its lambent elusive flames, scorched ruins, and beggarly memorials of modern pagans rotting on leafless boughs.
Nevertheless, when we turned to go down the hill we were well content. We had found no wonder, for, except by night, when the burning patch is a far-seen beacon at sea, the spectacle is no great matter. But we had been on holy ground, where man has communed with the Earth Spirit since first he broke into the Lycian wilds. Those piacular rags, those temple stones, bore sufficient witness that so he believed and still believes. There is no record of the name by which he called the Spirit; but in all likelihood, when Christianity had won him, he raised his church here to the Panaghía, the All Holy, the Virgin Mother, whose honour nine out of ten churches in Western Asia Minor commemorate. There are many Christian shrines, of course, in the Nearer East which bear other names than hers, dedicated to obscure saints who never lived; and there are tombs enough, honoured as resting-places of other saints who never died, cenotaphs as vain as those barrows which are supposed by Islamic piety to cover in double and triple the giant bones of Patriarchs drowned in theFlood, or as theturbé’sof early Moslem champions, who, in fact, died decently in far Arabian oases, or were eaten of birds and dogs in passes of Syria. But most of these shrines and tombs are peculiar sanctuaries, holy places of particular tribal groups, whose ghostly tenants passed through many metempsychoses, before they found their final peace as Saint This or Abu That; whereas the Panaghía enjoys universal honour in all this region, having inherited from the one great Nature Goddess, who was worshipped of old under so many names—Leto and Artemis, Kybele and Mylitta, Baalit and Ashtoreth, and others still earlier, which are not known to us.
PHASELIS AND TAKHTALY.
PHASELIS AND TAKHTALY.
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Anchor was up by early afternoon, and we dropped down the coast northwards to Tekir Ova, once Phaselis, the most easterly city which paid the Athenian tribute. Right over us hung a mountain whose eight thousand feet rise from the sea-line to the snow. Takhtaly is the proudest peak on the exquisite Anatolian coast, perhaps on any coast at all of the Mediterranean sea, and, seen from south, east, or north, will be remembered when many a loftier mountain has been forgotten. It is the great glory of Phaselis; but even were it away, the site of the city would be one of the most beautiful in the Greek lands, whether for its prospect over the purple gulf to the Tauric Alps, or for its nearer setting. The main group of habitations lay on a peninsula of jutting rock, which falls sheer to the sea on three sides, and probably was once an island, though not in historic times; for an ancient aqueduct straddles the sandy isthmus. The lie of the land gave the city two harbours, of which the southern is large, shallow, and silted up, while thenorthern is the most pellucid rock-bay imaginable, still fringed with broken quays and fenced by a broken mole. All eastern Lycia is now become wilderness; but Tekir Ova is a wilder spot than most. The site seems to have been little worth anyone’s while to quarry, and the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ruins have been left for Nature to appropriate as best she may. On the high part of the peninsula the sturdy cistus shrubs, which have found root in every corner and cranny, have helped wind and weather to break down the buildings bit by bit into such vast hummocks as a terrific earthquake might leave; and sprouting thickest in all hollows, the thorns, which fence each great heap, let no man through without taking toll of his garments and skin. The main street, flanked by the theatre and other public buildings, which ran across the isthmus from one harbour to the other, is now become one long grove of evergreen and deciduous trees, which have thrust down many a wall, and trail their fingers over carved and inscribed stones; and the fortuitous avenue frames some very pretty effects, the best being a glimpse of the northern harbour, seen in vignette down a green tunnel. But none of human kind passes to and fro in this street any more. Fauns and hamadryads are all you will see in the longest vigil.
There is no monument worth a pilgrimage. The theatre is small and collapsed; the temples are buried beneath their own ruin, and become shaggy hillocks; the buildings about the market place are choked, and hardly more visible in the brake than the Castle in the Sleeping Wood. A file of white marble gravestones, which lines the northward road, alone makes a show. But it is worth going all the way to Phaselis to see onlythe gracious revenge which Nature takes on those who were once her lords.
Tekir Ova is a type of what one may see so often along these coasts of Asia Minor—at every few miles an ancient seaport, its moles abandoned to the waves and its streets to the fox and the jackal. The busy modern centres of life in Asia Minor lie out of sight of the sea, the few exceptions being towns whose spring of life resides in an alien people, and not in the masters of the land. The Turk is in fault, of course, both because he ever withdraws his land, like his house, from the sight of alien men, and also because, in his distaste of the sea, he formerly allowed corsairs to scare the villages into the hills. But if that fault has been his, a like fault was committed also by others long before him. Not only are modern settlements lacking on the Anatolian shores, but, it seems, very ancient ones as well. The coastal sites have yet to show evidence of primaeval times, and all the native Anatolian cities of the remoter age, thus far known, except Hissarlik, lie inland, and the traces of the earliest civilisation have been found out of sight of the sea. Ephesus has yielded no prehistoric things, nor have any Ionian or Carian sites, which have been explored, given us more. The Turk has but done what all eastern rulers of Asia Minor, from the Hittite to the Persian, did before him.
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At Phaselis we saw the last of Lycia, except her higher snows, which open out, peak behind peak, in the backward view from the northern shore of the Gulf; and we passed on to Pamphylia, the land of All Tribes in antiquity and still a home for the scrapings and leavings of peoples. Whenever the Ottoman Government wantsplace for refugees, it plants them in Pamphylia. Thither have come Moslems from Greece during the war of independence, and Moslems from Crete since the Liberation; Circassians and Bulgars, at any time during the past generation; and gypsies at all times since the Ottoman conquest. All alike live as though halting for no more than the day, and waiting the word to go farther and fare better—or worse. There are very few villages, and those that exist seem not of the country. Even as progress is reckoned in Asiatic Turkey, Pamphylia is an unprogressive land, where no one appears to think it worth his while to do more than mark time. Why residence there should be so little desired, I know not. Perhaps it is undesirable. With their southward aspect, and great mountain screen to the north, the coastal plains must be intensely hot in the summer months; and since they are largely alluvial and in many parts marshy, mosquitoes and fever are probably all too rife. But just because it is so desolate now, Pamphylia keeps the most wonderful memorials of her past. Termessus and Perga, Aspendus and Sidé were not very great or famous cities in their day, and were it not for Paul the Apostle, had hardly been known by name to the modern world at large. But their remote ruins have survived as have hardly any others of their epoch, and all are famous cities now.
About the third hour of the day we were off the mouth of the Eurymedon river, cruising above the Persian wrecks, which were sunk by Cimon the Athenian. Balkis Kalé—for Aspendus has so appealed to oriental imagination as to be renamed, with other magic “castles,” after Solomon’s Arabian Queen—lies some miles up stream, and the Owner proposed, if his petrollaunch could pass the bar, to take us by water to the site. The deep discolour of the sea a mile offshore warned us that the river was running high, and a Greek fisherman, brought from Adalia to be pilot, prophesied we should pass easily into the mouth, but soon meet too fierce a current. He was to prove right; but for awhile we discredited him, finding not only water enough and to spare on the bar, but the launch making easy way up a placid flood, which glided almost bank high between earthy flats, not unlike the lower Delta lands of Egypt in vegetation and colour. There seemed at first few men or beasts on either hand, and such as there were stared astonished beyond measure at sight of a bark breasting the stream without oar or sail or smoke. But soon a large village of Cretan refugees rose into view on a mound some distance from the right bank, and as the channel curved eastward, two caiques at anchor appeared ahead. Pointing to them our pilot said we could float so far but no farther, and before we were well abreast of them he was justified. The current, which had run thus far three miles an hour against the launch, quickened to five and six, and our keel began to touch ground from one moment to another. There was nothing for it but to make fast, walk to the nearest hamlet, and seek horses.
These proved hard to find. There were few houses, and those widely spaced among fields and gardens. Most had but a single upper chamber built over a cow-byre (as men build in marshy plains), and half were empty and locked. The rest sheltered rather taciturn peasants, who seemed to live lonely lives, each man for himself. None bade us welcome, and none, till forced by the men of our escort, would fetch his beast frompasture and take a double hire. It was near noon, therefore, before we were mounted and away, and even by hustling unwilling horses, we could hope for no more than a very short stay at Balkís. The path ran among untilled hillocks, and now and again opened a view of some foaming reach of the river. So long as we kept the left bank, there was little to look at except the same Tauric snows which had closed our northward view for a week past. At one point we passed out of the scrub into a grassy clearing dappled with the shadows of old cedars, where half a dozen brood mares pastured, each with her foal, under the sole guard of four huge dogs; but even there no man appeared, nor were we to see one till we struck the river again at its single bridge, a decayed and dangerous relic of a better age, built bowwise to meet the stream. Here on the right bank stood a caravanserai, whence a knot of gypsies ran out to stare as we crossed. Their winter camp lay beside our farther road, a huddle of black tents and bamboo huts, of yapping puppy-dogs, squalling babies, elfin women and sooty kettles, among which we drew rein to gaze a moment on the distant bulk of the Theatre of Aspendus—to gaze from the ephemeral dwellings of a society which defies Time towards the imperishable monument of a society which Time has long ago destroyed.
THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS.
THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS.
IN THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS.
IN THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS.
You may have seen amphitheatres in Italy, France, Dalmatia and Africa; temples in Egypt and Greece; palaces in Crete; you may be sated with antiquity, or scornful of it. But you have not seen the Theatre of Aspendus. It has at once the grandeur of scale which excites fancy, and that perfection in survival which, lulling the sense of strangeness, allows fancy to leap unastonished acrossthe centuries. In every other Roman theatre, which I have seen, some part of thecaveais perished, the uppermost tiers at any rate being merged so irregularly into the hillside that one may hardly know where seats end and naked rock begins; or else jungle intrudes on the auditorium, and thescenawall, even if so perfect as at Orange, stands a dreary skeleton, with not only its marble statues lost, but all marble mouldings and casing whatsoever. Thus, whether one look up or down, all illusion that the building might still serve its first purpose, is cheated. But at Aspendus, not only is every bench in its place and perfect, but thecaveais still crowned with the original arcade which served as a finish and coping to the whole. Vegetation has hardly been able to take root in the close joints of the masonry, and the ancient drains and gutters, which are still serviceable, have suffered little silt to settle in the orchestra. From the stage buildings little is missing, and from the scena wall nothing, except the contents of the niches. All stones are still square and sharp, and the courses are true as if laid yesterday. The whole building, moreover, is of gigantic size, erected not at divers epochs by the city, but all at once by the pious munificence of one wealthy individual, desirous to outdo all other citizens of the Empire in gratitude for the victorious return of Lucius Verus from the East; and under the inscription by which this his act is recorded for all time to come, one enters the main portal to right of the stage. A taciturn officer of the Adalia police, who had ridden up with us, stood stock still a moment under this great doorway, and then went off by himself, looking curiously at every part of the corridors, stage and seats. At last he came back, accepted a cigarette,and stared slowly round the great horseshoe. “What sort of men,” he asked, “were here before us? No Osmanli built this.”
Taken all in all, the Theatre of Aspendus is perhaps the most splendid of all the great Roman buildings that time has spared. Certainly it is the first and greatest of the surviving theatres, and the one which fancy may most easily repeople with its ancient audience and dead players. You can imagine yourself strayed into it on an off-day, and look for the slaves to come and set it in order for a performance on the morrow; and, as in the Temple of Edfu, you tread softly, as a stranger doubtful of his right of entry.
It is hard to leave this Theatre; but when you do, follow the line of the city wall up to the table-land behind, where was the market-place, not to see only its ruined porticoes nor yet the shell of a great Basilica, which rises out of the brushwood, nor yet again the two marble statues lying near it, which perhaps were passed over by Verres when he robbed Aspendus to enrich his gallery; but to see also the northward view. The site lies on the rocky roots of Taurus, just where the Eurymedon escapes from a gorge whose fringing scarps lead the eye step by step into the farthest blue of the hills. The mountain screen, which shuts off the central Anatolian lakes, is more boldly carved into peak and buttress behind Aspendus than I have seen it elsewhere, and is more nobly wooded to the verge of the spring snows. Few palaces have so fair a prospect as the Castle of Queen Balkís.
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TURKS IN THE CORRIDOR AT ASPENDUS.
TURKS IN THE CORRIDOR AT ASPENDUS.
THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ.
THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ.
The next morning found the Utowana a few miles further east, at Old Adalia, settled, within the last yearor two, by some two hundred Cretan families, who have made themselves dwellings within the shell of Sidé. Here is the wreck of a theatre only less enormous than that at Aspendus. Since there was no convenient hillside to be hollowed, the auditorium has been raised on arches like a half Coliseum, and it survives almost whole; but the scena wall has collapsed upon the stage in a mighty cataract of stones. One part of the ancient city is still a labyrinth of ruin; the other has been cleared and built upon by the Cretans. The exiles seemed ill at ease in their refuge. The Sultan had given them land and houses; but their fields, they said, were stony, and they lacked cattle for the plough; the water was bad, and they found they could talk little with their Greek tongues to the surrounding folk. It was hard, they thought, to have to begin life afresh, and for what fault? None the less, they seemed to be setting brave faces towards the future, and making the best of their fortune; and though they knew well enough that men of English speech had weighted the scale against their creed in Crete, they showed no rancour towards us, but were glad to trade in ancient coins and scarcely younger eggs. They bethought them, too, of other antiques in marble and terra-cotta, which they had found while collecting stones from Sidé, or turning its soil with their spades; and in the event, we spent some exhilarating hours in unashamed quest of forbidden things.
It were easy enough now to justify our looting, for, else, those marbles had gone long ago into the limekiln. But I doubt if any one of us thought a moment about justification, as we were loading the whale-boat once and again with spoils of Sidé. We were filled full of the lust of loot, possessing ourselves of treasure ready-made,reaping that we had not sown, tasting a joy which recks as little of justification as any on earth. It is the joy which has made pirates and filibusters and mercenary adventurers of all sorts and conditions of men, and kept them so till death. It recruited Greeks to fight for Persia, and Germans to fight for Rome, Norsemen to fight for Constantinople, and anyone and everyone to fight in Grand Companies, and Knightly Orders, and Janissary and Mameluke battalions; and it will recruit their like to the end of time. It has no rivals among motives of human action, but Love and Fear, and it has so often conquered both, that who will say, the greatest of these three is not the Lust of Loot?