The temple of the great goddess Diana, about a quarter of the way across the plain, was a wide, low mound, and here it is that the recent excavations of Mr. Wood have laid bare one of the most interesting archæological discoveries of modern times. We eagerly tramp across the mud and over the corn-stalks of this year's crop to the débris, and, climbing up it, look down upon a vast depressed area, filled with fragments of magnificent marble columns, and with carved blocks on which are inscriptions so fresh that they seem to have been engraved yesterday, all jumbled together in a hopeless confusion, but from amid which Mr. Wood, who has had a force of three hundred men excavating here for the three previous years, has unearthed many valuable memorials. At the time of our visit the work was suspended and Mr. Wood was away, nor was it possible to obtain from the utterly dilapidated old Arab who called himself a guide, any coherent account of the last results, beyond the fact that a ship had come to take them away.
I made out one inscription, which was apparently a votive tablet to the daughter of the Emperor Aurelius Antoninus, but in most cases, though the engraving, as far as it went, was clear, the fragments were too small to contain more than a few words. In places the marble pavement of the temple was clearly defined, and its size was well worthy the fame which ranked it among the seven wonders of the world. From here a long, muddy trudge took us to the base of the hill, or mount, called Pion, on the flank of which is the cave of the Seven Sleepers, and attached to it is the well-known legend of the seven young men who went to sleep here, and awoke, after two hundred years, to find matters so changed that they were overcome by the shock. When I surmounted the hill and looked down upon the Stadium, the Agora, the Odeon, and other ruins, I was conscious of two predominating sentiments. One was surprise and the other disappointment; surprise, that one of the most populous and celebrated cities in the world should have arisen on such a site; and disappointment, that so little of its magnificence remained.
From an architectural point of view there is absolutely nothing left worth looking at. Lines of broken stone mark the limits of the principal buildings. The Stadium, which accommodated 76,000 persons, and one of the theatres, which accommodated over 56,000, are almost shapeless mounds. The whole scene is one of most complete desolation, and we are driven to our imagination to realize what Ephesus once must have been. In the case of Palmyra and Baalbec no such effort is necessary; enough is left for us to repeople without difficulty those splendid solitudes; but in Ephesus all is savage and dreary in the extreme; deep fissures run into the rock, which must have formed nearly the centre of the town; huge boulders of natural stone suggest the wild character of some portion of the city in its palmiest days. It is difficult to conceive to what use the citizens devoted this Mount Pion, with its crags and caverns and fissures. The lines of the old port are clearly defined by the limits of a marsh, from which a sluggish stream, formerly a canal, runs to the sea, about three miles distant, not far from the debouchure of the Meander. No doubt the mass of the city surrounded the port, but there is a marvellous lack of débris in this direction. Between the Temple of Diana and the foot of Mount Pion there is not a stone, so that the probability is that the temple was situated amid groves of trees. On the hill there are stones, or, rather, rocks, enough, but they are of huge size, and for the most part natural. Of actual city comparatively few remains still exist. No doubt its columns and monuments and slabs have supplied materials for the ornamentation and construction of many cities, and the convenience of getting to it by sea has materially aided the spoilers. Still, the site of ancient Ephesus affords abundant material for conjecture, and the more one studies the local topography the more difficult is it to picture to one's self what the ancient city was like.