Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/89

 ARCHITECTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PHRYGIA PROPER. 73 and caused that part of Phrygia which is wholly formed of irrup- tive rocks, to be called Phrygia Combusta. During these periods, which may be counted by thousands of years, the many streams which descend from these heights carved a tortuous bed around the more friable rocks, the eddy acting as battering-ram in shaping them into every possible contortion of lofty pinnacle and narrow promontories, rending their flanks into dark caves, deep crevices, and fissures, or polishing the hard-grained stone into vertical walls. 1 Strolling about the neighbourhood of Seid el-Ghazi (ancient Nacoleia) I was forcibly reminded of the Forest of Fontainebleau, whoseconfiguration science explains as likewisedue to fluvial energy. Before the primitive inhabitants were provided, as they are at the present day, with forged iron, they could not resist the temptation of excavating their houses into the friable rock they had everywhere at hand. Moreover, even when they had tools with which they could rapidly fell and cut up pines of the required length and size, they continued to take shelter, at least in the winter months, in stone habitations hollowed in the depth of the hill, or those isolated rocks which shoot up on many a point of the valley. The winters are cold here ; for, though Kumbet is but 150 metres above the level of the surrounding plain, it is more than 1000 metres above the sea. At such an altitude the nights are fresh, nay, cold throughout the year. Thus, at 6 a.m. on the 1 2th of June, the thermometer marked six degrees above zero; and albeit the time was summer, we were often kept awake in our wooden huts, by the sharp frosty air, and had to take in turn feeding the fire through the night. Dwellings like these are of a certainty picturesque, but they are positively no protection against the wind, and very little against the rain, which latter penetrates through chinks and fissures large enough for the hand to get through. Nor was it much better when we tried to stop the gaps with straw and clay, for these were presently turned into mud and washed down inside by the driving rain, whilst the chaff, left to itself, was taken up by the wind and tossed about our faces. As for the wraps and blankets we put up before the apertures, they 1 There was some uncertainty about the name of the site occupied by Seid el-Ghazi. Prymnessus, whose coins during the Roman domination bear the effigy of Midas, was proposed. Thejesearches of Professor Ramsay in 1884 have definitely settled the question. " Prymnessus," he writes, " was at Seulun, three miles south-east of Afium Kara Hissar," on the postal road which runs from this city to Konieh.