Over Ilium and Ida

As the great steamers of the Austrian Company, on their journeys between Constantinople and the lower Levant, pass from the mouth of the Dardanelles into the Ægean, their decks are apt to fill with groups of curious gazers, peering over at the landmarks of a memorable coast. In the eastern horizon lifts a mountain with a cap of gleaming snow. From its base drop terraces of low hills covered with wood. The hills soften once more into a drowsy, uneven plain, down which course two sluggish streams to the sea. Close by the shore extend a number of conical mounds, like the barrows of Sweden, or the burial mounds of the North American Indians. Over the objects of this landscape hang perpetual dreamy mist and a low sky. The scene is the field of Troy, against the base of Mount Ida! The rivers are Simois and Scamander of old. The harrows are the tombs of the heroes of Homer. The territory is that of the Iliad. Along this narrow strip of coast between the mountain and the sea, headed on the north by the bay at the foot of the Dardanelles, and extending downwards a dozen miles along the Ægean, for more than two thousand years have been sought the traces of that divinely recorded conflict of gods and men. The tumuli by the shore were as classic landmarks to the pagan Greek fisherman who flung out his sail to gather the breezes about Tenedos as they remain to-day.

Draw a line fifty miles in length, from the mouth of the Hellespont to the head of the long gulf over Mytilene, and you have dropped into the Ægean the triangle of ancient Mysia which modern geography marks as the Troad.

Mother Ida seems to have settled down very comfortably into this Asian angle, gathering up its space with her fingering spurs, almost to the sea. Everything in this westward direction must have been in tolerably clear vision to the gods perched upon her summit, but their mountain crowded hard upon the water’s edge the level fighting room for mortal heroes.

A week’s journey hardly suffices to compass the whole territory of the Troad, though the immediate landmarks of the Homeric battles lie only a few hours apart, on this bit of shore running from the Hellespont down the Ægean.

Riding between the Turkish castles at the mouth of the neighboring strait, modern travel, as has been intimated, easts an eye of greater or less curiosity on this historic plain. Sometimes an Englishman or other ardent wanderer out of Western Europe, willing to defer for a few hours his advent at Constantinople, halts in his upward passage from Smyrna or Athens, while he may run over this border of the Trojan field by the coast. Once or twice in a generation something further, perhaps, is attempted. Byron, passing along here in the “Pilgrimage,” hailed Ida with a stanza from the sea, and made some epistolary description of the sites of Troy, which he visited afterwards. Since his time, less than half a dozen Western pilgrims have given the public some record of research here. But the visitors of the Troad have been few, indeed, who have not contented themselves with a glimpse of the white peak of Ida from the distance of fifty miles, and then left the old land to its brooding silence. I had half conceived the existence of the classic mountain to be a myth, but, coming from the Marmora, as I turned into the straits of the Hellespont, there it towered and gleamed aloft in the Mysian sunrise as it has towered and gleamed in all the centuries since Homer. Achilles and his Greeks reached it from Tenedos, but a modern visit to the field of Troy is made most conveniently from the town of the Dardanelles, half-way down the famous strait. Some of these old lands grasped by the Turk are being rudely penetrated by railways, but the soil whereon rested the city of the Iliad is as virginal still from such innovations as in the primitive Pelasgian days.

As for roads over It of any sort, there are none — not even such as Æneas may have escaped over, carrying his father to the seashore. To do, in English phraseology, Homer’s land, now, is an enterprise removed to the utmost from a classic performance — or, it might rather be said, exactly resembling it in its bald severities. It is to see it, in short, from the galling peak of a Turkish saddle mounted upon the cropping vertebræ of the skinny Asia Minor horse — an animal that suggests neither the fleetness of an Arab charger, nor the hardihood of the Syrian mule. So bestriding, into this land, known three thousand years to authentic history, you go a pioneer, prepared to rough it, with your cook, your guide, and Turkish Surigee, mounted on still meaner beasts behind you.

My own plan of following the visions of Homer was to pass from the Sigean promontory at the month of the Dardanelles to the southward Lectum Cape, thence along the lower coast to the head of the Adrametum Gulf, and back again over the peak of Ida to the Hellespont, — thus describing a triangle around the whole field of the Troad.

While I awaited the preparation of the rude equine train I have described, I stayed, the guest of a morning, at the Dardanelles, in the stately house of the resident English Calverts, picking up, meanwhile, the gossip of the adjacent localities. To hear my hosts speak familiarly of their farming lands owned and cultivated, a dozen miles distant, almost on the very site of classic Troy, produced in the mind a novel association of ideas. But the novelty was quickly outdone by the information of the successful introduction of Louisiana cotton, during the American Civil War, on the Sigean promontory itself, at the point where the Greek ships anc hored during the famous siege.

The May sun had fallen half-way down the west over the Thracian Chersonesus before the half-starved Asian jades appeared for their mission of bearing me over Ida. I had not been able to attract for the Trojan adventure a single companion from among the scholarly English loungers at Constantinople, and so turned alone down the Hellespont, with my vision and purpose fixed none the less on Priam’s dreamy kingdom. As I proceeded along the shore there grew into vision over the Thracian peninsula on my right the coast of Imbros, while out of the rearward depths of the sea rose the ancient abode of the Cabiri, the mountain island, Samothrace. Finally the sun went down behind remoter Thasos, leaving the short splendid Levantine twilight, in whose atmosphere natural objects, obscured in the dayglare, move into sight with the effect of heavenly bodies crossing the edge of a telescopic field. Then the low line of distant Lemnos, and from a hundred miles the high conical peak of Mount Athos, came faintly into view amid the red light over the Ægean. Darkness dropped like a curtain of cloud over the picture as I watched it from the Greek village of Remkeni, on the hill at the southern extremity of the Hellespont, where night found me with one foot already in Homer’s land. Below the hill where I sat, flitted a few torches of fishing boats around about the ancient harbor of the Greek fleet.

Before the morning sunrise I had already advanced to Hissarlik, or Ilium Novum, three miles distant from this port of the Achaians. I had come there from my night quarters in the Greek village, wandering down either side of the straggling sluggish stream of the Simois, plucking wild roses from its borders. The Turks call the modern creek — for it is nothing more — Dumbrek, and the insignificance of its appearance as your horse splashes half a dozen times within an hour through its tortuous muddy current, reconciles you to the offense against the Homeric nomenclature. Classic Simois, in fact, as it runs down the plain half obscured by weeds, scarcely makes its mark in the modern landscape of the Troad.

Hissarlik, or New Troy, is a long ridge, rising over the low plain by the Hellespont, and hewn by ancient art into the form of an amphitheatre. Here, three miles removed from the sea, in the opinion of Strabo and other classic writers, stood Ilium, while modern scholarship generally translates the site seven or eight miles southwards, and farther from the naval beach, to the locality of the Turkish village of Bounarbashi. What the evidence of the conflicting commentators may be in favor of either of the disputed sites, concerns a shelf of volumes in the British Museum. For my own part I preferred erring with antiquity, to being correct with Professor Smith, and had prepared to rouse my imagination on this particular spot, to the effort the traveler feels called on to make in the neighborhood of celebrated transactions. So far as Homer is concerned, one has a sense of being a little nearer the spirit of his localities in agreeing with Xerxes and Alexander, who came here in the pagan centuries, in memory of the great bard, to view this site of Hissarlik. And it is to be remembered that the latter of these warriors stood here with the Iliad in his pocket — though if history be right, he must have laid the immortal epic temporarily aside with his tunic, running the circuit of Achilles’ tomb yonder on the sea-shore.

Assuming this as the site of Troy, what, in this year of our Lord, remains superficially visible of King Priam’s towers, are a few masses of scarred earth mixed with fragments of pottery and hewn stone on a hill terrace. Something more, however, has been interiorly discovered. Before sitting down on the summit of the ridge to scan the Homeric landmarks, I examined the shafts recently sunk from this surface by the zealous Doctor Schlieman, an American German, who has recently attempted to exhume the city of the Iliad. These excavations were commenced in the summer of 1870. and, with intervals of interruption by the jealous Ottoman authority at Constantinople, have been continued since. The shafts almost unexpectedly struck, at a depth of a dozen feet from the surface, a range of walls of Cyclopean structure laid with rectangular blocks of sandstone around and under the amphitheatre — like Hissarlik ridge.

What further exploration will decide as to this ancient masonry, whether it belongs to the wall of a city, or to the foundations of a citadel or theatre, is a question perhaps of the extent of the excavation itself. But there seems hardly a probability that any disclosure will determine the dispute of the ancient city’s locality; even if the question of its exact identification essentially concerns tlie interest of the half mythological narrative of the Iliad. This corner of old Mysia is strewn with ruins of prehistoric cities, and the remote period of the Trojan conflict precludes the possible discovery of coins or written memorials, by which to authenticate a definite spot as its central scene. The enthusiastic excavator assumes that his exhumed walls are as old as the Trojans themselves, while the judgment of the scholarly Calverts, at the Dardanelles, decides them to he of not earlier date than six centuries before the modern eras.

Some shepherds brought me a few coins which they had found on the spot where I stood, and which belonged to the period of the Roman city here. I also picked from the chinks of the uncovered walls some fragments of human vertebræ and broken earthenware which fancy easily converted into débris of Priam’s sons and pottery.

This site of the Turkish Hissarlik, agreed upon by the ancients as that of Troy, certainly meets the requirements of Homer’s locality. Here, at least, you tread the actual classic soil of the Iliad. Whether here, or yonder at Bounarbashi, Ilium stood, Achilles’ feet must have passed from the ships over this ground to reach it. Upon the spot the lofty cloud-wreathed Samothrace

— Jupiter’s watch-tower —looks down yet, as in the poet’s description, over low intermediate lying Imbros. Out that way between the two islands was the cave under the Ægean from which Poseidon emerged towards the conflict. And there towards the north and west, girding the field of straggle, are those everlasting barriers, older than history, the tumuli of Achilles and beloved Patroclus and their brother heroes. Just beyond, advanced from the shore, ran the wall in front of the Greek ships, where on that fourth day of the Homeric battles the sons of Priam broke through with loud hurrahs and horrible slaughter, to be forced back again by the Ajaxes — Greater and Lesser. Still behind, where the vision drops on the Hellespontic harbor, the mind crowds the space with the enumerated myriad ships that were all too many for the limited shore and stood several lines deep. There, through the dreary years of the contest, these vessels of the Greeks, desperately defended as their last hope of return to dear Argos, had lain already, at the outset of the epic narrative, till their timbers were decayed and their cordage rotted.

This stretch of three miles between Hissarlik and the shore was crossed a hundred times by the alternately advancing and retreating forces of the combatants, the plain underneath them sprinkled with the dead, ground by brazen chariot-wheels into furrows and trampled by tlie plunging steeds of the warrior chieftains into dust-heaps, until, amid the cloud and clangor of enormous, never-ending battle, there grew despair on either side. All this when you have come here, out of the skeptical West, under the Mysian sky, with Homer and Homer’s accurately de scribed landscape to guide you, is not so hard to believe in — not more difficult to recall than Waterloo or Antietam. The field is every whit as suggestive of battle. And how those poor Greek soldiers, unfurloughed veterans after ten years, must have grown weary of it all, and homesick, until death almost, fighting here for the harlot-bride of their King, Homer records, and can be well realized too. They were still looking across the Ægean towards their land and kindred after witnessing from this narrow strip of shore three thousand sunsets over its watersAthos, Imbros, and Samothrace must have remained the most vivid images in their memories long after their return to Greece.

I went down from Hissarlik towards the Hellespont once more, to get a near view of the tumuli of Ajax, Achilles, and Ilus. These are conical earthmounds thrown up in the prehistoric times, twenty or thirty feet above the ground level. They have borne always as now, save the profanities bestowed upon them by the modern Turk, the names of the individual heroes assigned to sepulture in them. That they are the actual work of human hands and for burial purposes has been fully demonstrated. About three quarters of a century ago the mound of Achilles was dug into by a Frenchman, Choiseul, who discovered, fifteen feet under its summit, a bronze vase and a figure of Minerva among the charred débris of antique funeral rites. Some fragments of metal and pottery procured at a more recent date from this tomb were exhibited to me at the Dardanelles. Another of the larger of these mounds of the Troad, opened as lately as 1853, was estimated to contain nearly thirty thousand feet of calcined bones. In the stratum of earth above the ashes were numerous jar tombs, and, in a vault underneath, reposed in its earthen case free from the upper fire a single skeleton evidently placed there at a very remote age. This vast mass of human remains appears to have been the deposit from an immense funeral pyre after some great battle of the ancient period, when, as after the first engagement of the Iliad, the dead on both sides were heaped and burned. On that occasion the Greeks raised a mound over the slain, and Homer’s account of Patroclus’ burial tells how the warrior’s tomb was formed: —

The mounds still suggest this manner of their making. The tomb of Ajax is earth heaped over a vault of solid masonry. It may be entered with dilficulty by a ruined passage-way at its base. On the summit of the barrow are visible the remains of the monument which the Romans erected above the redoubtable warrior of the Iliad, when they took possession of this part of geography. I crept half-way into the mound to conjure up, if possible, the great friendly ghost of Ajax, and after a few minutes passed out again over to the Sigean point, a mile off, to see if Homer’s pet hero, Achilles, would come to the fancy, standing over his burial spot, clearer than in those faraway hours of boyhood when I stood by the professor’s throne, scanning the sonorous hexameters recording how the first fighter among the Greeks sat dissentient here on this sea corner, brooding over the lost Briseis. Varying Alexander’s plan on the premises, I retained my garments and rode soberly round the hillock and then through Choiseul’s old ditch of excavation cleaving its centre, plucking, as I rode, a poppy-flower from over the warrior’s three thousand years’ sleep.

Bounarbashi, the Ilium Vetus of the moderns, is an afternoon’s journey down the whole length of the Trojan plain from the Sigean point. The way is by the Scamander, yellow and with deep swirling eddies as of old, where it rose to join in the fray with Achilles and overflowed the plain, bearing away alike Troy’s besiegers and defenders. Mendere is the modern travesty of the old river’s name. Two leaps of an English hunting horse would span its current now; though feats like those epic ones it might do still, if provoked by storms into flood. But Homer, from the want of a wide range of geographical imagination, — a defect of his date,— appears to have exaggerated all the landmarks here. Far away and winding through the plain, its line of waving willows traced the course of the ancient stream into the defiles of Ida, and from far away came the memories of the past, as I wandered down its banks deeply into this land where, as in that of the Lotos Eaters, it seems always afternoon. My fancy kept struggling, almost unconsciously, with the question of what kind of realities those were of the antique life and civilization here — whether these faded shores could have ever had any more vivid realities than now, when passage over them is like a dream. The level plain I traversed on either side of the Scamander was the fertile ground on which the opulent Ericthonius of the Odyssey pastured his three thousand mares.

When the day was finished, I had already reached and explored the ruins on the Bounarbashi site, at the end of the plain, and had come down from the craggy heights of the Balidagh above them, whereon, if modern opinion be right, rested the lofty palace of the Trojan kings. This hill, in fact, is the supposed Pergamus itself; and certainly no citadel locality could be more splendid and commanding. Down a chasm opening from the fir-clad ranges of Ida, the Scamander comes rushing here a thousand feet below and against this precipitous steep, turning its south and east into a mighty semicircular bastion. The ancients affirmed that Hercules had torn Ida apart at this point for the river’s passage-way. The panorama of the Scamander pouring through the rent mountain is, indeed, striking enough to have been fabled the result of an immortal labor.

Westward from the Balidagh Acropolis lies, once more, the vision of the islands in the Ægean. In front, rises out of the plain a lofty conical barrow which, assuming this to be Homer’s city, is the tomb of Æsyetes, — the Trojan outlook, about which the warriors mustered under Hector and Æneas before the battles.

This hill of the Pergamus was uncovered at its summit, ten years ago, by an Austrian consul in the Mediterranean, and there was disclosed a gigantic wall girdling its whole circumference. The stones and layers of this wall, like the foundations exhumed at Hissarlik, look ancient enough to satisfy the most antiquarian fancy. But the hill-tops of the whole Troad are crowned with the ruins of citadels. If this be the actual Pergamus, Troy’s eastle, it is more than sufficiently removed southward from the harbor of the Greeks; and, standing here looking at its difficult approach in front, a modern soldier would quickly conceive a contempt for the classic strategy which failed to suggest the detail of a part of the Greek fleet to a station down the western coast of the Troad, below Tenedos, for a basis, from which to storm Priam’s seat by a night attack, from the rear — instead of braving it out for ten years with bulky day fights in front. But then we should have lost the Iliad itself, which is all there is of Troy, after all; and the stories of its demi-god warriors who appear to have preferred these pitched battles in the sunshine for the express purpose of making, with their lofty speeches before charging the enemy, a Homeric benefit.

On this high ground of Bounarbashi it is somewhat easier than at Hissarlik to recall the picturesque domestic details of the siege — the doings of Helen and Paris, the wordy debates of the chiefs inside of the “ high wide-paved city,” as well as the rushing to and fro of heralds about the Scæan gate, to overlook the battle-field, and the swarming of the warriors in and out through its portals; though to conceive Achilles’ feat of dragging dead Hector at his chariot’s rear around these steeps where a goat could scarcely get footing, is a more difficult matter.

The thought comes, when you have reached, at the end of a few hours’ journey, this high ground at the extremity of the narrow Ilian plain, that the Trojan domain, after all, was a very petty affair,— a piece of territory altogether too insignificant for the basis of the gigantic political epic of the Iliad. A like thought occurs when, after a week’s travel on horseback, along the borders of smaller Asia, you have compassed all the localities out of which Homer makes his mighty enumeration of warriors gathered for the conflict around Troy, and which appeared to his fancy so remotely apart from each other. Whole nations would seem to have generated inside of territorial limits not too spacious for the estates of a modern prairie farmer. These reflections had all passed, as I sat among the broken columns and friezes of the later Greek city, strewn over the ground at the foot of the Pergamus hill, watching another sunset over the Ægean. I was trying to fix in my memory the picture made against the flushed west, by the long, waving line of Imbros lifting to peaked Samothrace. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a troop of Yuruks, fantastically garbed, stalwart sons of the mountain, who, returning at sunset to their clay lodgings here among the scattered marbles of the ancient city, had been attracted by the appearance of a Western stranger. These Yuruks are a people who appear to have inhabited the Troad in the antiquity before the Turkoman invasion. Their pursuits are of the hunting and pastoral sort, and their shaggy, bush-covered huts are fixed high up in the woody recesses of Ida, or at the foot of its spurs, as here at Bounarbashi. Despite their rude occupation and dwellings, they stalk through these classic wilds like the princes of the East they look, vying, in the contrast of scarlet and purple jackets against white nether garments, with the Albanian himself who keeps spotless, smoking his nargile in the shades of Montenegro. And such examples of physical superiority as the race presents are matched rarely in the civilizations of the West. Among the group which had gathered about me, hardly one was under the six feet stature of manhood, and their apparent chief was of such proportions as would not ill fit the description given,—perhaps on the very spot where he stood, — of Ulysses, by Priam, when, questioning of his history, he pointed out that warrior to Helen : —

and the sight of his naked calves would have filled Edwin Forrest himself with envy. Observing my admiration of his muscles, the hardy mountaineer came and stood by my side, exhibiting the girth of his chest and the measure of his colossal limbs. It was no test of the giant’s strength; but my own vigor seemed to have wonderfully rallied with the few days’ riding in this breezy land of heroes; and, taking him by the convenient hunting belt, I lifted him, as many a pupil of Winship might have done, before he was aware, to my shoulder, from where he tumbled to the grass. The feat of lifting their solid chief from the earth instantly secured me consideration from his companions, who chaffed him, as he arose from the ground, over his discomfiture.

I rested in the rude clay cabin of a Mussulman, who assured me — falsely I think — that I was the first Frank who had visited Bounarbashi — old Troy — for five years. The next morning I rose to see Greek women, whose huts were also on these premises, washing their garments in the fountains alleged to be those described by Homer as the sources of the Scamander. It was the exact scene of the Iliad! — the

From the heights of Chigri, an hour’s ride southward from old Troy, I looked down upon the accomplished length of the plain; but the journey of Homer’s land was only begun. Ida lifted her glittering summit into the noonday far to the east, while I was still peering over towards the west and Tenedos. That way before the sea was reached lay wooded hills and unpeopled, fertile valleys. Three hours later, under the haze of the May afternoon, that seemed midsummer, I was wandering there, misguided and hopelessly lost, through the olive groves up the farther hillslopes into the dense shades of a vast oak forest. It was the forgotten city of Alexander Troas! I had expected to find a few paltry remains of an ancient town scattered along the beach of the Ægean, but here, miles away up the immense ridge from the sea, with its site overgrown with thick, tangled grass, and giant oaks whose roots clasped, its fallen marbles, stretched the ruins of the great city. Ten miles would hardly gird their outermost extent, and days would be required to explore the monuments strewn thickly through the lonely overreaching forest, amid whose green tops pierce here and there into the sunlight above, masses of majestic ruins visible afar off to travelers of the Ægean. Here, somewhere, exist the remains of the house from whose windows young Eutychus fell in his sleep, and was taken up for dead the night St. Paul landed at Troas from Thrace and restored him.

Who has not bathed in the Ægean knows, perchance, but has not felt the love of Greece. Coming out of the tangled grass of the oak forest to its lonely beach, I hailed the sea as a discoverer, and plunged from an ancient mole under its waves with the double zest of school-boy delight. Dripping from its waters, I turned to wave an adieu to Tenedos, that seemed hardly more than a stone’s throw distant, and then went off Paul’s foot-sore track towards Assos and Mytilene.

The journey from Alexander Troas to the rearward slopes of Ida lies seventy miles around the Ægean coast. I passed a night under a tree amid the airy oak forests of the southern Troad; another on the open deck of a Greek fishing-smack at Assos; and, at the end of a third day, found myself emerged from the vast olive groves of southeastern Mysia, ascending Ida from the neighborhood of ancient Adrametum. This remote and unusual ascent is particularly wild and rugged, and can be made only under the direction of guides from the immediate vicinity. I left the Turkish village of Narli with the olive groves at sunset, and climbed still three or four hours onward into the dark, and pitched my bivouac high up on the slopes of the mountain. My three followers, wild enough looking for bandits themselves, and certainly far enough off from presenting a pecuniary bait to brigandage, refused to advance a step farther, on the double plea of exhaustion and fear of robbery. And, indeed, without the usual military guard offered by Turkish authority in these parts, we were fairly tempting the dangers with which the slopes of Ida have been infested for centuries.

Our camp fire, kindled and fed with the dry pine logs of the mountain, blazed far down over woody blackness to the Ægean. Then there burst suddenly a gust of storm, with the thunder and lightning of these hasty latitudes, across our perch on the mountain terrace, converting it for the night into a very witches’ roost of unrest. We were drenched with rain before we could secure a hasty covering of green branches. The forest, below to the sea, and above, to the mountain’s crest, was black and white with alternating flashes of storm, and, through the intervals of thunder, was heard the crackling rush of terrified wild animals down the heights. For Ida, as when Homer described it, is the “ mother of wild beasts ” still. On the following morning the fresh tracks of both deer and bear were within twenty yards of our night’s bivouac, and the whole mountain side as we advanced was literally ploughed by the rooting of multitudinous wild boars.

The most famous sport in the East is to be had over these heights when the Governor of Beiramitch, a town on the upper Scamander, brings to Ida some distinguished Frank stranger for a hunt. At the command of this Turkish potentate, for a few liras the whole Yuruk population of the Eastern Troad assemble with their rude arms, girdle the mountain slopes, and press the animals from their fastnesses. There is a ringing of musket-balls, a shouting of picturesque savage huntsmen, a hooting rush of savager boars down the gorges, and universal scream and clangor that transform the old mountain from its loneliness into the most exciting holiday spot in the world. But the gods who sat on its peak looked down upon scarcely more perilous ventures about Troy than these of chasing wild boars on the sides of Ida. Many a horse ripped open by gleaming long tusks is left dead upon the slopes; often a poor Yuruk is carried to his brushy cabin down in the valley, to join no more in the hazardous pastime.

Nine peaks rise propped against each other out of the Southern Ægean towards Ida’s crest, and form the steps by which the traveler passes upwards. From the sea to the last of the lower summits the sides of the mountains are heavily clothed with the pine forest from which — ῒδη — it derives its name. And such a forest was worthy to give name even to a hill of the gods. Stupendous and straight the pine giants on the lower terraces lift their bulks into aerial spaces level with the cliffs. Not even the pines of Norway match these colossal classic trunks of the South. The air of these wooded heights, too, is wonderfully sweet and pure.

As I toiled around the shadowy summits, Mytilene and the islands of the Smyrna coast dropped through lofty vistas down into the whiteness of the sea behind: the wood-covered steeps and valleys of the Idan ranges were seen far away, underneath stretches of blue mist drawn like veils over their blackness, while, as some unusual height was gained, the openings between distant western peaks were luminous with an intense purple splendor. My guides led by no path, but on over woody summits, through ways along which they had often tracked the bear and boar, descending here a cliff, and mounting now into clean spaces where flashes of white Asian landscapes shot from afar through the gloom of the upper forests.

The atmosphere over Ida in the months of May and June is of that perfect temperature that gives no suggestion of season. The stillness of the heights, together with the incense-like odor of the pines mixed with the stimulating breath of the mountain, produces an intoxication of the senses, a feeling, as it were, that immortality itself had been found among these lofty and beautiful regions. I even conceived for the moment that Homer might have planted his gods on Ida from such sensuous inspiration. At frequent intervals in the darkly picturesque recesses of these slopes are ruined monasteries of the early priests, who found here in the days of the Greek empire a meditative retreat equal to Athos or Vallombrosa. From morning till noon as I advanced towards the Idan crest, one summit had concealed the next until the inferior ranges had all been surmounted, when, at last, one mighty cone of mountain, abruptly shaking the pine forest from its sides, stood like a naked white Titan, with head among the clouds. It was Homer’s “ topmost Gargarus,” fringed at the base with marble rocks and covered with patches of snow!

Leaving our horses on the plateau at the end of the pine wood, in an hour more I had struggled with my guides to the very apex of the gods. There is no mistaking Jupiter’s outlook. The pinnacle of Ida towers solitarily aloft, domineering over its whole range. It was with a little pardonable vanity that I placed my foot upon it, as I was conscious of being nearly if not quite the only pilgrim from the West of the Atlantic who had attained this classic vantage-ground.

The prospect from the peak of Gargarus is equal to its fame. The panorama lying underneath is Western Asia Minor and European Turkey, modeled, as it has been said to appear, upon a vast surface of glass. Homer could not have more advantageously seated his divinities. Even to mortal eyes, from this summit the plain of Troy, although thirty miles distant, seems almost immediately under the gazer’s feet, while all the incidental localities of the Iliad are compassed with a single glance. As I stood in the mid-afternoon upon this glorious outlook, the Hellespont running down from the Propontis appeared a gleaming silver thread dividing Asia from Europe. Farther down, at the lowest limit of the Troad, Cape Lectum, whence Juno, wrapped in a purple cloud, approached Jupiter upon the mountain, projected into the Ægean, whose waters in the sunlight were like a mirror of brass.

In an outer sweep of vision lay a circle of lands and objects that sent to the mind in tumultuous flood a thousand memories of ancient history — the sea of the Propontis, the Asian Olympus, the shores of the Thracian Chersonesus, Thrace itself, Assos, the islands of Imbros, Lemnos, Samothrace, Tenedos, Eubœa, the Gulf of Smyrna and its islands, almost all of Mysia and Bithynia, parts of Lydia and Ionia and the peninsula of Greece itself; while at my back the remoter Idan chain, taking its measure from Gargarus, swung down its wall of misty peaks into the fastnesses of Asia.

It is said that the towers of Constantinople are sometimes visible from the top of Ida. I saw clearly from the place the crest of the Mysian Olympus, amid whose snows I had been lost only a month before.

The Turks call Gargarus Kaz-dagh, or Goose-height, from its white appearance resembling the breast of a goose. The level surface of his summit is about a thousand yards in extent — sufficient standing room for all the gods imposed upon it by Homer. Bacchus is the only divinity of whom there are any present indications upon the sacred mountain; the evidences of liis modern worship being lavishly sprinkled over the peak in the form of broken bottles of Rakee and other fierce liquors consumed by the Yuruks, who once a year, on the occasion of a festival of superstition, ascend this lofty Gargarian height and carouse for days and nights together.

Half-way down the sides of Ida descending towards the west are the real sources of the Scamander, in a vast cavern called by the natives Buyuk-Megara; and which must be traversed with the aid of guides bearing pine torches. At the extremity of a spacious hall, a hundred feet in length, the clear waters gush in mighty volume from the bowels of the earth, and run with an almost appalling sound over the rocky bottom of the cave. The grooved roof of this cavern has suggested its resemblance to the well-known “ Ear of Dionysius ” at Syracuse. Its gloomy and rocky windings have never been explored to their full extent, but certainly no source to the grand Homeric river could be more appropriate than this magnificent cavern, high up amid the pine groves of Ida. From its mouth the view down the valley of the Scamander is enchanting — a picture so fair that hardly the touches of Tennyson’s pen, in the Œnone, have done it justice. The English poet, in his description of the vales of Ida, has taken the liberty to represent the towers of Troas and Troy as visible from the foot of the mountain where Œnone tended her flocks, though a range of hills entirely closes out the sight of the Ilian plain and the valley of the lower Scamander from the region of the upper river. But the glades around the base of Ida need no adornment of fancy to make them the perfect ideal scenes for the wandering of the sweet shepherd maid whom Paris deserted for the charms of Helen. These valleys are still the grazing-fields of flocks. As, worn out with the fatigue of descending the mountain, I lay asleep in one of the most romantic of their dells, I was awakened by the warbling of a reed flute — the exquisite ami perfect reminiscence of the ancient pastoral time. It was a Yuruk shepherd with his little flock from the mountain, playing one of those plaintive wild airs of the primitive world, that seem to express at once the beauty and the sadness of existence.

Another night passed upon the turf by fhe side of the upper Scamander, listening to the rush of its waters and to the wolves calling to each other from the spurs of Ida, and another day of hard westward riding, and I touched the Hellespont again. I looked once more from the plain of Troy to the mist-covered mountain of the gods, and came out of the ancient land.

William J. Armstrong.