I sometimes find here house-walls built of stones joined with mere earth, which must certainly have been erected long before the Greek settlement, but which rise to within a meter (3¼ feet) of the surface; in fact in the great cutting in front of my house, I have pierced through two such walls 6½ feet thick, which here formed the corner of a house, and which reach up to within a foot of the surface; they appear to extend pretty far down, and in my next letter I shall be able to give more details about them.
Although the Pergamus, whose depths I have been ransacking, borders directly upon the marshes formed by the Simoïs, in which there are always hundreds of storks, yet none of them ever settle down here. Upon one of my wooden houses and upon the stone one I had two comfortable nests made for them, but although there are sometimes twelve storks’ nests upon one roof in some of the surrounding Turkish villages, yet none will settle on mine; it is probably too cold and stormy for the little storks on “Ἴλιος ἠνεμόεσσα.”
