As we passed the blockhouse, I found that the General-in-Chief had preceded me, and given orders that the honors due to a consular personage--the same as those paid to a superior officer in their own army--should be carefully observed, and so we had the whole garrison of each blockhouse on the way out at the "Present arms!" The road not only zigzags going from Lakus to the plain of Omalos, but makes such ascents and descents as well accounted for the fruitlessness of so many attempts to enter the plain, which is a sort of portico to Samaria. But now a fair artillery road followed the ridges up to the very plain, and blockhouses covered with their fire every point where an ambush could be made, and those little glens, famous in Cretan tradition for extermination of Turkish detachments, will never again help native heroism against organized conquest. We passed, in one of the wildest gorges through which the road passes, a blockhouse perched high on a hill-top like an eyrie, a peripatetic atom on the parapet of which caught my eye, as a wild goat might have done amongst the cliffs around. As we came into sight, looking again, I saw the garrison swarming down the hillside amongst the rocks like ants, wondered what they were at, and rode on, when at another turn the officer said, "They salute, Effendi!" I looked around, and, only on his indication, saw drawn up in rank, hundreds of feet above me, a line of animalcules, which, by good eyesight, I could perceive was the whole garrison presenting arms, and they so continued presenting until, after turn upon turn of the road, they disappeared from view definitively, when I suppose they swarmed back to their fastness. We passed through the ravine of Phokes, where Hadji Michali once caught a small detachment which incautiously attempted to penetrate to Omalos. I had heard the story of the fight, told at the time by an Albanian who was in it, in a brief but graphic way. The Christians waited invisible, he said, till the troops were in the bottom of the ravine, and then began to fire from many directions. The troops stopped, made a show of resistance, and then broke and made for the blockhouse at Lakus; "and those who couldn't run well never got there," he interjected laconically. He frankly admitted that he was so far in advance that he saw very little actual fighting, and made no halt, nor did any others, Mussulman or Christian, till they arrived at the door of the blockhouse, which he was surprised at their shutting in time to keep out the Christians. It was well into the afternoon when we entered the plain of Omalos, evidently a filled-up crater, its level about five thousand feet above the sea. The snows and rains of winter and spring flood it, and as no stream runs from it the waters disappear by a Katavothron--a gloomy Acherontic recess--into whose crooked recesses the eye cannot pierce, and down whose depths is heard a perpetual cavernous roaring of water.