herdsmen, who are now living in tents on the mountain tops.  All over the valley, the peasants were at work in the harvest-fields, cutting and binding grain, gathering opium from the poppies, or weeding the young tobacco.  In the south, over the rim of the hills that shut in this pastoral solitude, rose the long blue summits of Urus Dagh.  We rode into Taushanlue, which is a long town, filling up a hollow between two stony hills.  The houses are all of stone, two stories high, with tiled roofs and chimneys, so that, but for the clapboarded and shingled minarets, it would answer for a North-German village.

The streets were nearly deserted, and even in the bazaars, which are of some extent, we found but few persons.  Those few, however, showed a laudable curiosity with regard to us, clustering about us whenever we stopped, and staring at us with provoking pertinacity.  We had some difficulty in procuring information concerning the road, the directions being so contradictory that we were as much in the dark as ever.  We lost half an hour in wandering among the hills; and, after travelling four hours over piny uplands, without finding the village of Kara Koei, encamped on a dry plain, on the western bank of the river.  There was not a spear of grass for the beasts, everything being eaten up by the grasshoppers, and there were no Turcomans near who could supply us with food.  So we dined on hard bread and black coffee, and our forlorn beasts walked languidly about, cropping the dry stalks of weeds and the juiceless roots of the dead grass.

We crossed the river next morning, and took a road following its course, and shaded with willows and sycamores.  The lofty, wooded ranges of the Mysian Olympus lay before us, and our day’s work was to pass them.  After passing the village of Kara Koei, we left the valley of the Rhyndacus, and commenced ascending one of the long, projecting spurs thrust out from the main chain of Olympus.  At first we rode through thickets of scrubby cedar, but soon came to magnificent pine forests, that grew taller and sturdier the higher we clomb.  A superb mountain landscape opened behind us.  The valleys sank deeper and deeper, and at last disappeared behind the great ridges that heaved themselves out of the wilderness of smaller hills.  All these ridges were covered with forests; and as we looked backwards out of the tremendous gulf up the sides of which we were climbing, the scenery was wholly wild and uncultivated.  Our path hung on the imminent side of a chasm so steep that one slip might have been destruction to both horse and rider.  Far below us, at the bottom of the chasm, roared an invisible torrent.  The opposite side, vapory from its depth, rose like an immense wall against Heaven.  The pines were even grander than those in the woods of Phrygia.  Here they grew taller and more dense, hanging their cloudy boughs over the giddy depths, and clutching with desperate roots to the almost perpendicular sides of the gorges.  In many places they were the primeval forests of Olympus, and the Hamadryads were not yet frightened from their haunts.