Two hours' travelling next day brought us at last to the end of the immense plain of the Hermus, and we began to get among the mountains, going up the east side of a steep romantic dell, the west side of which was wonderfully rugged and wild. Beyond were mountains covered with snow: beneath us an immeasurable giddy depth. Except a few sheep, we saw no living thing for hours together. Once I heard some wild duck by the torrent below. At the end of six hours we reached Derwent, a village of, say, two hundred houses. A wretched lodging and, as there was no fowl to be got--and that is what one depends entirely upon--no supper; and I had to be content with smoke, coffee, and Homer. In the evening came, as usual, a number of Turks to see the stranger. They enter, they salute with a 'Salaam aleikum,' and sit down perhaps for hours. Their conversation generally turns upon the stranger, with conjectures upon his object in coming. Later at night came in the son of our host. He had been searching for a strayed ox, and was afraid that the wolves had got it. He examined my firearms for a long while, and admired them very much. The Turks of this part of the country are large, handsome, very slow in their speech, and stupid and ignorant. Starting next morning, we began by following the course of a river till we got on to a high level plain surrounded by formless hills--an ugly country. We met a few Turcomans, and once I saw some ploughing. At the end of seven hours' riding we reached the edge of the valley of the Meander and looked over a glorious view; then downwards through Bulladan, a village of about five hundred houses and a number of mosques, to a village the name of which I never learnt, where we slept. As one expects nothing of one's host but shelter, it was an unusual hospitality in ours to give us some of his bread. It was a strange compound, such as I had never seen before. To make it, the dough is mixed very thin and poured on a heated copper. The result looks like rags of coarse cloth and tastes like bad crumpets. We slept in a barn with the horses.