On the present occasion we were constrained by perverse orders from Constantinople to follow the chaussée. The tributary, which we crossed at Jevizlik by a bridge of several arches, appeared to bring almost an equal volume of water as the river which it feeds. The upper stages of the main valley are picturesque in character, with none of the gloom and savagery of the vale of Meiriman. The slopes on either side terrace upwards into the haze of the sky; and for some miles above Jevizlik they are alive with settlements. At mid-height you admire the frequent clusters of the villages; the churches are built on projecting pinnacles of rock, and consist of a group of gables surmounted by a dome and approached through a belfry with two storeys of open arches. A white-faced monastery is seen high up on the opposite or left bank of the river; it fills a niche or natural recess in a vertical wall of rock, and its roofs are overhung by the roof of the cave. The stream is spanned at frequent intervals by little stone bridges with single arches, the arches highly curved and the roadway rising to the centre of the bridge. In one place the way which led up the cliff-side to a village was flanked at its upper end by a strong tower from which the inmates could resist attack from below. Above this inhabited zone, at the foot of the firs, near the crests of the ridges, sparse hamlets or isolated châlets are just discerned in the vague detail of the uppermost slopes. A report of guns, sounding distant, comes from one of those eyries where they are celebrating a marriage feast. In the fields, with their strange gradients, men and women are at work, the men lithe of limb, the women square-set, with skirts to below the knee and thick stockings on their legs. It is a dreamy southern scene, in one hand beauty, in the other squalor; and it repeats on a large scale the characteristics of those transverse cuttings which extend from the coast to the highlands of Asia Minor and are inhabited by a population of Greek race.