Before we had completed ten miles the wooded heights on either hand were dotted with the dark forms of the first spruce firs. The valley narrows; the walls grow steeper, and tower to a greater altitude; but you never lose the expanse of sky. If the scene recalls Tyrol you are not conscious of confinement; there is none of the chill and darkness of an Alpine glen. The character of the landscape is influenced by the alternation of tuffs with lavas; the latter become much darker and more compact. To the tuffs are largely due the softer spaces of field and garden; while the lava, which has cooled into a roughly columnar structure, produces parapets of immense height and precipitous crags. A little below the town of Jevizlik we stood in wonder at the foot of a cliff composed of a rock of this description. It fills the angle between the main stream and a tributary to the left bank, and it must be at least 1500 feet high. The columns of lava suggested the appearance of an organ of colossal proportions. And what a romantic feature, the bold perspective of the side valley, the cultivation carried upwards by almost impossible gradients, the vivid green of the young corn contrasting with patches of fallow land, coloured a light purplish-brown! Along the summits of the wide amphitheatre of ridges the forest rises against the field of the sky. Jevizlik, the first station, is reached at about the twentieth mile; it is situated just below the confluence of a considerable stream which comes in on the right bank. A rough road diverges from the chaussée at this point, and follows the course of the tributary. It leads to the famous monastery of Sumelas, a ride or sharp walk of three and a half hours. We passed bands of pilgrims on their way to this resort--whole families, an entire village packed up and piled upon horses, the women astride with their babes beside them, the men on foot. The monastery is built on a ledge of an almost perpendicular wall of mountain, at a height of 4450 feet above sea-level, and of 800 feet above the torrent which hisses at the base of the rock. It is placed almost at the head of the beautiful valley of Meiriman--a valley which, indeed, is narrower than that of the Pyxitis, but which combines in its various stages all the features of this fair land. Orchards and stretches of forest trees clothe the easier gradients at the mouth of the opening--a large circle of heights soaring up into the heaven above purple slopes, where the soil is exposed by the plough. Clusters of wooden châlets overlook the winding river, and each bolder eminence is crowned by a white, stone chapel. As the valley becomes a glen--the term is ill adapted to express the scale upon which Nature has worked--the vegetation increases in luxuriance and changes in character, until the scene assumes that strange and almost supernatural appearance which has found such just expression in the weirdness of the Kolchian myths.