urkish government, and I being a young Englishman, he
good-naturedly gave me his assistance, without which, as I afterwards
found, it would have been impossible for me to have travelled with
safety through any one of the mountain passes of the Pindus. I was told
that this chief, whose name I unfortunately omitted to note down,
commanded a large body of men before the city of Berat, and certainly
all the ragamuffins whom I met on my way to and from the monasteries of
Meteora acknowledged his authority. I heard that soon afterwards he
returned to his allegiance under Mahmoud Pasha, for it appears that the
outbreak, during which I had inadvertently started for a tour in
Albania, did not last long.

Late in the evening we arrived at a small khan something like an
out-building to a farmhouse in England; this was the khan of Malacash:
it was prettily situated on the banks of the river Peneus, and
contained, besides the stable, two rooms, one of which opened upon a
kind of verandah or covered terrace. My two servants and I slept on the
floor in this room, and the four robbers or guards (as in common
civility I ought to term them) in the ante-chamber. I gave them as good
a supper as I could, and we became excellent friends. It was almost dark
when we arrived at this place, but the next morning when the glorious
sun arose I was charmed with the beautiful scenery around us. On both
sides banks of stately trees rose above the margin of a rippling stream,
and the valley grew wider and wider as we rode on, the stream increasing
by the addition of many little rills, and the trees retiring from it,
affording us views of grassy plains and romantic dells, first on one
side and then on the other. The scenery was most lovely, and in the
distance was the towering summit of the great Mount Olympus, famous
nowadays for the Greek monasteries which are built upon its sides, and
near whose base runs the valley of Tempe, of which we are expressly told
in the Latin Grammar that it is a pleasant vale in Thessaly; and if it
is more beautiful than the valley of the Peneus, it must be a very
pleasant vale indeed.

I was struck with the original manner in which our mountain friends
progressed through the country; sometimes they kept with us, but more
usually some of them went on one side of the road and some on the other,
like men beating for game, only that they made no noise; and on the rare
occasions when we met any traveller trudging along the ro