“Vous parlez bien?” he continued.
“Très bien,” I answered unblushingly, and he was obliged to take my word for it, for when I inquired whether he were a native of Tomarza, he could not understand until I repeated the question in Turkish.
My next interlocutor was a boy who spoke English, which he had learnt, and learnt well, in an American college where he had taken his degree. He asked if he might know my name, and when I had obliged him in this particular, he begged that he might be told my object in coming to Tomarza. But I, being at the moment too busy with the ruins of the church to answer so many questions, replied that I had no object, and reduced him to a discomfited silence. The springs of action are different in American colleges.
We left Tomarza at ten o’clock and journeyed into the hills by way of Suvagen, which we reached at 12.40. Almost immediately after we had left the village, we entered a gorge, and our path climbed up through the pine-woods to Kokur Ḳayâ, a small yaila near the top of the pass known as Ḳara Bel. Here we pitched camp at five in the afternoon, close under the snow-wreaths that clung to the northern side of a rocky chain of peaks. Until sunset the clear fresh notes of a cuckoo filled the alp, and all that he had to say was worth hearing; but I wondered whether he enjoyed the society of his brother the kite, whose thin rippling cry dropped down from the rocks above him. I did not take my camp over the pass to Comana, but set out next day with Fattûḥ and a zaptieh and such simple provisions as might enable us to spend a night away from our tents if we found it necessary. Before we started I covenanted with the zaptieh, who was unusually pious, that prayers should be suspended for the day, the previous day’s journey having been seriously upset by the occurrence of the ’aṣr (the hour of afternoon prayer), though every one knows that there is a special dispensation with regard to travellers.
The long grassy pass opens on to a confused prospect of desolate mountains and hardly less deserted valleys; the gnarled and twisted pine-woods clinging to the rocks, the flowering hawthorn and regiments of yellow mullein that lined the lower course of the stream, gave to our road a memorable beauty, and if the going was not so good as might have been desired, why, we had seen worse. In the midst of these wild solitudes, five hours from Kokur Ḳayâ, we came upon a ruined shrine. It was a temple-mausoleum, and in this respect the true forerunner of the memorial churches of the Anatolian plateau ([Fig. 226]); nor did the connection between the Christian and the Pagan work cease here. The shallow engaged pilasters, broken by a moulding into two storeys, which are found in the churches, were present in the temple; if the string-courses did not yet form a continuous band over the window arches, it was easy to see how obvious the transition to the later type would be, and the character of the profiles was the same here as in the churches ([Fig. 227]). The lower part of the temple contained a vault filled with loculi; the eastern end of the upper floor was ruined and overgrown with thick brushwood, but I have no doubt that it could be disengaged and planned without difficulty. Some clearing away of earth and shrubs would be required before it would be possible to make out the nature of a building, indicated by masses of dressed stones and broken columns, which was placed immediately to the south of the temple, but the ruins standing above ground were an exceedingly instructive link in the chain of Cappadocian architecture, and I rode down to Shahr full of hope. The village lies in the heart of a valley cut out by the Gök Su, a tributary of the Saiḥûn. Its sheltered fields were covered with corn, its
