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.
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.
