LEVANTINE CITIES.
THERE are no sadder countries to travel in than the
desolate lands about the Aegean. Plants and beasts and man have never prospered there in their struggle with the earth, and now what little they had gained is being lost again. The great landscapes are made up of nothing but soil and stones. Trees and shrubs imitate the rocks in their hard lines and colours ; and great cities, fallen in ruins, seem to have been subdued and incorporated by the predominant earth.
The eeriness of a ruined city, the most eerie of natural things, is not independent of the manner of its introduction. Should a Londoner be transported on a flying carpet straight from Piccadilly to Nicopolis, probably he would remain quite unaffected by admiration or wonder, except at the novelty of the means of transit. To each such scene there is the proper approach.
The true initiation to Nicopolis is by a day's ride through the gorges of Pindus, sloping towards the west, where the green torrents of Acheron leap and glimmer under high precipices of dark rock, sometimes foaming through narrow channels, sometimes gliding in circling pools among round white stones, the pavement of a sunless gorge. Far above the river the sun gleams on the white clothes of Vlach goatherds, and lights the brown shoulders of the hills with a golden glow against the blue. As the day passes, the mountains fade out into a marshy plain, mingled with which run inlets from a shallow land-locked bay. By the low margin the traveller rides suddenly into a Roman town, angular masses of fallen brick, the long rounded mounds of the Circus, a few bold blocks of building clothed with vegetation, their outlines softened into the natural shapes of earth. A great theatre stands down by the long waves that ripple up across the sands. In its crumbling corridors and antechambers there is no sound but the slow, pulsating murmur from the sea.
At the other end of the Levant, the last day's journey to Nicaea leads across a cultivated plain baked hard and dry by the sun and shelterless from the dust and blazing heat. The rare villages seem trying to sink into the earth to escape the sunlight. Their flat-roofed houses, all equal in height, look like little natural terraces, scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding plain but for the single white minaret that marks the mosque in each. No wayfarers venture into the heat of the day ; except perhaps a panting, dusty Pasha in his fly, forced abroad by administrative cares ; or a squat Tartar driving his pack-train down from the plateau of Olympus, which hangs like a cloud high up in the sky upon the horizon, its base concealed in haze. Towards evening the track winds over a range of low hills. The dusty maize-fields disappear, and in their place come shrubberies of stiff dry arbutus, covering the slopes so densely that for hours there is nothing to be seen but their sapless crinkled growth, until the watershed is past and the next plain appears below. A lake stretches along the foot of the hills. At its farther end the sun has just set, leaving the water shining with a pearly lustre. Round the nearer end roll dark velvet billows of ilex, their spray the silver foliage of olive woods. Where the waters pierce farthest into the forest a double circle of towers rises above the trees. Tall and narrow upon the inner wall, and short and strong upon the outer, the towers are set alternately ; and towards the four quarters of the compass four square masses of building, ancient Roman gates, arch themselves frowningly across the visible tracks that still lead along their old courses into the town.
" Chelebi ! Chelebi ! " sings the guide, enlivening his tedious journey with a long nasal chant; "this is Isnik, Isnik, Isnik ! Emperors of Rilm dwelt there of old. Behold it! a village in the wide dominions of the Pa-a-adishala." Since the Turk came, the town within the walls has shrivelled, like a dry nut in its shell, to a handful of poor wooden huts, lying among little fields and gardens. There is the tomb of a Mahomnriedan saint, very sacred and very greasy. But scattered among the trees stand old Byzantine
churches, the meeting-places • of Councils, brilliant with Lagmentary frescoes and mosaic ; and as darkness obliterates the ugly details of decay the wonderful perfection of the fortifications, the beautiful proportions of their strong right- angled outlines; the strange Eastern touches in their detail, suggest no thought of the present, but recreate in impression and imagination the days of their Byzantine builders. •A secret stair for the defenders gives access to the inner rampart on the landward side. Beyond the lake the sky is filled with the liquid emerald splendour which is the twilight of an Anatolian. day. Below there lies a narrow belt of white water, the background of a black line of walls and towers thrown into strong relief against the light. The village buffaloes trample past below, driven to their evening bath; or is it the vanguard of Palaeologus, marching to reconquer the Empire of the East ?
Nicopolis has lost its human associations and faded back into the earth. Nicaea remains unaltered by time : it has perished by no catastrophe; but its vitality has gradually dwindled and disappeared, leaving perfect and uninjured the dead shell of mediaeral life. Back again across the Aegean, in the dazzling atmosphere of Greece, there is a town of classic times, Oneirocastro, which has suffered a rarer change. Age has etherealised it among its secret crags into a magic city, shining with the rainbow colours and shaped in the visionary forms of fairyland. The path to it winds among rounded golden bills that rise slowly towards a group of distant peaks. Their lower slopes are in the shade, where pale-grey aloes in the gloomy cypress woods look like the waving wings of spirits wan- dering in Limbo. The sunlight burns above upon sheets of crimson oleander flowers. Over great tracts there is a metallic gleam, like the sheen upon a beetle's wing, where the growth of dry star thistles floats as lightly as a mist upon the hill- side. Gorgeous butterflies, too lazy to fly, make little patches of mosaic on the hot ground. Strange insects glitter among the stones in enamelled armour of green and brown ; and. lizards like sapphire arrows shoot in pursuit. The air is so clear and full of light that it seems to shine with a faint phosphorescence of its own, bathing all it touches with its luminosity.
This fiery loveliness is the preparation ; but Oneirocastro itself is built high up on one of those peaks seen all day upon the sky-line, and is not reached till after nightfall, when the moon is up. The ancient track to it ascends a cone of marble, bristling with sharp spikes of splintered rock, and shattered at the summit into a group of natural spires, whose points rise into the open flood of moonlight. The marble glistens, wherever the moonbeams fall, with a weird green light. Elsewhere everything is profoundly dark. From time to time a stone-cicala sends from its cranny a loud, shrill cry. The lighted spaces seem thin and unreal, as if they had no greater substance than night air distorted to the vision by enchantment. In the most brightly illuminated spot, at the foot of a crag which forms the foundation of the crowning spires, a single high rampart is vaguely seen, lost at either end in the darkness. Its smooth atone surfaces, with- out seam or flaw, stand in a straight, unbroken line among the rocks along the hillside, guarding the imagined hall, whose columns must rise somewhere out of sight and hidden far above among the pinnacles. There lives the magician at whose spell these shimmering unrealities grew from the moonlight. In a moment they will fade; but perhaps before they vanish some shadowy procession of laurel-bearing youths will pass along the hill, some quiet strain of old Delphic song will be heard among the crags, bringing assurance that here time has but purified, and not destroyed.
Oneirocastro is hard to find. But whoever will travel long and far in the hot summer-time, searching through all the recesses of Attica, and Thessaly, and the Peloponnese, may come upon it at last, unexpectedly, perhaps in a familiar place which he has passed and seen, unseeing, a hundred times.
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