O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids.
* * * * * *
At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers.”
A CARPENTER OF THE TAURUS.
And here also, on the banks of this same river, swollen and rapid with the melting snows of Taurus, not far from the sea, is the forlorn-looking city where Saul of Tarsus was born to the trade of a tentmaker and the exalted career of the greatest of the Apostles. In Tarsus, once a free city under the Roman Empire, her coins proudly stamped “Metropolis,” at one time more illustrious with academies and schools of philosophy than Athens or Alexandria, the ancient Marseilles of the Mediterranean, real estate has taken a fearful tumble since Paul boasted that he was a citizen of “no mean city,” for he “was born in Tarsus.” Seven thousand squalid inhabitants still cling with amazing tenacity to life, and carry most of the real estate around with them as personal property. There is absolutely nothing of interest to be said of it, for it is not even a ruin. It is the degenerate scion of a noble ancestry, in “looped and windowed raggedness,” whose only claim to respectability is the “high connections” of past history; and of these the most is made, for among other pretensions not the least is the ancient one, that to this very port the prophet Jonah set sail when “he entered into a ship of Tarshish and paid the fare thereof.”
Riding leisurely through the suburbs, we are soon in the heart of the Great Plain. Two hundred and seventy miles from east to west, sixty-eight in greatest breadth from white-capped sea to snow-capped mountain, are the vast dimensions of this Cilician prairie. The soil is as fertile as nature ever made, the rich alluvium of three rivers constantly depositing itself in thick layers, century after century, and yet it is a comparative desert, often stricken to death with famine and calling upon the pitying world for help from starvation. And why is it? The only sufficient answer is—the Turkish Government!