The road to Amasia was a gradual crescendo of delight. The soft blue mountain ranges towered up above the travellers as they approached the entrance of the gorge. Here and there a column of smoke wound up the mountainside from the fires of the charcoal burners, whose little tents were pitched on the slopes. It was afternoon when they entered the ravine along which the white road wound into the town. Above them they saw the Baghdad road, on the opposite side of the ravine, half obscured by the clouds of dust thrown up by the miscellaneous traffic of carts, herds, camels and donkeys driving into the town. Now the plain appeared, and the vision stretched before them was like a new garden of Eden, a land flowing with colour, and scents from luxurious gardens. The smooth, quickly flowing river tumbled over its weirs; they could hear the singing of the water and the creaking of water mills built along the banks. The great crags stretched sheer to the sky, blazing with crimson shrubs in the bright, hot sunlight, and the further they progressed, the richer, the more varied grew the colours of this wonderful land. Presently with a sharp turn in the road, they emerged from the rocky ravine into a tremendous gorge, with Amasia nestling between the folds of the towering mountains. The town itself was a maze of little white houses, dotted here and there in the small fertile valley, and stretching along the two banks of the Yeshil Innak. A dozen bridges, all of quaint design, some going back to Roman times, spanned the bright river, and above the banks rose the minarets of the mosques, khans, colleges and public buildings. The best houses built along the river each possessed wonderful hanging gardens blazing with luxuriant growths of semi-tropical plants and fruits, but the wonder of Amasia lay, not in the gardens or buildings, but in the immense cliffs that walled in the town from the outer world. These precipices, scarcely a mile apart, rose up on each side of the town to heights of three thousand feet on the western and more than a thousand on the eastern side. They did not rise as mountains, but seemed to be walls of rocks guarding the town. A castle stood boldly silhouetted against the bronze sky, perched on a frowning crag dominating the town. This was indeed an ancient dwelling place, an old world town of wonder, where history seemed to sleep, for Amasia was once the capital of Pontus, the home of the great Seljuks, the birthplace of Mithridates the Great. On the face of the western precipice there were still the five rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings. When Strabo wrote of them in B.C. 65, he was telling an ancient story, yet they remained untouched as when he had seen them.