himself and upon Enoch, so that those are the Two Sorrows of Heaven's Kingdom. Thereafter Eli shuts the book, and the birds utter a great cry of lamentation at that time, and beat their wings against their bodies, so that streams of blood come from them for fear of the pains of Hell and of the Day of Doom.

Since, then, it is the souls of the Saints unto whom is appointed eternal possession of the kingdom of Heaven, that make this lamenta tion, meeter were it for the men of the world though it were tears of blood that they shed in having heed of Doomsday and the pains of Hell. It is then the Lord will pay His Own wage to everyone in the world, to wit, rewards to the righteous and pains to the sinners.

Then thus will be put the sinners into a depth of eternal pain, into which the lock of God's word will shut them under the hatred of the Judge of Doom for ever.

But the Saints and the Righteous,

the folk of charity and of mercy, shall be set on God's right hand to possess for ever the Kingdom of Heaven. To wit: a place wherein they shall be in that great glory without age, without waning, without limit, without end, for ever and

ever.

Thus, then, is that City, to wit: a Kingdom without pride, without haughtiness, without falsehood, without blasphemy, without fraud, without pretence, without reddening, without blushing, without disgrace, without deceit, without envy, without pride, without disease, without sickness, without poverty, without nakedness, without destruction, without extinction, without hail, without snow, without wind, without wet, without noise, without thunder, without darkness, without coldness-a Kingdom noble, admirable, delightful, with fruitfulness (?), with light, with odour of a plenteous Earth, wherein is delight of every goodness.

FINIT. AMEN. FINIT.

concluding the history of this Greek State, we enquire in vain for any benefit that it conferred on the human race,' says Finlay, as he winds up the crimestained scroll of the Byzantine empire of Trebizond. A severer sentence could hardly have been passed; yet none perhaps has been ever more thoroughly borne out by facts and memorials, in annal or in monument. Originated, to borrow the same able historian's phrase once more, in accident, continued in meanness, and extinguished in dishonour, the Comnenian dynasty has left on the Pontic coast but few enduring records, and those few unmistakably stamped with the leading characteristics of the empire itself. The straggling, loosebuilt walls of the ill-constructed citadel of Trebizond; the dwarfish littleness and tasteless ornamentation of the over-vaunted church of St. Sophia; the still feebler proportions of the churches of St. Eugenius, St. John, and others, now doing duty as mosques in different quarters of the town, belong to and attest the type of those who reared them; and their defects are rendered but the more glaring by a servile attempt to copy the great though ungraceful models of earlier Byzantine date. If this be true, as, begging Fallmereyer's pardon, true it is, of the quondam capital, what can we expect in the less important and outlying points of the ephemeral empire, where the littleness of art is still more disadvantageously contrasted with the gigantic proportions of nature?

Yet even here, among these relics of a debased age, we occasionally come across some grand constructional outline indicative of others than the Comnenes; of nobler races, or at least of superior organisation. Such are the Cy

clopean fragments at Kerasunt, the broken columns of Kyrelee, and the solid though shattered walls of 'Eski-Trabezoon,' or 'Old Trebizond,' situated some sixty miles east of the present town. With these may rank the rock-built monasteries scattered throughout the mountains that line the coast; and which, though bearing the traces of later modification and, too often, defacement, are yet not unworthy relics of the time when Chrysostom preached and Pulcheria reigned. And of these is the monastery of the Virgin, the Panagia of Sumelas.

High-perched among the upper ranges of the Kolat mountain chain, south-east of Trebizond, from which it is distant about thirty miles inland, Sumelas is the pilgrimbourne of innumerable 'Greeks,' to use a customary misnomer for the mongrel population of Byzantine, Slavonian, and Lazic origin that here professes the orthodox' faith, who flock to the shrine of the Panagia on the yearly recurrence of her great festival day, the 27th of August in our calendar, the 15th in theirs. At other seasons her visitors are comparatively few: indeed, snow, rain, and mist render the convent almost inaccessible for full eight months of the twelve; nor can the road be called easy travelling at any time. Hence the convent, in spite of its widespread nor undeserved reputation, is visited by Europeans seldom, by the inert and uninformed Levantines hardly ever. For us, however, Ovid's fellow-convicts in our Pontine Sydney, a trip to Sumelas, so managed as to coincide with one of the rare intervals of clear weather on this murky coast, and yet avoid the crowd and other inconveniences of the festival epoch, was too desirable a break in the sameness of Turko-Levantine life not to be un

dertaken; and a fine week towards the beginning of August at last afforded the wished-for opportunity.

So in the early dawn, while the waning moon yet glittered above the morning star in the calm slaty sky, we started, a band of five horsemen in all, two negro servants included, bound for the celebrated 'Mariamana,' as the convent is here popularly called; and rode out of Trebizond with the huge bare mass of Boze-Tepeh, or the Brown Hill,' once Mount Mithrios, on our right, and the black and brackish pool, entitled by geographical courtesy a sea, on our left. We followed the new road, that, when Turkish engineers shall have learnt the first rudiments of their art, is to render the route between Trebizond and Erzeroom amenable to wheeled carriages instead of the classic caravans that now, as for centuries bygone, alone thread the double mountain pass. For at present the roughest waggon that ever lumbered along a Devonshire lane could not venture on four miles of the Erzeroom track without an unpleasant certainty of being either upset or jolted to shivers on the way. To us, however, on the present occasion this matters little, for Turkish horses are sure-footed as Spanish mules; so on we ride; and after rounding the great corner cliff that, jutting right out on the water's edge, retains the classic-sounding name of Eleusa, we enter on the sandy delta of the Pixytes river, now degraded into the 'Deyermend-Déréh,' or 'Mill-Course' of Turkish nomenclature. Its valley, penetrating south-west far into the mountains, has at all times served as directing line to the great commercial track that, bending eastwards to Erzeroom, brings Koordistan and Persia into communication with the basin of the Black Sea and Constantinople. Up this valley we now turn, and soon cross a huge barrier-ridge of rolled

stones, the joint work of sea and river in glacial times, when the now shrunk torrent was full fed by vast tracts of snow and ice in its parent mountains. And here I may add parenthetically that over all the highland of inner Anatolia, from the Lazistan coast range to the watershed of the Euphrates, I have met with numerous traces of that cold Post-Pliocene epoch, such as furrowed rocks, erratic boulders, rounded prominences, and huge moraines, stretching far down into the plains from the summits that even now, though long since bared of their icy caps by a milder climate, maintain patches of snow all the year through.

At

Next we thread a pass of remarkable beauty, where picturesque rocks jut out among thick brushwood, or steep slopes, all grass and wild flowers, run high up against the sky; at times the gorge narrows into a ravine, where black volcanic crags barely leave room for the pathway along the right bank of the brawling torrent; while the old traffic-route, despairing of a footing below, passes by the heights several hundred feet overhead. The general type of scenery recalls North Wales, or the Rothen-Thurm pass of the Carpathian district. last, just as the eastern sun bursts in full light and heat over the fircrowned mountain tops on our left, we reach a point where the valley expands into a wide marshy plain, thick-planted with maize, while the roadside is lined with rows of Khans, or halting places-long low sheds, with no accommodation to offer beyond shelter from the weather, and the possibility of fire-lighting: some are in good repair; others in various stages of broken roof and crumbling wall; others mere traces. For in Khans, as in every other kind of building, Eastern custom or superstition forbids repair, and prefers to supplement the injuries of time or accident by a new construc

tion in toto alongside, rather than attempt the restoration of the old one once decayed. Hence, among other causes, the frequent vestiges of deserted houses, mosques, and the like, that cumber the lines of traffic everywhere in Eastern Turkey, and convey to the traveller's mind the idea of even more ruin and decay than is really the case; being in fact the symbols of transportation as often as of desertion.

Little shops, mixed up with the Khans, offer eggs, sour apples, coarse tobacco, cigarette paper, matches, nuts, cheese, and such like articles of cheap consumption to the caravan-drivers and other passers-by. All around the hillsides, here more moderate in their slope, and patched with corn, maize, and tobacco, are studded with rubble-built cottages, each one at a neighbourly distance from the other; these, taken collectively, form the village of Khosh-Oghlan,' or the 'Pleasing-Boy.' Such is the name; though who was the individual boy, and in what respect he made himself so particularly agreeable, were vain now to enquire. It is the first stage of the inland journey; so, obedient to the usage of which our attendants have not failed with a broad African grin to remind us, we alight at one of the booths for a cup of coffee, over-roasted and over-boiled as all Turkish coffee is, yet refreshing; and then go on our way. Seven or eight miles more lead us still up the same 'Deyermend' valley, past some pretty Swiss-like wooden bridges, and many fine points of mountain view, past the straggling hamlet of Yeseer-Oghlon,' or the 'Son of the Prisonera Prisoner and a Son now no less forgotten by history and tradition than the Pleasing Boy' before mentioned - where, not long since, two Frenchmen, hacked and slashed, paid with their life-blood the penalty of the meddlesome hectoring usual to their

VOL. III. NO. XIV. NEW SERIES.

tribe among strangers; till we reached the high stone arched bridge called of 'Maturajik,' and, crossing by it to the other side of the valley, climb aloft above the torrent as it forces its way through huge clusters of columnar basalt, piled up tier over tier of rusty brown; then descend to the little plain known, as are also the many scattered houses that jot the green or brown mountain sides all round, by the title of Jevezlik,' or the 'Place of Walnut-trees:' these last stand before us, green and spreading by the water's edge. Here again the road runs the gauntlet between shops. and Khans, for we have now done eighteen miles, the ordinary day's march of a caravan from Trebizond. Besides, Jevezlik is a place of some note, partly as the residence now of a district sub-governor, formerly of a dreaded 'Dereh-Bey,' or 'Lord of the Valley;' a euphemism for Lord of Robberies-but more so from its central position, which renders it the meeting-point of three great tracks, and which would in classic Italy have insured its dedication to 'Diana Trivia:' the winter road to Erzeroom; the summer ditto; and the road of Sumelas or Mariamana. Of these routes, the first follows the main valley south-west up to where it culminates in the far-off snow-flecked summits of Ziganeh; the second, or summer road, scrambles rather than climbs due south across the dreary heights of Kara-Kapan,' or 'Black-Covering,' so called, I conjecture, from its almost perpetual veil of cloud and mist, whencebut it must have been on unusually clear day-Mr. Layard, if memory serves me right, makes Xenophon and his Greeks shout their áλarra, áλarra; the third path, that which leads to Sumelas, goes off south-east by a side gorge that here falls into the Deyermend valley. The sun is now high and hot; so we halt for a noon-tide

P

an

bait in the spare room of a rickety Turkish coffee-house overhanging the torrent; receive the visits of some land-farmers, conservative and discontented as farmers are by prescriptive right all the world over; feast on brown bread and eggs fried in grease, vice anything else, unattainable in this corner of the gorgeous East; and would fain have crowned our midday rest with a nap on the floor, had not the immemorial fleas of Asia Minor pronounced their absolute veto on any such proceeding.

Well; Sumelas, not Jevezlik, is our goal. So, noon over, we remount and turn south-east, following over rock and grass the rise of the noble mountain cleft, hemmed in here and there by great basaltic masses, suddenly protruding through the limestone rocks of an older formation. Next to the cape of Hieros, or Yoros, with its fan-spread columns, the basalt pillars of Melas are the grandest -I have never visited either Skye or the Giant's Causeway-that it has been my fortune to witness any where. Next we cross the fierce but now diminutive torrent on a covered wooden bridge that might have been imported from Zug or Luzern; and begin the final Sumelas ascent. It follows for several miles the upward course of a deep and precipitous ravine, where huge rocks and cliffs, many hundred feet in height, are interspersed among or overhang forests of walnut, oak, beech, and pine, that might do honour to the backwoods of America themselves. Under the shade, now of the branching trees, now of the wall-like crags, winds the path, bordered by a dense fringe of laurel, dwarf fir, azalea, rhododendron, and countless other tangled shrubs; it is kept in fairly good order, propped up by stone counterforts, and protected by trenches and dykes against the descending watercourses by the care of the monks, whose convent

we are now approaching. On either side and in front glimpses of bare and lonely heights, herbless granite, and jagged ridges far up in the blue sky, show that we have penetrated far into the Kolat-Dagh, the great. Anatolian coast chain, that even here averages ten thousand feet in elevation, and ultimately out-tops the Caucasus, its northern rival and. parallel. At last a turn of the way brings us half-round at the foot of a monstrous rock that has for a long while barred our direct view along the ravine in front; and there, suspended like a bird's nest in air far overhead, we see rejoicingly the white walls of the convent, the object of our journey.

One last corkscrew ascent. of almost Matterhorn steepness brings us up through the dense forest that somehow manages to cling to and girdle the cliff half-way; till, just on the edge of the leafy belt, we reach the narrow ledge, almost imperceptible from below, on which the convent is niched rather than built. Two-thirds in length of this ledge are occupied every inch, from precipice above to precipice below, by the monastic buildings; the remaining third partly forms a kind. of landing-place, where visitors may wait admittance within the claustral precincts, partly is occupied by large stables and outhouses for horses and cattle. From this shelf sixty-six stone steps, of recent construction, conduct to a little ironbound door in the convent wall, conveniently commanded by some grated windows above. Till within the last few years a long wooden ladder, let down as circumstances required, then drawn up again within, afforded the sole and occasional link between the monastery and the outer world; while sinister arrivals might, if they tried entrance by other means of their own, receive from the flanking windows a warmer welcome than they expected or desired.