are provided for the horses belonging to travellers or caravans: beautiful fountains spout forth refreshing streams around the khan; the gate is one of the richest specimens of Moresque architecture, as well in conception as in all its details, and one of the most striking in point of effect, to be seen in the world. The Arabian style of architecture may there be recognised in its full perfection."

FORTIFIED CLIFFS OF ALAYA,

COAST OF CARAMANIA.

These vast precipices of Alaya drop perpendicularly into the sea, which has worn caverns in their base, and their summits are lined with ancient towers, probably of the middle ages. The town is partly seen at the foot of the declivity, up which the houses seem to climb, so as almost to rest on each other: the numerous walls and towers which still exist prove how anxious its former possessors were to make the place impregnable. The cliffs are between five and six hundred feet high above the sea, and continue equally perpendicular to sixty or seventy feet below it; at a little distance from the shore, they are lost under the lofty mountains of the interior, but close in they have a magnificent appearance. They consist of a compact white limestone, tinged here and there with red. The general aspect of the town and its vicinity exactly coincides with the short description Strabo gives of Coracesium, the first town of Cilicia; and the barren ridges of Mount Taurus, which here come down to the shore, sufficiently indicate the beginning of that rugged coast Other circumstances concur in proving the identity of these places; for we find that Coracesium shut its gates against Antiochus, when all the remaining fortresses of Cilicia had submitted. It was afterwards selected by the pirates, from their many strongholds, to make a last stand against the Romans; and certainly no place on the whole coast was so well calculated to arrest the march of a conqueror, or to bid defiance to a fleet, as these commanding precipices. On the top of a high conical hill, about three miles north-west of Alaya, and two miles from the coast, are the deserted remains of an ancient town: it was surrounded with walls; the ruins of a handsome temple were found there, much broken sculpture, and many Greek inscriptions; but they are all monumental, in honour of different individuals, and throw no light on the former name of the place. Laertes is described by Strabo as a fortress built on a hill, the shape of which is like a woman's breast, and the above hill has manifestly this peculiar form. Diogenes Laertius was a native of this town.

In approaching Alaya along the coast, several villages and castles are passed, of comparatively recent construction, yet all ruined and deserted, and affording a striking picture of the rapid impoverishment of this part of the Turkish empire. The present importance of the town is not great, although it is the capital of a pashalic; the streets and houses are miserable; there are few mosques, and they are mean; there are no perceptible signs of commerce, and the population does not exceed two thousand. The vestiges of ancient buildings do not possess much interest; there is here no harbour, and the anchorage is indifferent The view of the town-walls and steep, to whose bosom they cling, is so picturesque and fantastic, that it resembles a chess-board placed on its end; open to the sweep of the southerly winds, without trees or shelter. There is a small isle, with a castle on it, near the shore: a useless, at least an uncultivated soil, rarely pressed by the traveller's foot: no incitement to industry or activity; little intercourse with other nations or places; the grossest ignorance, bigotry, and brutality—such are the characteristics of Alaya and its people.

Wherever the industrious colonists of ancient Greece formed a maritime settlement, they endeavoured by art to supply the deficiencies of nature; and it is not probable that a place of such strength and consequence should have been left destitute of some shelter for its vessels. There was probably a mole here in ancient times; and Captain Beaufort, in his rapid and admirable sketch of the whole of this rarely-visited coast, observes, that he was restrained from searching for the remains of this mole, from an anxiety not to give offence to the peevish prejudices of the inhabitants. An isolated position, like that of Alaya, though it looks from the sea like a little Gibraltar, is a dreary home, where the Turk dreams and frets away his life, deprived of all the associations and little indispensable luxuries and excitements which seem to form the art and part of his existence: no groves, even in the rocky cemetery—no fountains, no coffee-houses but of the meanest kind—how is he to bear " the many ills and cares that flesh is heir to?' he must sit on the rugged beach, or the limestone rock, and smoke his pipe, and look on the wild waste of waters, or on the mouldering and broken ruins of old walls and towers, while the seabird's shriek rings in his ear. In the hot season, the white cliffs cast fiercely and dismally back the glare of the sun, all shadowless, flowerless—no soft green bank, no loved palm or sycamore: in winter, the violence of the wind and the surge often keep him within doors, where his thin walls and comfortless rooms are pierced by the blast: if he has ever read the Arabian Nights, or heard of Cairo or Constantinople, what visions of glory and blessedness must they seem—what a mockery of Alaya!