This Being Agreed To, We All Started, And, Crossing The
Valley, Entered A Gorge Upon The Other Side.
We now ascended naked hills
of pure crystallised gypsum; the strata were vertical, and the perfectly
transparent laminae were packed together like small sheets of glass only
a few inches in width.
It was easy to walk up the steep slopes of this
material without slipping, as the exterior edges, having been exposed to
the weather, had become rough, and were exactly like coarse glass placed
edgeways. We spread out into a line of skirmishers extending up the
hills upon both sides of the gorge, and quickly arrived in very likely
ground covered with dwarf-cypress. Here the dogs immediately flushed
partridges, and a Turk having wounded one, a considerable delay took
place in searching for it at the bottom of a deep wooded hollow, but to
no purpose. We now arrived at lovely ground within a mile of the sea,
forming a long succession of undulations, covered, more or less, with
the usual evergreen brushwood as far as the eye could reach. This uneven
surface, broken by many watercourses, was about eighty feet above the
water-level, and descended in steep rocky ledges to within a few hundred
yards of the sea, where the lower ground was flat and alternated in open
glades and thick masses of mastic scrub; the beach being edged by drift
sand-dunes covered by the dense jungle of various matted bushes.
There was a fair amount of game in this locality, and had the Turks shot
well we should have made a tolerable bag; but they did not keep a good
line, and many birds went back without being shot at, while others were
missed, and altogether the shooting was extremely wild.
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