bridge of his long body, by leaning over from the inner angle of the road to the side of the takterawan. As for me, beyond peeping like an old rat out of a cage, I could not move, so I lay still till I was pulled out by two men over Beyragdar's back, handed like a bundle over the foremost mule, and stuck upon a horse a little farther on. The mules were, somehow or other, saved and released from the shafts of the takterawan, which I never saw again; they could get it no further, and the rest of the journey I made on horseback, supported by a man on each side when the road was wide enough, by one when it was too narrow for two, and, when there was only room for the horse alone, Beyragdar carried me in his arms till we got to the Strada Reale, good two feet wide, when I was put upon a horse again. In this way, by slow degrees, we scrambled on our way, till, on the 10th of January, after fifteen days' journey through the intense cold of the mountains, I arrived, in better health and strength than when I started, at the edge of the table-land, from whence I saw the blue waters of the sea, and at 11 o'clock A.M. I was seated in my room in the quarantine station at Trebizond. CHAPTER XIII. Former history of Trebizond - Ravages of the Goths-Their siege and capture of the city - Dynasties of Courtenai and the Comneni Emperor " David — Conquest of Trebizond by Mehe -The " met II. TREBIZOND, SO famous in the middle ages as the residence of magicians, enchanters, and redoubted heroes of chivalry, is better known in the pages of romance than for any facts of historical importance which occurred there during many centuries. The only person who might probably have been able to throw much light upon the ancient history of this Byzantine city was that veracious chronicler the Cid Hamet Bengenelli, who, in his account of the renowned and valorous Knight of the Rueful Countenance, records of Don Quixote that "the poor gentleman already imagined himself at least crowned Emperor of Trebizond by the valour of his arm; and wrapped up in these agreeable delusions, and hurried on by the strange pleasure he took in romances of chivalry, he prepared to execute what he so much desired." Two real events, however, occurred at Trebizond which I shall endeavour to describe,-the only ones which stand out with any prominence in the records of the dukes, counts, and governors who held this province in their languid rule. In the third century the Goths, a band of desperate barbarians, who came originally from Prussia, were established in a curious out-of-theway kingdom situated on the Cimmerian Bosphorus, the inlet which gives access to the Sea of Azoph from the Black Sea. Trebizond, the capital of a Roman province, had been founded in the days of Xenophon by a Grecian colony, and now owed its wealth and splendour to the munificence of the Emperor Hadrian, who had constructed an artificial harbour for its shipping, while the town was defended on the land side a double line of walls and towers, some part of which probably exist at the present time among the fortifications afterwards erected by the Christian emperors and the Turks. In those troublous times the country was in disorder, and the wealthy patricians had sent their treasures into the town for greater security, the garrison having been reinforced by an additional body of 10,000 men. A numerous fleet of ships was in the harbour, which, perhaps, were timidly seeking |