Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean; On Board an American Frigate (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1853 Excerpt: ... LETTER XLVI. The Eye of the Camel--Rocky Sepulchres--Virtue of an old Passport, backed by Impudence--Temple of Cybele--Palace of Croesus--Ancient Church of Sardis--Return to Smyrna. Unsightly as the camel is, with its long snaky neck, its frightful hump, and its awkward legs and action, it wins muck upon your kindness with a little acquaintance. Its eye is exceedingly fine. There is a lustrous, suffused softness in the large hazel orb that is the rarest beauty in a human eye, and so remarkable is this feature in the camel, that I wonder it has never fallen into use as a poetical simile. They do not shun the gaze of man like other animals, and I pleased myself often when the suridjee slackened his pace, with riding close to some returning caravan, and exchanging steady looks in passing with the slow-paced camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old man. The face of Mount Sypilus, in its whole extent, is excavated into sepulchres. They are mostly ancient, and form a very singular feature in the scenery. A range of precipices, varying from one to three hundred feet in height, is perforated for twenty miles with these airy depositories for the dead, many of them a hundred feet from the plain. Occasionally they are extended to considerable caves, hewn with great labour in the rock, and probably from their numerous niches, intended as family sepulchres. They are now the convenient eyries of great numbers of eagles, which circle continually around the summits, and poise themselves on the wing along the sides of these lonely mountains, in undisturbed security. We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a pretty town at the foot of Mount Tmolus. Having eaten a melon, the only thing for which the place is famous, we proposed to go on to VILLAGE OF ACHMET-LEE...