and barley, mulberry orchards and groves of
fruit trees, under the shade of which the Turkish families sat or slept
during the hot hours of the day. Birds sang in the boughs, and the
gurgling of water made a cool undertone to their music. Out of fairyland
where shall I see again such lovely bowers? We were glad when the soldiers
announced that it was necessary to encamp there; as we should find no
other habitations for more than twenty miles.

Our tent was pitched under a grand sycamore, beside a swift mountain
stream which almost made the circuit of our camp. Beyond the tops of the
elm, beech, and fig groves, we saw the picturesque green summits of the
lower ranges of Giaour Dagh, in the north-east, while over the southern
meadows a golden gleam of sunshine lay upon the Gulf of Scanderoon. The
village near us was Chaya, where there is a military station. The guards
we had brought from Scanderoon here left us; but the commanding officer
advised us to take others on the morrow, as the road was still considered
unsafe.

Chapter XVII.

Adana and Tarsus.

The Black Gate--The Plain of Cilicia--A Koord Village--Missis--Cilician
Scenery--Arrival at Adana--Three days in Quarantine--We receive
Pratique--A Landscape--The Plain of Tarsus--The River Cydnus--A Vision
of Cleopatra--Tarsus and its Environs--The _Duniktash_--The Moon of
Ramazan.

"Paul said, I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a
citizen of no mean city."--Acts, xxi. 89.

Khan on Mt. Taurus, _Saturday, June_ 19, 1852.

We left our camp at Chaya at dawn, with an escort of three soldiers, which
we borrowed from the guard stationed at that place. The path led along the
shore, through clumps of myrtle beaten inland by the wind, and rounded as
smoothly as if they had been clipped by a gardener's shears. As we
approached the head of the gulf, the peaked summits of Giaour Dagh, 10,000
feet in height, appeared in the north-east. The streams we forded swarmed
with immense trout. A brown hedgehog ran across our road, but when I
touched him with the end of my pipe, rolled himself into an impervious
ball of prickles. Soon after turning the head of the gulf, the road
swerved off to the west, and entered a narrow pass, between hills covered
with thick copse-wood. Here we came upon an ancient gateway of black lava
stone, which bears marks of great antiquity It is now called _Kara Kapu,_
the "Black Gate," and some suppose it to have