cities beneath. The precise situation of most
of these is unknown, but in one case it is
known, and the entrance to it is visible; I have
seen it, in fact.

This entrance is in the face of a mountain
not many miles from the city of Ephesus. It
is a flat niche, which looked to me as if
some one had begun a small tunnel or
driftway, and then stopped. No doubt I must
be wrong. If we could get the key of the
door (and that is perhaps in the keeping of
some African magician), we should find it
readily swing on its hinges, and the population
would stream forth. Their carriages and
horses, however, they could not possibly bring
with them, for the door (granting an invisible
door) is too low. There, within that mountain,
is a vast people in a large city, with all the
establishments needful for such a concourse.
They are within a few feet of us. I wonder how
their streets and palaces are lighted? I have
been over that mountain range, but I never
could find a clue to this mystery.

It is enchanted ground, however. I
remember once passing there on horseback;
none but my own party in sight. High above
in the air, we heard the ringing of bells and of
cathedral chimes, like some carillon of
Flanders! It came from no fixed station; but
floated up and down in the air above us. There,
we clearly heard it, awakening old thoughts of
our western cities, when on some Sunday or
holiday, or in the summer evening, the bells
cheerily rang forth from the spires. I could
see no one; but I have little doubt that this
sound from the subterranean city was an echo
of the bells of strings of camels moving in the
distance.

The city is closed; but it may yet give forth
its men. In holy Ephesus, near by, did not
the seven sleepers take shelter in a cave, and
did they not there remain for one hundred years,
when they and their dog came out, and hardly
found the way to their own neighbourhood,
when, what they thought had been the hurried
sleep of a night, had been the long epoch of
revolutions in religion, and in the state? The
street boys, who mocked at them, were their
great grandchildren. Old men, to whom they
appealed for information and protection, were
their own grandsons. Their beards had turned
grey, and their dog had become decrepit; as
well he might at a time of life unknown to
dogs before. The citizens of Ephesus could be
little surprised to see men of past ages
reappear, and treated them with honour; but the
sleepers found none whom they knew, of wives,
or infants, late or early friends. The seven
sleepers went into a convent with their dog,
and, after a further lease of mortal life, were
buried in holiness in their own cave, in truthful
commemoration of the event.

I heard of two aged men near Mekka, who
were known to many Moslem pilgrims as being
six hundred years old or more. Our own
grandfathers lived when George the Third was
king, not a hundred years ago; but one of
these sheikhs might have seen a sheikh who by
like communication would have learnt from an
eye-witness the events of two thousand years
ago, when the memory of Alexander still was
young, and before Julius fought for the empire
of the East.

The British Association at its last meeting
reduced by five thousand years the age of the
Wellingtonia gigantea, and unlucky inquiries
have also brought down the ages of the sheikhs.
Those who had not been on the pilgrimage,
fixed them at six hundred or eight hundred
years  those who had been part of the way,
said four hundred; I was afraid to inquire
nearer, lest the old men should be reduced to
boys, and I should lose the pleasure of the
marvel.

I was told, however, by a learned Turk, that
the truth of the matter was that a sheikh
taking possession of the tent or abode of a
famous sheikh, is known by that name, and
that the ignorant multitude see in the perpetual
succession of men of like name only one
long-lived individual.

Often have aged and bowed men been pointed
out to me as a hundred and fifty years old
but I could never get such an age proved. A
Turk can always gain a few years in age by
the shortness of the Turkish year.

A Turkish friend who had been in Roomelia.
told me that at a great fair in the Adrianople
district he had seen an old Greek woman
sitting at the foot of a tree, selling wares; her
age, she said, was a hundred and fifty; but she
pointed out her mother and grandmother, and
said that her great-grandmother was at home
in the village, being now too infirm to attend
the fair. The old women got much custom,
including some from my friend, but he did
not go to the village to see the eldest of the
family.

People so gifted as to tenure of life, are
likewise privileged as to other faculties, ubiquity
not excepted. There is now, or was lately, an
imam in the city of Diarbekir, who on the
same day, and within an hour's time, preached
in the great mosques of Diarbekir and Aleppo,
two or three hundred miles apart. This was
attested by merchants and others, who had
known him in both places. He likewise
preached simultaneously in the cities of Mosul
and Diarbekir.

An African friend—who made arithmetical
mistakes in many matters of mine—told me
some singular tales. He informed me of men
and women in his part of the world who had
three eyes each: and of another population
having, besides the front eyes, two behind, and
a tail. These gentry were cannibals. The people
were named Nya Nyas, and they had teeth
filed in a saw shape, and there were Nya Nyas
in Turkey.

At Constantinople, in Santa Sophia, Mahomet
Ghazi, the conqueror, rode on horseback
to the altar, and devoted it, by the recital of
the consecrated formula, to the worship of the
one God of the Osmanli. The bishop who was
officiating stepped into the wall, gospel in
hand, and has been waiting with mitre and