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That is why I write about Keben.

I write about Keben because the picture of this Turkish mountain village has come to me over the years like flute song across a mountain valley. I'm not asleep when I see the vertical village clutching a mountain cliff. A hamlet so isolated that as late as 1972, the inhabitants had never heard of America and in their frustration, asked, "Who is your king?"

We were staying near Silifke, in a tiny Mediterranean fishing village with our newfound friend Huseyn and his wife Eminou, her mother and their two sons, Mustafa, age 4 and Eyüp, nearly 2. It was Huseyn's idea to travel to Keben when Ramadan drew to a close. In Keben we would visit Eminou's family and celebrate Bayram, the culminating feast of this holy period. One morning, Huseyn announced, "Tomorrow we will go to Keben. We will be stoop-id [his amusing way of saying "stopped"] there."

The trip preparation was intense. Huseyn and Stephen fished all day and caught a large bag of mullet and sea bass to bring as gifts. I helped Eminou make an extra vat of yogurt. Then, with several trips to the village pump, she filled the cauldron with water and hung it over the fire. When it was warm, we carried it into the storeroom and there she and I sat on little wooden stools and splashed our naked bodies with the water, scooping it out of the cauldron with hollow gourds. We soaped ourselves luxuriously with the soft white soap she had made from olive oil. Afterward, we put on our baggy trousers and sweaters and combed our wet hair by the fire. Now we were clean enough to visit Keben.

What with making the bread and the yogurt, the packing of it and packing the green olives and the clothes and the coverlets and of course, the bonjuk beading so hands wouldn't be idle -- what with all this activity, it was noon before we left.

Huseyn, Stephen, Eminou, her mother, little Mustafa and Eyüp and I settled into our VW van. We drove north into the Taurus mountains, winding along the narrow muddy roads. Several times we had to push the van out of the mud. At one point on the journey, Huseyn yelled, "You are stoop-id here!" We screeched to a halt at the side of the mountain where an overgrown footpath led upwards. He took his rifle and beckoned us to follow.

Leaving the others in the car, Stephen and I trudged up the path for about 10 minutes, not understanding why or where we were going until we reached a bluff. "Look!" Huseyn pointed up to a sheer cliff wall that held three enormous Hittite reliefs, each more than 30 feet high.

The sight of the magnificent carvings looming above us was breathtaking. Each carving was in profile. One was of a man, perhaps a priest in a long robe, with a long curly beard and wearing a tall cone-shaped hat. The second was even larger and showed a warrior in a short tunic with a spear. The third carving was the most beautiful -- a woman in a pleated gown with a sort of fan-shaped hat. Her arm was raised, pointing to something in the distance.

"The lady," Huseyn explained solemnly, "she is pointing to the ducks."

While we were still standing awestruck by this hidden treasure, he walked to the edge of the plateau where we could no longer see him -- but could hear the reverberating mountain echoes of his gunshots.

After a little while, Huseyn ran back, grinning. "No ducks today. We are going!"

Our van groaned up the tortuous road. As it climbed we could look far across the land. We saw pastures and tributaries of the Göksu River in the shadowed valleys. By a stream, we stopped for a lunch of cheese and bread. Then we wound higher and higher until, in the red glimmer of dusk, we rounded a hairpin bend to see above us several waterfalls pouring over a cliff. As if mimicking the waterfalls, houses built of rocks or carved out of the mountain tumbled down the cliff -- a flowing cascade of homes. From crevices in the mountainside rose delicate dwarf pines the pale green color of sage.

This was Keben.

Next page | "You are the first strangers to visit Keben"