THE GILIGIAN GATES. 39 



ferred the true line of defence from the narrow neck of 

 the Cilician Gates, whose perpendicular walls of rock 

 rise high on either side of the road a few miles to the 

 south. The bad weather which had pursued me the 

 whole way showed no improvement as I drove through 

 the celebrated Gates, and I saw nothing consequently 

 but a blurred picture of perpendicular walls of rock 

 through flakes of falling snow. Professor Ramsay 

 describes the passage as a narrow cleft piercing the 

 front wall of the main mass of Taurus : " The actual 

 passage of the Gates is about 100 yards long. On 

 both sides the rock walls rise almost perpendicularly 

 (that on the west side literally so, at one point to about 

 100 feet above the road), and then slope steeply back 

 towards the towering summit of the ridge. A mediaeval 

 castle crowns the western summit, evidently a relic 

 of the long frontier warfare between Byzantine and 

 Saracen power, 641-965 a.d." ^ In the same paper he 

 points out the falsity of the legend that Ibrahim Pasha 

 widened the passage, which before was too narrow to 

 admit of two loaded camels passing one another, re- 

 calling the fact that " a road practical for waggons 

 traversed the Gates at least as early as 400 B.C.," 

 while his own estimate of the width of the defile 

 corresponds exactly with that of Kinneir, who when 

 traversing it in 1812, before Ibrahim's day, described it 

 as not more than ten or twelve paces in the narrowest 

 part. It may further be pointed out that there remains 

 a rock inscription on either side of the pass dating from 

 a period many hundreds of years prior to the time of 

 Ibrahim. 



So much for this ancient highway of nations, which 

 has resounded with the tramp of the armies of Cyrus, 

 Alexander, Cicero, Harun-al-Kaschid, and Ibrahim 



1 Journal E.G.S., October 1903. 



