Walker Lake bulletin. (Hawthorne, Nev.) 1883-1926, 1915-02-13

!. TRO1 THE SOUTH
travellers who had been told with
cheerful iteration of the vermin-haunt-
ed dirtiness of the old khans. 1t had
all the primitive antiquity of appear
ance that the most enthusiastic hunt
er for the real eastern life could de-
sire.
Up the Pass.
By the time the next morning was
fully fledged our wagon was creep
ing once more up the pass. A new
note of wild grandeur began to sound
in the ravines. The road now chung
to the almost precipitous sides of the
gray rock, which lifted itself in
jagged, swift leaps a thousand feet
above us, while beneath, the icy, tum-
bling stream filled the whole valley
with the sound of running waters.
Some peaks were bare, with the stark,
unclothed grimness of mountains of
the moon; others were covered even
to the dizzy peaks with pines which
chung to the rock with tenacious roots.
Ancient hollow sycamores, as gray as
the rocks in which they were rooted,
thrust their gnarled trunks over the
stream.
Contrasted with the valleys and
plain behind us, it was as though we
had swept from the alluring har-
monies of Beethoven symphony into
the wild and crashing discords of
Wagner overture-with all the stir
ring blare and appeal of brass and
string and wood. Yet through it all,
like strange haunting theme from a
| folk-song as old as men, strobe the
tinkling strings of camels, sounding
| bells that varied from the tiny neck
bells in the high trebles to the bari
tone of the long bronze bells that
swung from their sides.
| Precipitous bluffs, their gray and
white thrown up defiantly against the
blue of the sky, gave strange feel
ing of castles built by giants to defend
this eerie pass against armies of Jim.
At last it looked as though the end
had come. The gray bulwark was
hurled in front of us, an unbroken,
impenetrable, unscalable mass. Sud-
denly thin edge of light appeared;
there, cloven in the rock, was a pas
sage-narrow and between sheer preci-
pices, with sharpedged submits.
The Split Rock.
All the thunderbolts of Olympus
must have riven the rock that the
stream of water and of humanity
might pour through it. In the world
there are few places suggesting SO
wonderfully the power of the simple
physical facts of hill and mountain
and plain to control history A split
rock, through which loaded camel
could barely pass (till Ibrahim Pasha
blasted away the rock to give passage
1 for his artillery, has DETECTED the flow
of the contest and contact of East and
| West in history. And, as scenery, the
| Gates" are the crashing climax of
the Taurus overture
| Passing out of their shadow, we
came out into open valleys running
north and northwest, on a rise so grad
uai that, when the actual watershed
was reached, It could barely be dis
cerned. And, curiously enough, the
waters that flow north and south from
this point do not reach seas distant
| from one another. each finally reach
ing the Mediterranean.
Our road ran north and west, drop
ping now gradually, now steeply-
till, passing the last string of tired
camels as the sun set ahead of us, we
reached the old khan at Bozanti
Ahead lay the caravan road, along
which Greek and Roman and Crusad-
er have come. They have come, but
they have passed-and the eternal
East remains. The Oriental, swinging
his legs astride his tiny donkey and
leading his line of laden camels, holds
the road, Just as he held it when Paul,
in his company, came along these
valleys to that shining tableland"
where Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and An
tioch were to be immortalized by his
passing.