At Pergamo I lodged in the khan. The first thing I did was to walk up to the castle. It is in three stages, with remains of fortification of all ages, from the earliest to the Genoese, but the Roman are the most important. On the second stage are two towers and a great wall built of Roman-Greek fragments of white marble. Above are two larger towers with a gate and strong wall full of fragments. On the south-west side a gap or dell in the hill is filled up with arches fifty feet high by twenty wide, and above them a range of smaller ones, the whole forming a solid foundation for an immense temple[38] of white marble in the best Roman-Greek style. The whole work is prodigious and very noble. There are still considerable remains of the temple, but they are rapidly disappearing, for the Turks cut them up into tombstones. The ancient town seems to have been built on the hill. Everywhere on the sides of it are immense foundations. The amphitheatre is an extraordinary building. It stands in a narrow valley astride of a river. The two sides of the valley make the two ends of the oval, and the middle stands upon arches under which the river runs. I was detained at Pergamo two days by the weather. It poured all the first day, and the second the water was out and the river too high for me to get across. I went to the baths to see the vase for which Canning offered 10,000 piastres, and bought there a beautiful stone for 40 piastres, and some bronze coins. I took a guide to show me the way across the river, for the water was out all over the valley, and even on the causeway it was over our horses' knees, and to get off it would have been dangerous. On the way we met the son of a neighbouring aga with a party of fifty armed followers. We took them at a distance for a company of derrys, or mountain robbers. But when they came near us we saw they were much too smart. The young man was merely going to the Aga of Pergamo with the compliments of his father on the recovery of his health. Seeing me and my suite dressed _à la Turque_, he sent in passing a man with his compliments to me to wish me a happy journey.