us.  The entire plain is covered with wild fennel, six to eight feet in height, and literally blazing with its bloomy yellow tops.  Riding through it, I could barely look over them, and far and wide, on all sides, spread a golden sea, out of which the long violet hills rose with the liveliest effect.  Brown, shining serpents, from four to six feet in length, frequently slid across our path.  The plain, which must be sixty miles in circumference, is wholly uncultivated, though no land could possibly be richer.

Out of the region of fennel we passed into one of red and white clover, timothy grass and wild oats.  The thistles were so large as to resemble young palm-trees, and the salsify of our gardens grew rank and wild.  At length we dipped into the evening shadow of Durdun Dagh, and reached the village of Koord Keui, on his lower slope.  As there was no place for our tent on the rank grass of the plain or the steep side of the hill, we took forcible possession of the winnowing-floor, a flat terrace built up under two sycamores, and still covered with the chaff of the last threshing.  The Koords took the whole thing as a matter of course, and even brought us a felt carpet to rest upon.  They came and seated themselves around us, chatting sociably, while we lay in the tent-door, smoking the pipe of refreshment.  The view over the wide golden plain, and the hills beyond, to the distant, snow-tipped peaks of Akma Dagh, was superb, as the shadow of the mountain behind us slowly lengthened over it, blotting out the mellow lights of sunset.  There were many fragments of pillars and capitals of white marble built up in the houses, showing that they occupied the site of some ancient village or temple.

The next morning, we crossed Durdun Dagh, and entered the great plain of Cilicia.  The range, after we had passed it, presented a grand, bold, broken outline, blue in the morning vapor, and wreathed with shifting belts of cloud.  A stately castle, called the Palace of Serpents, on the summit of an isolated peak to the north, stood out clear and high, in the midst of a circle of fog, like a phantom picture of the air.  The River Jyhoon, the ancient Pyramus, which rises on the borders of Armenia, sweeps the western base of the mountains.  It is a larger stream than the Orontes, with a deep, rapid current, flowing at the bottom of a bed lower than the level of the plain.  In three hours, we reached Missis, the ancient Mopsuestia, on the right bank of the river.  There are extensive ruins on the left bank, which were probably those of the former city.  The soil for some distance around is scattered with broken pillars, capitals, and hewn stones.  The ancient bridge still crosses the river, but the central arch having been broken away, is replaced with a wooden platform.  The modern town is a forlorn place, and all the glorious plain around it is uncultivated.  The view over this plain was magnificent:  unbounded towards the sea, but on the north girdled by the sublime