As far as Malaṭiyah we followed the high road which led us at first across a fertile plain celebrated for its gardens ever since the days of Ammianus Marcellinus. Outside the village of Tarmûr[207] we spent the night somewhat uneasily by reason of certain wedding festivities which were there in progress. Not only did the merry-makers keep up their rejoicings until close upon dawn, but the inhabitants of a neighbouring village judged the occasion to be propitious for mule-lifting, and were driven off with rifle shots. Peace was restored by daybreak, and the marriage procession conveying the bride to her husband’s house set off to the strains of fife and drum. We passed it upon the road, a motley crowd, mounted and afoot. The bride was enveloped in a silken cloak of vivid magenta, which will not, I fear, be needed again for many a long day, if her opportunities for the wearing of finery may be measured by the aspect of her future home, for a more poverty-stricken collection of hovels than the bridegroom’s village it would be difficult to picture. We left her in her brief glory to take up her daily task of preventing her husband’s roof from falling about her ears, and rode on to the hill of Arghana, a bold spur of the Taurus mountains, with a village perched among its crags. I sent the baggage animals along the carriage road and climbed with a zaptieh to the village, and thence by a steep path to the Armenian monastery of the Virgin, which stands on the summit of the rocks.[208] We were rewarded by a magnificent view and by a pleasant talk with the prior who informed me, as I drank his excellent coffee, that the monastery was founded in the first century of the Christian era, a tradition which calls for weightier confirmation than any which he advanced. Be that as it may, the existing house must have been largely rebuilt in the Middle Ages, perhaps towards the fourteenth century--I hazard this date on the evidence supplied by the decoration of the church which had the character of Mohammadan work of about that period. We led our horses down the north side of the hill, by a stony [Illustration: FIG. 210.--ARGHANA MA’DEN.] [Illustration: FIG. 211.--GÖLJIK.] [Illustration: FIG. 212.--KHARPÛT, THE CASTLE.] [Illustration: FIG. 213.--IZ OGLU FERRY.]