Caria, where thunderbolts are frequent. Athenaeus mentioned this and D.B. now repeated it, and offered me his Land-Rover as a substitute for a horse, with Eddie Wilkinson, his consul in Smyrna, an erudite and perfect companion, on a few days' leave of absence to look at the inland cities. Eddie knows the country and the history, and the credit of this expedition is his. We travelled from Ephesus, under the Augustan aqueduct, over the Maeander pass and along the Marsyas river?the modern ?ine ?ay; and turned by its bridge into a pastoral basin where the Marsyas, resting from corkscrew gorges, spills sheets of reflected sky between willowy fringes, round temporary islands that end in spits of sand. Herds of cows rest or browse here along the water, and a country road winds in easy reaches through cornfields stuffed with flowers? campion and viper's bugloss, yellow and purple vetches, harebells, campanulas, anchusa, cornflowers and poppies, marguerites white or yellow and hawthorn and wild roses at the edge. Where the ground breaks into small accidents, the broom pushes out among boulders, and a pink convolvulus runs like embroidery through oats that hang about in small jade-coloured patches, until the cultivation ends in the rocks above. Bee-eaters, wagtails and rollers were about, and cuckoos were calling; and the spring, sweeping black clouds from hidden places, poured cold showers that ended as suddenly as they began. Alinda is there, at the head of a small enclosed and fertile plain that drains to the Karpuzlu ?ay, some 25 kilometres out of sight from the Marsyas river and a little less from the western highroad that once ran along its bank. The present village? Demircidere, or the Blacksmith's Valley?has collected itself round the long stylobate of some obliterated building or temple, a centre thinly fringed with houses, where a new mosque shines with star and crescent painted white on rain-washed tiles. Most of the houses are old and straggling?older than they know, for their walls