. Discovery. Science. DISCOVERY 140 tliat the houses have existed above ground much longer than the church, which was built in 1S44. The entrances to the subterranean dwelhngs are in every case inside private houses. Your host takes you into his back premises, which extend themselves into an aperture like an enlarged rabbit-hole down which it is necessary to crawl upon hands and knees until the entry proper to the settlement is reached. This is marked by a recess at the side of the passage in which there is a mill-stone. From an inner chamber this stone can be rolled into position, completely
. Discovery. Science. DISCOVERY 140 tliat the houses have existed above ground much longer than the church, which was built in 1S44. The entrances to the subterranean dwelhngs are in every case inside private houses. Your host takes you into his back premises, which extend themselves into an aperture like an enlarged rabbit-hole down which it is necessary to crawl upon hands and knees until the entry proper to the settlement is reached. This is marked by a recess at the side of the passage in which there is a mill-stone. From an inner chamber this stone can be rolled into position, completely blocking the passage ; only the central hole of the mill-stone remains, and through this a rifle can be fired. " From inside we used to shoot with a gun thorough the hole in the mill-stone and shoot the Turks," said a modern villages, we were told, had taken refuge underground at the time of the Adana massacres. I can only hope that their cities of refuge may have enabled some of these Christians to survive the Great War. For with a sufficient supply of food they should be impregnable, except to blasting operations, for an indefinite period. Not less interesting are two series of rock-cut dwellings above ground. The material of the Cappa- docian plateau appears to consist of a very soft volcanic tufa with a thin protecting layer of harder rock on top. At two places there are cracks in this covering, and in these valleys the soft rock thus exposed has shown itself equally plastic to the agency of nature and the hand of man. One of them I have not had the good fortune to visit; the other, which runs from two masses. Fig. 2.—rock , UTCH I11>.SAK informant, and in the Middle Ages a captain of Timour Beg, who was sent to hunt out the cave-dwellers of this district, was shol with an arrow in similar fashion. Beyond the mill-stone is a series of dwelling-rooms, churches, and store-houses (that below Misti is reputed to contain as many as 400 dwellings), and t
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