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pomp of eve." Turning her dazzled eyes once more ahead, she saw the charger stop. With a stifled groan his rider slid from the saddle and fell heavily on the side nearest the upland slope. In an instant Pipette was on the ground beside him, her arm passed through the bridle of her horse. Silver had moved on a few paces. Pipette knelt down and raised Marmaduke's head, moistening his brow with eau-de-Cologne. He was in a dead faint. Presently he came to himself, and staggered to his feet.

"I never had a good headshouldn't have risked playing the fool, but-er, I beg your pardon. I-ah, see I-ah, owe my recovery to a-a stranger." Here giddiness again overcame him, and he would have fallen had not Pipette caught him, and let him down gently on to the bank. He was pale and trembling all over. "This is pretty humiliat ing," he muttered.

"Shut your eyes," said Pipette, who was a woman of action. "I will lead you home."

He leant back, half unconscious, while Pipette stood by full of anxious fears, with a tide of awakened early love flooding her heart. Her reverie was broken in upon by the sound of hoofs, and round the curve came Kate on her Cabulee. Pipette went to meet her.

"Miss Trenchard !-you here! What is the matter? Has Colonel Ferrers been thrown?" and the girl looked from one to the other with strained expression and parted lips.

"Colonel Ferrers turned giddy and faint. Will you ride home and send the tonga to wait at the • Chota Tope'? Your man can take Silver and my horse. I will guide Colonel Ferrers to the main road when he is able to move."

"As you please,” answered Kate, with a shrug. She hated to see a man at a disadvantage. The animal instinct which induces flocks and herds to close round and trample upon a sick member of their kind was strongly latent within her. (Concessions to Diogenes, sops to Cerberus, always on hand, you see.) She had no sympathy with the sick or sorry, and she relegated Colonel Ferrers then and there to the limbo of the aged and incurable-to "the portion of weeds and out-worn faces." She was not sorry for him-only angry with him; and underlying the hot rebellion of her spirit there was a subtle sense of a past shared by these two-an intuition of a claim on Pipette's part to succour, which gave her a distinct yet indefinable shock.

A little later Marmaduke, leaning on Pipette's arm, was slowly moving homewards. At one point, where the road widened for a few paces, she bade him rest on a moss-clad rock, while she stood gazing at the view. As she half turned again, the glory of the sunset fell full on her face and shining hair.

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Pipette! is it you? We meet at last," he cried.

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the long years, and the "ashen grey delight" burst into clear flame once more. Marmaduke is not a name that lends itself readily to endearing abbreviations. "Marmee " is suggestive of an old woman, "Duke too cold. Of course he had been "Marmalade" at Eton and in the regiment; but no romantic woman could call her adorer" Marmalade -at least not in that early Victorian era to which Pipette belonged, when furniture and fashions were hideous, and women were pretty and sentimental. I don't know what Pipette did with his name, I only know she was a moving embodiment of bliss tempered by experience. And now the fairy godmother put on the wings of Azrael and came down to visit poor little Pipette for the last time.

"You should never have brought your sister back to Kalijigaum

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ARCHEOLOGICAL NOMADS IN RUGGED CILICIA.

WE started with three months of nomad life before us from Mersina, a port of Asia Minor,-real genuine nomad life in a hitherto unexplored district, without a village or a town to speak of, up in the lofty mountains of "rugged Cilicia," where for this period we should meet none save wanderers like ourselves: pastoral wanderers, who go from pasture to pasture as necessity compels; whilst we professed to be archæological nomads, who went from one set of ruins to another in search of fresh material concerning a long ago defunct race of mankind.

A word or two concerning this country, its present and its past, before we dive into its gorges and lose ourselves in its maze of rock and brushwood. This district, known to the ancients as "Cilicia Aspera," from its rugged appearance, lies on the southern slopes of the Taurus mountains, where they push their spurs right down to the sea, and has for centuries been only inhabited by wandering tribes, offering as it does no attractions to the sedentary inhabitants of Asia Minor. For the centuries immediately preceding our era, it was inhabited by a race known to the Romans as the "Cilician Pirates," who appear from time to time on the pages of history, and whose misfortune it has been to have

1 Isocrates Panegyricus (Or. 4, § 161).

that history written by their enemies. They were then practically masters of the Mediterranean, and carried their predatory expeditions as far as Italy. Pompey reduced them in a big seafight in the year 67 B.C., and planted the remainder of them in a town by the sea, and henceforward we only hear of them as peaceably acquiescing to the yoke of Rome.

Our researches led us

to respect these pirates, and rather to regret their name, for they built for themselves great temples to Jove and Hermes, and mighty fortress towns with polygonal masonry in the heart of the Taurus. They buried their dead in rockcut tombs, embellished with fine figures in relief on the rocks. In short, they gave evidence of possessing a civilisation inferior to none existing in Asia Minor. Their origin is lost in uncertainty and myth - a wild mountainous race, who gained for themselves independence after the power of the Seleucida began to wane, and who originally came under Greek influence four centuries before the Christian era.1 Their kingdom, as Strabo, who is almost our only authority, tells us, was called Olba.2 They were ruled over by priest - kings priests of Jove, and dynasts of Olba; and from the coasts of the

2 Strabo, xiv. ch. 5, 10. "And then higher up than this place (Anchiale, mod. Mersina) and Soli is a mountainous district, in which is the city of Olba, and a temple of Jove, the foundation of Ajax the son of Teucer, and the priest became dynast of Rugged Cilicia: then many tyrants succeeded in the government and formed piratical companies, and after the destruction of these, in our days even it is called the Teucrid dynasty and the priesthood of Teucer." See also Head, 'Historia Nummorum,' on Olba.

Mediterranean up to a height of 4000 feet in the recesses of the Taurus, this district was studded with prosperous towns and villages, now entirely abandoned to the Yourouks, as the Turks call this nomad race, from a word in their language, youroumek, to wander. There is a glamour about these mountain slopes, their deep gorges and craggy heights, in their present state of utter abandonment, when one tries to people it with a hardy and independent race of freebooters who refused to acknowledge the conquering arm of Rome, like the Highlanders of Scotland or the Mahrattas of the Deccan, who fought a hopeless contest against the overwhelming power of civilisation.

We drove for thirty miles along a wretched Turkish road which skirts the coast, in a rickety carriage, to a spot called Lamas, where the mountains come right down to the sea, and where we met the horses which were to convey us into those mountains. These horses had three owners, one Maronite and two Armenians. We had a servant to administer to our personal comforts, and a curious individual who called himself Captain Achmed, who was to act as guide and mediator between us and the wandering tribes. A man of no definite race, who dressed himself in a fine Albanian dress though he was no Albanian, bristling with quaint and useless arms, he was one of those mongrel products of the East who had, once upon a time, indulged in brigandage himself, and passed many years in prison, but who in his old age had found a certain degree of honesty the best policy. He had been handsome, and still was vain; and though carrying but little luggage, in it was

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Strabo, the geographer, was our only guide-book, and oddly enough one of our horses was called Strabo by his Greek-speaking master, because it was blind of one eye,—one of those miserable quadrupeds of the East, totally unfitted for a mountaineering expedition such as we were about to undertake, which fell on every possible occasion, once nearly drowning itself in a stream, and sending our chattels floating away; and again falling with our jar of wine against a rock, and thereby reducing us to a condition of enforced abstinence. The other five horses of our cavalcade were moderate specimens of their kind, and carried us safely over many an awkward spot.

We took everything with usbeds, tables, chairs, tent, and groceries-trusting only to find a sufficiency of meat and milk amongst the nomad tribes. But in the former case we were doomed to disappointment, owing to two somewhat different causes. In the first place, they would not part with their lambs and kids, because the flocks had run down during the recent years of famine; and secondly, the fowls were scarce, because they had last year found excellent market for them at Mersina, where the French steamer touches, and all the poultry had been conveyed to France for consumption during the exhibition

an

time. Consequently, though milk and butter were plentiful we had to content ourselves with the flesh of goats well stricken in years, and every one knows that this is by no means palatable.

On the first plateau above the sea-level we visited three curious depressions in the ground, averaging 200 feet in depth: one was 800 feet long, another was a quarter of a mile round, and the third three-quarters. The walls of these holes were of calcareous formation, and had in places been decorated by the pirates of old with quaint bas-reliefs and inscriptions. At the bottom of these holes flourished the wild verdure of the mountains, a dense jungle of carobs, pomegranates, myrtle, and prickly thorns; and Strabo told us how in his time flourished here excellent saffron, and I doubt not that he was right, for though we found none there, we saw abundance of it on the mountains around.

The largest of these depressions had a cave at its southern extremity, eating its way for a couple of hundred feet into the rock. This was the anciently famed Corycian Cave, about three miles behind the old town of Corycos, which Strabo tells us was celebrated in ancient cult as the prison where Jove kept bound the giant Typhon,1 and where in those olden days frenzied oracles were uttered by its priests. Here we found several inscriptions identifying it, and accidentally by pulling down an outer wall in the temple of Jove which stood at the lip of the cave, we came across a list of the priest-kings of this district, 162 in all, the rulers of the race of last name pirates down to the very

before they were formed into a Roman province. This last name was that of King Archelaus, about whom Josephus has a good deal to tell us, whose daughter, Glaphyra, married the son of Herod the Great, and whose advice was much sought after by that monarch in settling his family disputes.

This is quite one of the most awe-inspiring spots I have ever seen, and from the nomads who dwell on its edge we inquired if they were not afraid of it, and if they never saw dread sights therein. "No," said the oldest man amongst them; "I and my father before me have spent the winter months here all our lives, and we have never seen anything. In fact, we call this hole Paradise, for we can tether our camels and stable our flocks in it. But there is another hole hard by, which we call Purgatory, into which no one can descend." So under his guidance we visited this place. It is separated from the Corycian Cave by a sea of pointed calcareous rocks, and it is a round hole a quarter of a mile round, with sides sloping inwards to the depth of two hundred feet, all hung with stalactites, amongst which countless pigeons build their nests. Without a good strong rope no one could possibly descend into it, and as we had not this wherewithal we were reluctantly obliged to forego the pleasure. "Only once to my knowledge has any one been down," said the old Yourouk. "About thirty years ago, a nomad shot a Turk, and dragged him still living to the hole. The Turk clung to the roots which hung around, but the nomad cut the stalks, and the unfortunate man was hurled into the abyss.

1 Strabo, p. 670; Eschylus, Prom. 351; and Pindar, Pyth. i. 31.

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