The river Meander is perhaps the most celebrated of all antiquity, and has been made a generic term, in most languages, to designate a winding stream; poets and historians equally commemorate it. It rose near the ancient city of Celene, and, increased by various tributaries, it fell into the Ægean between Miletus and Priene. So tortuous was its course, that it was counted to have made 600 windings in its progress to the sea. It afforded Dædalus the model for his labyrinth, and travellers have discovered in many parts the various accurate outlines of some of the most convoluted letters of the Greek alphabet. It was remarkable for the alterations it caused in the countries through which it wound its way−obliterating old, and adding new tracts. This was so frequent, and attended with such damage, that an indictment lay against the river; and the person who suffered was remunerated out of the tolls of the bridges which passed over it.

This constant undermining of its banks, and the fall of them into its current, was the probable cause of its devious course. The soil, obstructed in one place, was deposited in another; while the great quantity held in suspension, was suffered to fall when the waters, meeting the obstructions of the sea, no longer supported it in the current. In its mouth it formed great bars, and threw up new lands. The changes thus made were celebrated by the ancients as so many mythological and preternatural metamorphoses:−

Thus it happened that several celebrated towns, situated on its banks, are not now to be traced there. The city of Myus stood on a bay; the constant deposit of mud by the river obstructed the ingress of salt-water, and the bay was changed into an inland lake; the alluvial and marshy soil, generated by the slime, afforded a nidus to vast swarms of insects; and so Myus was infested, and called “the city of gnats.” The swarms at this day are an intolerable nuisance; towards evening, the inside of tents become black with them. Myriads of winged insects cling to the poles and canvass. The torture they give is so insupportable, that the sufferers blow them up with gunpowder, and often set fire to their tents, to get rid of a plague equal to any of those of Egypt. Miletus, celebrated for its woollen manufacture and rich dyes−the birth-place of one of the seven wise men, and the capital of Ionia−was ruined by the Meander; the capricious stream removed itself from its vicinity, and, for an easy and inviting approach, prohibited ingress by depositing inaccessible mounds of mud.

The process, which for revolving centuries marked this singular river, is still going on; deposits are daily made of soft soil, and that which had been left before, hardened into firm ground. This new-created land is stretching beyond the estuary of the stream, and the promontories which marked its mouth, as its barrier against the encroaching of the sea, are now so remote from it, that they are seen distant inland hills. A judicious traveller remarks, that it is probable the land will be pushed away, to join the island of Samos, and such a change will be wrought on this coast by the caprice of the river, that “barren rocks may be enamelled with rich domains, and other cities may rise and flourish on the bounty of the Meander.”

The rich valley through which this river winds its way, was formerly filled with many famous cities, and some distinguished for that luxury and effeminacy which a balmy climate and a fertile soil are apt to generate. Tralles and Alabanda sent from hence their swarms of “esurient Greeks,” with their cargoes of figs and prunes, to taint the Roman citizens, already sufficiently corrupt. Notwithstanding the desolation which Turkish indolence and barbarism brought into these fertile regions, the active spirit of the ancient Greeks still seems to animate their oppressed descendants. The whole plain is seen by the traveller in the highest state of cultivation: corn, wine, and oil, the evidence and emblem of fatness and fertility, are now abundant here, as in the days of the free Greek cities,−pastures covered with sheep and oxen, fields waving with golden crops of wheat, vineyards bending under vast clusters of grape, and gardens shaded by the broad foliage of the fig, are still the prospects which present themselves.

In the midst of this abundance is situated the town of Guzel-Hissar, appropriately called “the Castle of Beauty,” which its name imports. It lies on a small stream, about ten miles from the Meander, and on an eminence which commands a prospect of the lovely vale through which the river winds its way. Our illustration presents a view of it, with Mount Thorax rising behind it, and the ridges of the Messogeis before it−the wooded plain of the Meander lying between, and spread out under the city. Both seem to partake of the same quality of rank vegetation. Among minarets, and domes, and houses, rise cypress, terebinth, and oriental platanus, so that the whole is a forest of mingled spires and trees; among these, myriads of turtle-doves take up their abode, and they and their progeny, in surprising numbers, covering the branches and roofs, fill the air all day long with their incessant and plaintive cooing. The town is the residence of a pasha, but its edifices have little to boast of; they are mean and ragged, and travellers complain of the caravansaries, as being more comfortless and destitute than even Turkish khans. The inhabitants feel the effects of a rank and exuberant vegetation. During the sultry months, a mal-aria is generated, highly pestilential. The plague sometimes rages with mortal malignity; and the traveller, shut up in a small and naked room of a filthy house, panting with heat and devoured with insects, rather endures any thing within, than walk abroad, and encounter the ghastly and infected objects that stalk along, and carry contagion with them through the streets.