IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 245, 29 July 1936, Page 3

IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

| s: SERIAL FEATURE :: J

t (By H. V. MORTON)'. I X _ w

f :: Copyright. :: <| THE CILICIAN GATES. CHAPTER VI. The Cilician Gates is the historic pass through the Taurus Mountains to the high plateaux of Asia Minor. I was particularly anxious to see “the Gates,” for through them St. Paul passed on his missionary journeys to the West. After some difficulty I discovered a jocular individual in Tarsus who owned an ancient Ford car. He was willing to take me to the Cilician Gates for thirteen Turkish pounds, which is about £3 in English money. We set off in the forenoon. The car would have attracted attention anywhere except in Turkey, where, by the way, motor-car manufacturers would discover many a specimen worth exhibiting as a tribute to the strength and durability of their workmanship. The Turkish driver, if he is a good one, can coax movement out of a car that would remain dead to any other driver. He can also drive a car containing few of the generally accepted necessities of a car, such as windscreen, mudguards, brakes. As long as an engine, can turn over, a Turkish driver will somehow manage to take his car across open country and to the tops of mountains. The fuss that was made in England some years ago about taking a car up Ben Nevis would be incomprehensible in Turkey, where feats of this character are performed every day! We bumped out of Tarsus over a track with a ditch on each side of it. A hillman riding a pony, or rather, sitting on top of two enormous bags which hung down on each side of his mount, came towards us. The animal exhibited every sign of terror, but the rider managed to hold his head towards us and to keep him under control. The car, however, made a sudden nasty dive to avoid a foot-deep pit in the centre of the roadl and the pony, turning suddenly, shot bags and driver into the ditch.

I stopped the car and ran after the pony, while my driver picked his compatriot out of the mud. When I returned with thei pony I expected a, first class row, but to my astonishment found the driver and the hillman pulling away at the sacks and roaring with laughter. It was my first acquaintance with a characteristic which I was to note time and again during my travels; the remarkable good nature of the Turk in moments of difficultly. Situations that might be expected to infuriate most people usually rouse his sense of humour; and his sense of humour might be termed English. It is an ironic humour. I am willing to wager that while an Italian and an Englishman might have difficulty in seeing the same joke, a Turk and an Englishman would have no such difficulty’. Turkish proverbs bear a remarkable resemblance to English proverbs, and so do their stories. “The hare had a grudge against the mountain, but the mountain never knew this.”

That, surely, might be one of our own proverbs ?

As we polted on, we left the Cilician Plain and mounted towards the pass. We met a string of camels descending from the hills, and a band or two of Yuruks, or nomads, with their burdened donkeys anil their ilark-eyed children.

Nothing wider than the approach to the Cilician Gates can be imagined. The mountain sides fall away into gorges loud with the rush of meltc-d snow water.

Now and then I would look up from the depths of some ravine and see the pines growing in sunlight above me and the high snow-fields flushed pink in the afternoon light. Sometimes the car skidded on the edge of a road hardly wide enough lor it, a road that fell into emptiness; more than once wo had to get out and move from our path stones that had been brought down by a landslide.

The worse the road became, the higher grew the spirits of the driver. He knew' only one English word—“dance.” How' this word found its way into his vocabulary would probably be an interesting story, and I wish I knew it.

Whenever the car flung us towards the roof and the springs looked like giving out, or whenever lie hit his head on the roof above him, the driver would turn to me and, waggling one hand up and down to denote the unsteadiness of the car, cry with amusement : “Dance, dance!” * * * *

A few miels from the Cilician Gates wo came to a* dizzy little village perched in the cold mountains. There were a few huts clustered round a police post. A smiling young policeman w r ith a rifle over his shoulder held us up and inquired where wo were going, although for centuries the Cilician Gates have been the one possible destination on this road!

He nodded in a friendly way to me as he glanced inside the car, and all would have been well had not an excited young man with a w T ild mop of hair rushed out of the police station to see what was happening. He spoke a few fractured words of French, and

I gathered that he was the schoolmaster’s son.

He asked a lot of questions and, as the police at Adana had retained my passport, I was in a rather difficult situation, especially as the policeman, egged on by the young man, now joined in. “You say you are English?” said the young man. “Your passport, was it issued in Berlin?” “No,” I said angrily, “Berlin is in Germany. It was issued in London.” “Why are you in Turkey ? Why do you go to the Cilician Gates?” It was useless to object or to ask

what right this young man had to question and cross-examine me. I got out of the car and, walking some distance, sat on a stone and smoked cigarette after cigarette w'hile the young fanatic argued with the driver. I realised that‘simply because this young Chauvinist had interested himself in me, I stood a good chance of spending the night in the local cell or of being turned back from ,the Cilician Gates.

He came up to mo (and I would have given anything to have been able to tell him exactly what I thought of him), and pointed excitedly to my camera.

“What is that?” he cried. “You say it is a camera. lou cannot take photographs.” He pointed to the policeman. “This man must go with you,” lie said.

bo the policeman climbed in next to tiie driver and olf we bumped over the mountain track. Every now and then the car would give a lurch that threatened to send the rifle of my escort through the roof. 1 hoped the safety catch was down. After a mile or so the memory of the young Chauvinist faded slightly, and tne carver and trie policeman began to smg songs together and to indulge ail cheerful bursts of laughter. Then, with the air growing colder and in a silence broken only by the rush of mountain torrents, we approached onei of the most awe-inspir-ing gorges I have ever seen. The ancient road through the Taurus Mountains is about eighty miles in length, but the actual pass, rlie Liliciau Gates, is only a hundred yards long, where the dark coloured chits narrow to a mere slit. It is just a crack in the rock, at the bottom of which a torrent roars and tumbles.

.Many centuries belore Christ the people of Taurus chiselled a wagon road out of the cliff side. I walked tor some distance through the Gates and examined several ancient, weatherworn inscriptions hewn on the face of the rock. They were cut long ago by the armies that had passed through the Gates. One is, I think, an inscription of the time of Marcus Aurelius.

This is a haunted pass. Since the dawn of war and commerce, soldiers and merchants have poured through this narrow slit in the Taurus, Xenophon tells us how Gyrus and his immortal Ten Thousand came through on their way to Babylon in the summer of -101 B.C.

It was tli£ road taken by Alexander the Great with his armies in 333 B.C. The Crusaders, after passing through Constantinople and marching across Asia Minor, stood appalled beside the gorge of the Taurus which led down into Syria. They were horrified by its dark and gloomy defiles, and frightened by the danger which threatened from its overhanging dill's, where a handful of men could roll down death upon a multitude. They gave it the name of “the Gates of Judas.”

But as I stood in the pass that afternoon it was not of conqueror or of caravan that I thought, but of a man with a stalf in liis hand, who climbed up through the Cilician Gates to the great plains of Asia Alinor with a message of peace. As a child Paul must have known these mountains well, because in Homan times it was the custom to leave the hot plain during the summer months and live for a time on the heights. Early in his life he must have thought of the Gates as the entrance to another world; the place where the eastern roads, the desert roads, the roads from Baghdad, from Antioch rnoj’cd up through the mountains and joined a road that lay straight as an arrow to Ephesus, and over the sea to Rome.

I sat so long in the gloomy pass, trying to picture this indomitable wayfarer, that my escort began to cast suspicions glances at me, possibly wondering what mischief the foreigner could be hatching on a road that is to-day, as it was in thci day of Xenophon, a military road. The driver came to me and, pointing to the sky, indicated that unless we started back at once we would be held up on the hills. Regretfully I began the homeward journey, and we crept cautiously into Tarsus in the dark. No footfall broke the silence. Now and then the town dogs would bark and jackals would answer far off on the plain. Like a ghost in the moonlight I saw the vanished Tarsus of temple and colonnade, and, like a ghost in the moonlight, I seemed to see the figure of one man pressing on through the wild mountains I had left behind, bearing the most important message that humanity has ever been privileged to hear.

(To be continued.)