THE SATALIAN GULF.
In the 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.
[Illustration: 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 to _Yanár_, 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 summer noons 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, this _arslán_ of 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 of the 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 the Flood, or as the _turbé’s_ of 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.
[Illustration: PHASELIS AND TAKHTALY.]
* * * * *
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
the northern 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 only the 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.
* * * * *
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 wants place 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 petrol launch 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 from pasture 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.
[Illustration: THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS.]
[Illustration: 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 across the centuries. In every
other Roman theatre, which I have seen, some part of the _cavea_ is
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 the _scena_
wall, 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 the
_cavea_ is 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.
* * * * *
[Illustration: TURKS IN THE CORRIDOR AT ASPENDUS.]
[Illustration: THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ.]
The next morning found the Utowana a few miles further east, at Old
Adalia, settled, within the last year or 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?