Thus, slowly toiling up through the sublime wilderness, breathing the cold, pure air of those lofty regions, we came at last to a little stream, slowly trickling down the bed of the gorge.  It was shaded, not by the pine, but by the Northern beech, with its white trunk and close, confidential boughs, made for the talks of lovers and the meditations of poets.  Here we stopped to breakfast, but there was nothing for the poor beasts to eat, and they waited for us droopingly, with their heads thrust together.  While we sat there three camels descended to the stream, and after them a guard with a long gun.  He was a well-made man, with a brown face, keen, black eye, and piratical air, and would have made a good hero of modern romance.  Higher up we came to a guard house, on a little cleared space, surrounded by beech forests.  It was a rough stone hut, with a white flag planted on a pole before it, and a miniature water-wheel, running a miniature saw at a most destructive rate, beside the door.

Continuing our way, we entered on a region such as I had no idea could be found in Asia.  The mountains, from the bottoms of the gorges to their topmost summits, were covered with the most superb forests of beech I ever saw—­masses of impenetrable foliage, of the most brilliant green, touched here and there by the darker top of a pine.  Our road was through a deep, dark shade, and on either side, up and down, we saw but a cool, shadowy solitude, sprinkled with dots of emerald light, and redolent with the odor of damp earth, moss, and dead leaves.  It was a forest, the counterpart of which could only be found in America—­such primeval magnitude of growth, such wild luxuriance, such complete solitude and silence!  Through the shafts of the pines we had caught glorious glimpses of the blue mountain world below us; but now the beech folded us in its arms, and whispered in our ears the legends of our Northern home.  There, on the ridges of the Mysian Olympus, sacred to the bright gods of Grecian song, I found the inspiration of our darker and colder clime and age. “O gloriosi spiriti degli boschi!”

I could scarcely contain myself, from surprise and joy.  Francois failed to find French adjectives sufficient for his admiration, and even our cheating katurgees were touched by the spirit of the scene.  On either side, whenever a glimpse could be had through the boughs, we looked upon leaning walls of trees, whose tall, rounded tops basked in the sunshine, while their bases were wrapped in the shadows cast by themselves.  Thus, folded over each other like scales, or feathers on a falcon’s wing, they clad the mountain.  The trees were taller, and had a darker and more glossy leaf than the American beech.  By and by patches of blue shone between the boughs before us, a sign that the summit was near, and before one o’clock we stood upon the narrow ridge forming the crest of the mountain.  Here, although we were between five and six thousand feet above the sea, the woods