The soaring minarets, the white domes of mosques and baths, lie amid cypresses and plane-trees at the foot of the mountain. The streams of Olympus, many-fountained like its neighbour Ida, water the town and the surrounding country with such profusion that every inch of ground yields fruit and flowers in tenfold abundance; the hot steam of the sulphur springs diffuses a drowsy warmth through the atmosphere; the city is full of the sound of tinkling fountains and murmuring plane-leaves, and of the voices of black-eyed Turkish children--no wonder if the eagerness of men for its possession drove peace for so many hundred years from its vineyards and olive-groves. It is said that of the Romans no trace remains. If this be so, the spirit of the Roman builders must have lingered on among Byzantine masons. There is a gateway at the southern side of the town from which part of the stone casing has fallen away, revealing that exquisite brickwork whose secret was known to the Romans only--an entablature of long, narrow bricks, set into arches of complicated pattern, with the sure eye and the even hand that ennoble the commonest materials, and make Roman bricks and plain Roman stonework as beautiful in their way as frieze, or fresco, or marble-casing. Pliny’s baths, however, are gone; the present buildings are of Turkish origin. They lie a little to the east of the town, in fields which vine and olive share with irises and great scarlet poppies. You enter, and find yourself under the dome of a large hall, round the walls of which are railed off compartments where, upon piles of cushions, the bathers rest after the exertion of the bath, smoking a narghileh and drinking a cup of coffee. Beyond this is another and smaller hall, with a fountain of clear cold water in the midst of it, and through various chambers of different temperatures you reach the farthest and hottest of all. The air is thick and heavy with the steam which rises from the blue-tiled basin, where, when the process of washing is over, the Turkish youths swim in the hot water of the sulphur springs, while through the mist the sunlight glimmers down on them from the windows in the dome.