First published in 1988 by
The Overlook Press
Lewis Hollow Road
Woodstock, New York 12498
Copyright © 1988 by Freya Stark
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-918-9
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COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD
PART I
CILICIA
1. ISSUS AND CASTABALA
2. MERSIN, SOLI AND OLBA
3. CILICIAN DIGRESSION. Seleuceia to Anamur
4. CILICIAN DIGRESSION. Anamur to Antalya
PART II
PAMPHYLIA
5. THE PAMPHYLIAN PLAIN
6. MOUNT CLIMAX
7. THE PAMPHYLIAN DEFILES
8. SELGE
PART III
LYCIA
9. THE CHELIDONIAN CROSSING
10. THE VALLEY OF THE ALAGIR CHAY
11. THE EASTERN WALL OF XANTHUS
12. THE COAST ROAD OF LYCIA
13. THE ROAD TO FINIKE FROM MYRA
14. THE HIGHLANDS OF XANTHUS
15. OENOANDA AND THE PASSES OF XANTHUS
16. THE WALL OF XANTHUS
APPENDIX I (with maps):
ALEXANDER’S MARCH FROM MILETUS TO PHRYGIA
APPENDIX II:
APPROXIMATE MILEAGES
REFERENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
To B.B.,
whose kind thoughts travelled with me,
this book is dedicated.
My grateful thanks are due to Lord David Cecil, to Sir Harry Luke, to Dr. Guy Griffith, to Mr. John Sparrow, to Mr. George Bean; to the Editor of The Journal of Hellenic Studies for permission to reprint the article which appears as Appendix I, and to my patient publisher for kind advice and help.
‘He lived thirty-two years and eight months … In body he was very handsome, a great lover of hardships; of much shrewdness, most courageous, most zealous for honour and danger, and most careful of religion; most temperate in bodily pleasure, but as for pleasures of the mind, insatiable of glory alone; most brilliant to seize on the right course of action, even where all was obscure; and where all was clear, most happy in his conjectures of likelihood; most masterly in marshalling an army, arming and equipping it; and in uplifting his soldiers’ spirits and filling them with good hopes, and brushing away anything fearful in dangers by his own want of fear—in all this most noble. And all that had to be done in uncertainty he did with the utmost daring; he was most skilled in swift anticipation and gripping of his enemy before anyone had time to fear the event; he was most reliable in keeping promises or agreement; most guarded in not being trapped by the fraudulent; very sparing of money for his own pleasure, but most generous in benefits of others.
‘If Alexander committed any error through haste or in anger, or if he went some distance in the direction of Eastern arrogance, this I do not regard as important; if readers will consider in a spirit of charity Alexander’s youth, his unbroken success, and those courtiers who associate with kings … But I do know that to Alexander alone of the kings of old did repentance for his faults come, by reason of his noble nature….
‘Whosoever speaks evil of Alexander … let such a one, I say, consider of whom he speaks evil; himself being more puny, and busied about puny things, and not even bringing these to success.’
ARRIAN VII, 28–30.
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.
DUKE OF WELLINGTON: Croker Papers, 1885, Vol. III, p. 276.
NO PART OF THE WORLD CAN BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN the western and southern coasts of Turkey. Their remote valleys break from the treeless plateau, whose oozing snows feed them with harvests wherever the land is flat enough to grow wheat or barley; and to travel in and out of them is like the circumventing of an immense natural fortress, whose walls are precipices with a glacis of fertile stretches before them and whose bastions are toilsome capes that dip, one after another, to the sea.
I have made three journeys into these regions, and have written two books about them—the first dealing with the more northerly and gender coasts of Ionia, and early blossoming of Greece on the easy peninsulas loved by the Mycenean oarsmen; and the second travelling by sea, under the high, forest-clad fortresses of Lycia. When I left these, I longed to return, and after a two-year interval did so, and my account now extends the scope of the former journeys, describing things that already have altered much since I saw them, round the coasts and along the southern shore from Alexandretta to Pamphylia, into the valleys of Chelidonia and the uplands of Cibyritis behind them. The method of travel, by horse or jeep along ways not much frequented, brought me into closer contact than before with the country people of Turkey, whose kindness, hospitality, and goodness I am delighted to have discovered for myself, as many earlier travellers have done before me.
This, then, was a simple travel book to plan. Beginning at the beginning it was to move, like the voyage itself, by easy human stages to its end; and so it would have done, if Alexander, and the geography of his marches, had not pressed in to complicate the pattern.
Alexander followed this coast and crossed the Chelidonian headland, and although that early and successful adventure is dismissed in few words by all historians ancient or modern, the mere outline of the great conqueror’s footstep is enough to oust all other history from one’s path. He impressed himself upon me not all at once, but gradually, as the descriptions of Arrian and the scenes of the landscape combined; and I have kept this accidental order, and brought him by slow degrees into my story—stepping into the foreground at Issus and vanishing altogether through Cilicia, along the pirate coast. It was only when I first reached Pamphylia in 1954, that a question—like that small discrepancy which starts the train in detective stories—awakened a number of surmises. I was driving along the plain, dark under the sunset, with pointed ranges round it thin like cut paper against the clear pale sky. Looking, as Alexander must have looked, at the easy spaces on my right that seemed to lead to open valleys, and at the opposite heavy high outlines of Termessus threatening in the west: “why,” I asked myself, “should he have wished to turn west at all and attack such a difficult position, when his aim was all towards Gordium in the north?”
This question altered what was left of my journey. Instead of adding the Macedonian march down the coast to my Lycian book, as I had intended, I held my hand and decided to investigate the passes and to see whether Arrian had not left out things that it might still be possible to discover. The whole route between Xanthus and Phaselis, and the campaign against the hillmen which it included, is a blank, to which roads and passes are, I felt sure, the key. I began to ask myself other questions. Why, if they had no importance, should Arrian mention those mountain raids from Xanthus and Phaselis? And why, if one comes to that, should Alexander stop here and there for unessential reasons while his greatest adversary was gathering in strength before him? It seemed as improbable as did the unnecessary turning to the west. Only one other mountain raid is mentioned before Issus, and that too dealt with passes—near Soli in Cilicia—evidently intended to secure the road to the coast from Labranda (Karaman). I decided to spend two months with a horse or a jeep among these mountains, and reconstruct what I could.
* * * *
It is one of the caprices of history that while the farther regions of Alexander’s marches have been illuminated by the most brilliant modern scholars and enquirers, the nearer geography of Anatolia, which saw the first and most formative year and a half, or perhaps a little more, of his adventure, have been comparatively little attended to. The ancient historians dismiss it in a few pages, and the moderns are not left with much to work on; and this is perhaps due to the fact that Asia Minor, now full of elusive distance, was a part of the everyday world in Alexander’s time. The crossing of the Hellespont was a military risk and an imposing function, but no leap to the unknown. Alexander must have been familiar with it through Aristotle, who had spent three years and married at the philosophic court of the tyrant of Adramyttium, and had then lived in Mitylene. His host, the uncle of his wife, met ruin and death through the Persians’ governor, Memnon the Greek—which adds a private enmity to the first campaigns in Asia. Among the most intimate of Alexander’s friends and companions were the Lycian Aristander and the Cretan Nearchus, who knew the coastlands well; and there had been messages and intercourse with Caria, and friendship in Philip’s court with Persian refugees.
There was no need to go into great detail of routes in a country so well known; and the king who landed here was not yet solitary in his Arimazian mists, but a companion whose projects were shared by all his peers. It is this little band of brothers, so very young, that swings across the Granicus, and looks out from the acropolis of Sardis, and takes Miletus and Halicarnassus by siege and storm and marches down the coast. Nor is there any mystery about their plans: they were those of a small army in a land where even Greeks were potentially hostile; the enmity of Athens was simmering, and no fleet but hers could stand up to the Persian navies at sea. The march through Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia was a measure directed not against the land forces of Darius, but against his ships. Alexander’s objectives were the harbours with their populations of sailors and the immense forests behind them of cedar and cypress and pine, which continued through Hellenistic, Roman, Crusading ages to be valued and fought over by the timberless dynasties of Asia. When he reached Pamphylia, Alexander had in his possession all the harbours except the outlying fortresses in Caria which the Persians could hold from the sea; and when the battle of Issus was fought and won, he swung south and completed this naval policy along the Phoenician coast. Only then, with Tyre destroyed and Egypt conquered, was he able with no threat behind him to turn against the homelands of Darius.
When this policy was determined we do not know, but it was given a voice and an effect at Miletus, both during the siege and when Alexander disbanded the small navy he had.1 From here he marched across Caria and besieged Halicarnassus and—leaving three thousand men to complete its capture behind him—continued down the coast. He knew all he had to expect in the rough hills of Lycia and travelled light, without siege train, heavy baggage, and possibly with little or no cavalry to speak of (which explains his anxiety about the horses of Aspendus when he reached riding country again). He foresaw no major opposition, for much of the infantry was left behind as well. He cannot have taken more than, or even as many as, fifteen thousand men.
Historians seem to me to have by-passed a certain human interest in this march, connected with Caria and Ada the Queen. The tangle of her affairs, complicated by incest and family quarrels, had ousted her from her throne and reduced her to the one fortress of Alinda. From here, Arrian tells us, she went to meet Alexander, surrendered her stronghold, and adopted him as her son. ‘Alexander gave Alinda back to her in charge, and did not reject the adoptive title, and on the capture of Halicarnassus and the rest of Caria, put her in command of the whole.’ Arrian does not even say that he stayed in her fortress—a fact proved by Plutarch, who mentions sweetmeats that she sent him every day, and how she offered to provide cooks—a picture of eastern hospitality and the difficulty of circumventing it which every oriental traveller will recognize across the ages.
Alexander therefore stayed in Alinda on his way, and became Queen Ada’s adopted son; and all this began three years before, when he was still the nineteen-year-old prince in Macedonia, and had decided to marry Ada’s niece. He had consulted the friends who were now among his officers, and had sent a messenger from Corinth to Asia. Philip, furious with him and with the companions who encouraged so inferior an alliance, had exiled a number of his friends. And now Philip was dead and the Carian family affairs had changed: Ada’s brother, the father of the young fiancée, had ejected the widowed queen and become ruler; and he too had died, and Orontobates, a Persian brother-in-law, had seized and held his power. Ada, with all her difficulties, had become a centre for the anti-Persians in Caria. She would remember Alexander with kindness, and welcome someone who had almost become a member of her (however unsatisfactory) family: and that, it seems to me, is the background for the adoptive relationship of mother and son.
Nor is this matter historically negligible, though one would not wish to press it too far. Professor Tarn3 has shown how important in the world’s history were the thoughts of Alexander when they bridged the gap between Greek and Barbarian—the gap that Isocrates and Aristotle and every mainland Greek before him had failed to cross. Alexander crossed it. His messages from the Granicus speak of ‘the spoils of the barbarians of Asia’; but tolerance grew as he came to know the lands and their peoples, step by step till it reached the climax of his life, and an unsurpassed conclusion; for at the feast in Opis, he prays for the brotherhood of mankind. And I do not think it too far-fetched to see in the planned half-Carian, half-Persian marriage in Asia—the boy’s dream that prepared the reception of Alinda—an early step in line with the stronger steps that followed—the kindness for Sisygambis, mother of Darius, the marriage with Roxana, the Persian fusion, the gradual vision of a united world.
Any evidence of the links that unite this ancient dream, across a gap of twenty-two centuries, with our thoughts today, must interest us deeply, and give as it were a topical complexion to such events in Alexander’s life.
The immediate effect, however, was that he passed through and out of Caria with influential friends. He came, too, as a champion of the democratic nationalists who were popular among the seafaring populations of the coast. Arrian, without lingering over names or details, brings him to Xanthus, mentions an expedition there among the tribesmen, brings him across the high peninsula to Phaselis and to Pamphylia, and finally takes him, after a fight in the defile of Termessus, north to Gordium where his base and his reinforcements and his general, Parmenion, were waiting. From there he marched by the regular and usual route with all his army, across the Cilician gates to Issus and his destiny beyond.
To find out what he did between Xanthus and Sagalassus became my object; and the gathering of the evidence and gradual unwinding of the clues got involved in my daily gossip of travel. I soon discovered that my book was no longer so easy to plan. Alexander and I happened to be travelling in opposite directions; he was coming from the north while I was approaching Chelidonia from the south. I could not very well treat myself like a movie roll and drive backwards along the southern coasts; nor could I reverse one of the most inspired marches in history. The only answer was separation. Alexander’s progress is written by itself in the appendix to this book, with such evidence as to his route and motives as I have been able, to the best of my ability and very tentatively, to gather; and my own journey is related in the casual way which I enjoy. The Macedonians were never far from my thoughts: the places I visited were nearly always the places where they, too, had halted: the questions I asked myself were those that dealt with their geography, silent for so many centuries: but the order of my journeying remains haphazard as it occurred and the landscape is the landscape of today, though the past appears through it, like the warp in the world’s threadbare weaving.
Yet it is, in spite of all this, a geographic essay, of which Alexander himself might have approved. For he was, more than most men, geographically minded. As I travelled, I remembered the story familiar in the East, as I heard it many years ago from the Mirza who taught me Persian in a garden in Hamadan. It tells how they spoke in the King’s hall of the wells of life in the Lands of Darkness, and the King asked where they lay; and none could tell him until Elias, a stripling at the court, stood up and spoke of the waters, white as milk and sweet as honey, that rise through six hundred and sixty springs out of the darknesses of the west. Whoever washes there and drinks will never die.
Alexander, who wished to live for ever because his kingdom was so great, prepared for the journey. He asked what he should ride and Khizr Elias bade him mount a virgin mare, for their eyes are made of light—“and in truth,” said the Mirza, “I have noticed that a mare which has never foaled sees better than any other—and each took in his hand a salted fish, to test the waters when they reached them.
“Now when they came to the western darkness, Elias wore a jewel, and by its glitter saw on every side white wells of water, and threw his salt fish, and it swam away; and Elias washed and drank and lives for ever. But Alexander of the Two Horns missed the path and wandered, until he came out by another road, and died in his day like other mortal men. Unto God we return.”
The tale, in the way legends have, holds its essential truth and gives in right proportion the great conqueror’s passion for exploration. I can even imagine, though there is nothing to prove it, that the secret promise of Ammon was no military matter, but the sailing of unvisited and unreported seas, for which on the shore of the Indian Ocean, ‘he sacrified other sacrifices, to other gods, with different ceremonial … in accordance with the oracle given’,2 and reached perhaps the nearest limit of his dreams.
None can know. But to the geographical bent of Alexander’s mind there is abundant witness, and the surveying section of his armies, checked and controlled by himself, long provided all the geography of Asia that there was. When his troops forced him to turn back he wept, not for the unfinished conquest—for he gave away the provinces of India as he acquired them—but for the unsolved problem with which his mind was busy when he died.3
He was, one may venture to surmise, more of an explorer than an administrator by nature. His administration, at all events, was never proved, for he died too soon; but the ideas and innovations that underlay it can be traced in a normal way from clear beginnings, from Philip, Isocrates, Aristotle, Xenophon (whose contribution has, I think, been undervalued).4 Distinct novelties, such as the acceptance of divine honours, which had already been given to Lysander,5 the establishment of financial overseers, which Xenophon had foreshadowed4—these materials were transformed by his genius, but they lay there ready to his hand: and in military matters also the principle of growth is apparent—from Sicily through Epaminondas to the reorganization of the Macedonian armies; from Xenophon’s first use of reserves,6 to Cyrus and Agesilaus with their lessons for cavalry in Asia: the climax is as it were gradual.
But the explorer’s readiness for the unknown, the quality that vivifies human darkness, the finding of the Waters of Life, to this—whatever the old Mirza may say—he attained. Combined with military genius it allowed him to conquer the world, and to hold its imagination as long as histories are written, and one responds to it now as men answered to it in his time. As he vanishes across the Asiatic ranges—with his veterans growing older, and his friends and officers about him writing the matter-of-fact details that Arrian copied—the atmosphere of legendary youth surrounds him, the explorers’ atmosphere of The Tempest, which also grew from geographic origins in a remote, enchanted world.
Deseritur Taurique nemus, Perseaque Tarsos,
Coryciumque patens exesis rupibus antrum,
Mallos, et extremae resonant navalibus Aegae.
LUCAN: Pharsalia, in, 225.
Next day at dawn he passed the Gates with his
full force and descended into Cilicia.
ARRIAN, I, 4, 4.
Darius, then, crossed the height by the Amanian Gates and marched towards Issus; and he slipped in unperceived behind Alexander.
ARRIAN II, 7, 1.
… when the two armies were close, Alexander riding along his front bade them be good men and true, calling aloud the names, with all proper distinctions, not only of the commanders, but even squadron leaders and captains, as well as any of the mercenaries who were conspicuous for rank or for any deed of valour…. Once within range, he and his suite … took the river at the double, in order to confound the Persians by the swoop of their attack.
ARRIAN II, 10, 1–4.
IN APRIL 1954 I TOOK A SEAT IN AN ALEPPO CAR WITH TWO Arabs, two English and a Turk, and the rain caught us before we were well out among the beehive villages that have mounded themselves through the ages against the skyline. There would be something eccentric about an oriental journey that made no false start to begin with, and we were lucky, for our one Turkish passenger was a man of influence, his new suitcase was on the outside of the roof where it was getting wetter than ours, and he was able and willing to make our driver turn back to hunt for a tarpaulin among his friends.
The driver was an Aleppo man, ‘Aleppo, out of Aleppo, out of Aleppo for generations’, and dusted his car cheerfully in the rain while we waited; and we set off for the second time with the feeling that all was in order. The rain continued: the Greco-Roman arch that marks the Syrian frontier was easily passed; at the Turkish border, more conscientious or less weather-conscious, they made us unload and load up again in sheets of water; and the afternoon was late before we crossed the marshy plain of Amuk, and battleship hulls of mountain closed about us dark and green. The tumbling red streams of Amanus washed across our road. For a moment we saw the plain behind us, wide-flooded and beautiful, in which Darius had camped with his army: then down to where the ships of Iskenderun (Alexandretta), like a row of sentinels, were anchored in their roadstead along the crescent of the shore.
‘It was a trading place, and many merchant ships were lying at anchor,’ says Xenophon of the lost city of Myriandus, and the same description will do for Iskenderun, its descendant, where the yearly British ships alone have increased in the last century from about forty to eight hundred. Mr. Redman, our Consul there, entertained me kindly, and lent me his car for the battlefield of Issus, which has been located some twenty miles away to the north on the banks of the Deli Chay.
The rain had been just such a storm as kept Alexander’s army in camp on the November day before the battle in 333 B.C. But for it, he would have marched across Amanus, and Darius would have been able to seize and hold the passes behind him, and the world’s history might have taken another course. As it was, I reflected, the swollen rivers would now make the scenery more or less the same. The whole plan of the landscape appears easily, in fact, to the imagination, the plain opening long and narrow between the flat shore of the Issic bay and the steep Amanus ridges, whose defiles like funnels fan their torrents out towards the west.
The march of Darius had, perhaps unintentionally (for it was done by a matter of hours) cut off the invader’s army. The Persian king had brought his forces across a northerly pass, probably the very anciently frequented one of Bahche;1 and he had descended on the roadstead of Issus and massacred the Macedonian sick that had been left there. When the news was confirmed, Alexander, who had already reached the neighbourhood of Iskenderun, waited only to give the troops their dinner, and marched them back in darkness to seize the narrow passage by the sea.
Only a ruin is left now—the shapeless fragment of a gate called the pillar of Jonah, where the Armenians later on had their customs,2 with a medieval fort above; but Xenophon describes the wall of an earlier time, and towers on either side of a mountain stream, and Cyrus asking the Spartan ships to help him there as he expected trouble. Alexander in his turn took no chances, and kept his men surrounded by outposts ‘on the crags’ from midnight to dawn.
The mound of Issus, or possibly Nicopolis if those two are not the same, shows here beyond the American road and the railway, against the bay and the Aegean horizon. It is still a mere three cables3 from the sea’s edge, so that the shore-line cannot have retreated much since Cyrus pitched his tents there beside his anchored fleet. The only city at that time was Issus; and the present half-way village of Payas, with its bridges, mosque, minaret and old castle, is not visibly earlier than the ages of Islam. Towards the open ground where it now stands Alexander descended in the first light, leading his troops in column. On the flat, he was able to deploy the phalanx, and brought up battalion after battalion to fill the space between the mountains and the sea. The cavalry, ranged behind the infantry, was brought forward, and the whole army—not more than twenty-nine thousand—marched on in order of battle, across what is now partly cultivation but then, being so thinly peopled, was probably scrub, easy and hard for the marching men to tread.
Descriptions of the battle mention the mountain, which pushes into spurs or withdraws in bays, so that the soldiers were crowded close at one time or spaced more thinly at another; and when the two armies came in sight of each other, the Persians raised their fierce confused war-cry, and the less numerous troops of Alexander heard their own voices enlarged and redoubled by the forest and the overhanging slopes. All this is very apparent as one crosses one after another the three parallel rivers that run their short impetuous courses to the shore. The Deli Chay has been identified with Pinarus, where the battle was fought; and I rather wondered why the more southerly Kuru Chay had not been chosen, giving as it does a ten- instead of a fifteen-mile march between the start at dawn and the opening of the battle, and crossing the plain at a slightly narrower place, more like the fourteen hundred stadia of Polybius. This measurement, I take it, refers to the narrowest section of the plain, which widens with every torrent that pours out of its defile in the range. This opening and shutting of the ground explains Darius’ manœuvre. He stationed about twenty thousand men on the ridge ‘that opened here and there to some depth and had, in fact, bays like the sea; and, bending outwards again, brought those posted on the heights to the rear of Alexander’s right wing’. Centuries later, such manning of the heights of Issus gave a great victory to the emperor Severus;4 but Alexander foresaw the danger, and as the plain widened brought forward the cavalry to the right wing where he commanded, and pushed patrols and archers to deal with the menace from the heights.
The three rivers looked very much alike, and I took the Deli Chay as the authorities offered it, and found it beyond the orange gardens of Dörtyol, or Fourways, flowing under the Ojakli bridge through a landscape of planes and poplars against the cloudy background of the hills. On either side of it the open ground sloped evenly and almost imperceptibly under beds of gravel that the floods of the ages have carried down. The pale rain-washed pebbles made easy banks, except where a bend, or a pressure of the current, scooped dwarf precipices, not high but crumbly: the sticks of the Persian stockade could easily be bent or pulled out from so yielding a foundation, which was nowhere too high for a man on horseback to be even with the defenders of the bank. The muddy current still looked as if it were tossing foam-crested manes of horses. The river had probably been lower, even after rain, in November, than now with the winter behind it.
I spent a long time here, imagining the battle very clearly, as Arrian and Curtius describe it, but puzzled by the flight. Alexander, safe across with the Persian left wing routed, turned to help his phalanx. It was in difficulties with the river-bank—which the horsemen had negotiated more easily—and with the Greek mercenaries who were charging for Darius from the top. Only when he saw the battle secure, did Alexander turn to pursue. This time it was evidently cultivated country, as one would expect in the neighbourhood of a city like Issus, for ‘the riders were hurrying by narrow roads in a crowded horde … as much damaged being ridden over by one another as by their pursuers’: they were no longer in the scrubby open where they could scatter.
Darius had seen his officers killed around him, with their faces on the ground as they had fallen, their bodies covering their wounds’. He fled in his chariot, as long as he found it level; and ‘when he met defiles and other difficulties, left his chariot and threw away his shield and his outer mantle, nay, left even his bow in the chariot, and fled on horseback’; and these things were found by Alexander, before the falling darkness turned him from pursuit.
Out of all this information, it seemed clear to me that Darius—whatever pass he took in coming, and the Bahche is the obvious one for a man with an army—cannot have fled except by one of the shorter tracks that led across the Amanus up the river defiles close by. Otherwise, if he had made for the northern pass, he would first of all have met no defiles for hours, to force him on to a horse; his retreat would have led him near enough to his camp to pick up his family in passing; and lastly, the finding of his chariot so quickly by Alexander—easy enough at the mouth of a defile where only one road is available—would have been much more of a coincidence on the wide northern plain. I looked longingly at the likely pass, which opens to steep high pastures east of Erzin, and can be ridden across in twelve hours, they told me, to the Amuk plain: but the snow still lay thick upon it, and would do so until towards the end of April; and I have not yet been across. The Consul’s Greek driver took me back to Iskenderun, discussing tactics; and I left next day for Adana and Mersin, with four Turks and a Turkish colonel’s wife in a car.
On this, the second of my Turkish journeys, I still spoke very little of the language. I sat, usually in the 4th century B.C., but otherwise alone, while the tides of life rippled around me, and was roused from such torpor by the bulk of the colonel’s wife pressing me into the middle of the front seat for which I had paid double to enjoy it by myself. The colonel and a friend were seeing her off, and they and the driver and all the passengers looked at me, when I protested, with that furniture-look which the old-fashioned Turk keeps for women who begin to make themselves conspicuous in public. I might have been a fly walking up a window-pane within their field of vision. The driver’s conscience pressed him to say “zarar yok” (it doesn’t matter) at intervals; but the woman continued to sit. The British lion disguised as a worm suddenly woke up inside me, and I vaulted over her thighs and wedged myself between her and the window, so that the colonel when next he turned round found that he was no longer talking to his wife. A horrid silence followed. The six men remonstrated; I fixed my eyes on a roof, and they gave it up. The colonel went off, looking absent-minded. Having obtained justice I was willing to be amiable. I explained how necessary the window-seat is to a photographer; and a thin little melting of friendliness trickled back into the car.
This was helpful, for no sooner were we out on the open road than two policemen broke from a mulberry hedge, held up their hands, and asked to see what was in my five pieces of luggage on the roof. Having been soaked to the skin to show them at the frontier two days before, I was naturally put out, but there was nothing to be done: unsuitable objects were spread out in the dust while the army, firmly holding its rifles, looked on.
“Can’t any of them be bought in Turkey?” the sergeant asked, bewildered, appealing to the landscape where the battle of Issus was visible in the distance.
By this time an obliging engineer had climbed out from the back and advised that if I had some little scrap of paper given at the frontier, all would be well. I had, and handed it. It was what was wanted, and the fault was mine for not knowing all about it. The soldiers became filled with kindness. They tried in a pathetic way to help me pack. They had done their destruction with no malice—no official sadism—merely an anxiety to Do Right—an awful thing in Men of Action uninfluenced by Words! I spurned them, and worked on by myself moaning “zahme, zahme, sorrow, sorrow”, as I did so: but when all was over, and the luggage tied on to the roof again, we were reconciled. It was their work and duty, said they. It was hard and disagreeable for them to have to do it, said I. We shook hands and parted and the engineer at the back expressed his enthusiasm over the army’s condescension: “but it was your politeness,” he added, “that won them over.” I felt I had been British enough for one morning, and let it go, entranced by eagles which I afterwards heard were vultures, soaring over Issus in the sun.
A flat expanse wide as a plain, the Jihan or Pyramus valley, lay open before us, with the Iron or Amanic Gates of the Cilician highway on its western edge.5 They were not much to look at: sloping like Victorian shoulders, one behind the other they sank to nothing: but they were at the meeting of great thoroughfares and people had come and gone here continuously, either by Alexander’s route to Syria or by Bahche eastward to Mesopotamia. A way led up from them through an openness already green with summer, and an Arab castle of basalt on a stepped mound stood guard. It was called Toprak Kale and was the first I had seen in Turkey with that fairy-tale completeness of the Islamic fortress. The walls and towers went up diagonally across its grass-grown terraces, in a shallow landscape of smooth green hills.
At the top of the trouée, some ten miles away beyond the Pyramus (Jihan), the line of the pass is again held by Castabala—now Bodrum. There, according to Curtius, Alexander joined Parmenion, sent ahead from Tarsus to secure the passes. This cannot be true, for Alexander marched by the coast, while his cavalry moved straight eastward and joined him by the Amanic Grates; and Arrian is explicit, and gives no time for a detour and two river crossings to be added to a march of over thirty-five miles in two days.6
But Curtius’ source perhaps referred to Castabala territory, which could easily stretch so far south: and Parmenion probably reached the northern fortress, for he patrolled the outlets of all the passes with his Thessalian horse before joining Alexander in the march south to Issus.
Just after the Macedonians had gone, Darius came into this valley and turned south down its natural avenue towards the sea. The Bodrum fortress is a descendant of the one that must have watched him, whose stones can still be seen in the foundations. It is a small castle left on a rock by the Knights of St. John, with towers slanting together like a handful of spears. At its back the ridge was cut through in more ancient days to make a passage of over fifteen feet between two halves of a city. A street of columns with brackets and late Corinthian capitals led down from it in Roman and Byzantine ages, and half-fallen apses of buildings, Christian or pagan, stand deep in corn, as if all were ripening for the same harvest. A wide and glowing view basks in the sun. The northern track, still used, rises between tilled hillsides; on the north-east are the far ‘pierced mountains’ of the Arab wars; and the river in front fills its curves from bank to bank with a strong current, where the years can see themselves reflected as they ride by.
Darius found it not very different. The fire altars were carried across the pass and the young men in red cloaks marched before him; and those who led the chariot and the horses of the sun; and the twelve nations; and the Immortals with their apples, in sleeved tunics and gold; and the King’s relatives that surrounded his high car; and the thirty thousand footmen and the four hundred horses; and the six hundred mules and three hundred camels with money; and the chariots of the mother and wife, the women and children behind: all this Curtius tells, as some Greek soldier must have seen it, who describes with professional disgust the ‘discordant, undisciplined army’ in the camp before Issus.
But we, driving through the Amanic Gates at the southern end of the great avenue on this particular day, saw nothing of all that, for we followed the main road of the plain. We passed under the Castle of Snakes, where the stubble was burning, and storks, like diplomats with narrow shoulders and well-tailored cut-away clothes, walked about without any signs of enjoyment, swallowing frogs that jumped from the flames.
We passed Missis, the ancient Mopsuestia, a shabby little town of decay, whose bridge was built by Valerian and repaired by Justinian, and Walid and Mu’tasim,7 when the Pyramus was one of the rivers of Paradise and sailed by Tancred’s galleys;8 we ran through cotton fields, whose cultivation began with the Crusaders and was renewed by Muhammad Ali; and came to Adana, filled with noisy streets; and to Tarsus across the yellow Cydnus—not clear as it once was, but thick with mud, as if Time and all ruins were inside it—between banks where Alexander bathed and the Caliph Ma’mun died, and Julian the Apostate was buried. But as for us, we drove to Mersin and the friendliest of living welcomes at the Toros hotel.
He took a guard into Soli, and fined them two hundred silver talents, because they were still inclined towards Persia … and marched upon the Cilicians who held the heights. In seven days—no more—he partly drove them out, partly received surrenders, and returned to Soli.
ARRIAN II, 5, 5–6.
MERSIN, AS A RESORT, HAS LITTLE TO RECOMMEND IT. It is built along a flat beach, with no known history; and Captain Beaufort, charting this coast in 1812, found nothing but a few huts and some ancient tiles scattered on the malarial level. Prosperity began with the Crimean War and a demand for cereals,1 and tobacco and cotton now ensure it; wooden piers and jetties are multiplying along the shallow sands; and streets and houses add themselves behind them. A club, a ‘family garden’, a casino and cinemas are there, and the market starts at 4 a.m. in summer with shoeblacks seated in a row, their boxes bright with brass ranged like portable altars before them. The box is not only useful to hold polishes and brushes; it is a symbol of the confraternity, and cannot be merely bought with money. From the window of my hotel I dropped my sandals down and watched them being treated with that artistic enthusiasm which the Middle East concentrates on its shoes, however shabby; and I could then lean out and look at the market unloading lorry-loads of vegetables, and see the level sun pushing shafts into dingy crannies, to give the illusion that even the flotsam of the man-made world still shares the life of nature.
A good traveller does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is a part of his own Leisure; and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveller and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be.
A certain amount of trouble is required before one can enter into such unity, since every country, and every society inside it, has developed its own ritual of living, as well as its own language. Some knowledge of both is essential, and—just as our circumambient air contains melody but cannot express it until a voice is given—so a technique or voice is needed for human, or indeed for all intercourse. To find this unity makes me happy: its discovery comes unexpectedly upon me, not only with people, but with animals, or trees or rocks, or days and nights in their mere progress. A sudden childish delight envelops me and the frontiers of myself disappear; I feel sorry for, but also try to avoid, the human beings who estrange themselves in separate cells like porcupines in needles.
In Mersin, neither language nor knowledge were sufficient. I was at home in the hotel, whose owner overflowed with kindness and with a passion for cleanliness unique in my experience of Turkish inns; but, when I went out to eat at the lokanta on the beach, a dusty little wind fretted the oleanders, and the waiter tried to talk French, and the feeling would come over me that They and I were different—the root of all troubles in the world.
As my meal was finished and people had left, I sat on, watching a woman in check trousers; she was holding a pail of tired vegetables and talking to a man who had married her daughter. “She is begging him not to gamble,” the waiter came up and explained, unasked, in simplified language that I might understand. So one is drawn in. The son-in-law saw her off and returned—small, weak, curly-headed, with yellow shoes and showy pullover; not good nor bad, but boneless. He sat and ate at the expensive restaurant and wasted his beer half finished, and I wondered where his wife lived—in some dingy little hole. At the end of each meal time, when the people had thinned out, the mother-in-law took her pail of garbage and went off with a meagre white-haired man, who sat feeding his dog till she came. The dog too was a caricature. His hind leg was broken, and he limped with his masters—a trio held together by affection in a world that gives them little, and touching, because of the razor-edge we live on, to us all.
When I got back to the hotel another drama was being developed. A woman sat looking out to sea, dabbing her eyes and bursting into Arabic regardless of the public lounge. She was very fat, and obviously came from across the border, and another immensely fat woman soon joined her. How unjust, that tears should look ridiculous when one is fat! The one man in the party thought so too, and slunk out quietly when the new arrival released him, leaving the great harim background of Asia to operate alone.
Next morning I drove westward in a taxi across the plain that even in the days of Cyrus grew ‘sesame, millet, panic, wheat and barley, and is surrounded on every side, from sea to sea, by a lofty and formidable range of mountains’.2 It narrows, until the rough Cilicia closes the coast with snouts of limestone and the difficult haunts of the pirates begin; and the last of the ancient cities before it closes was Soli, whose proverbial loutishness gave our language the word solecism—a place now filled with orange gardens and prosperous small houses, that have planted their foundations on the line of its former walls. Out of the two hundred pillars of the colonnaded street which the Hellenistic age invented, twenty-three still stand; a heaped mound near-by shows the theatre; and an artificial oval harbour, built with moles to protect it, is filled with a petrified beach where the sea washes shallow, as if over a concrete floor. Peasant women had come down to picnic; their young girls were flying kites from the headland; their horse was tethered beside its cart; and along the shore the dunes stood in column to hold the sea-wind back. Alexander fined the city for its Persian leanings, and stayed to review his forces, and held his games here: and during this stay, marched away for a week to deal with the country of the hillmen.
He had to safeguard the only good alternative route west of the Cilician Gates. It leads from Corycus and Silifke and the Gök Su valley—the ancient Calycadnus—to Karaman and so to the plateau south of Konia,3 and is possibly the route by which Epyaxa the Queen of Cilicia was sent to the coast by Cyrus.4 On its south-eastern edge was the priest-state of Olba, whose temple, built some time about the year 300 B.C.,