[17]
Carura forms a boundary between Phrygia and Caria. It is a village; and it has inns, and also fountains of boiling-hot waters, some in the Maeander River and some above its banks. Moreover, it is said that once, when a brothel-keeper had taken lodging in the inns along with a large number of women, an earthquake took place by night, and that he, together with all the women, disappeared from sight. And I might almost say that the whole of the territory in the neighborhood of the Maeander is subject to earthquakes and is undermined with both fire and water as far as the interior; for, beginning at the plains, all these conditions extend through that country to the Charonia,1 I mean the Charonium at Hierapolis and that at Acharaca in Nysaïs and that near Magnesia and Myus. In fact, the soil is not only friable and crumbly but is also full of salts2 and easy to burn out.3 And perhaps the Maeander is winding for this reason, because the stream often changes its course and, carrying down much silt, adds the silt at different times to different parts of the shore; however, it forcibly thrusts a part of the silt out to the high sea. And, in fact, by its deposits of silt, extending forty stadia, it has made Priene, which in earlier times was on the sea, an inland city.4
1 See 5. 4. 5, and the note on "Plutonia."
2 i.e., sodium chloride (salt), and perhaps other salts found in soil, as, for example, sodium carbonate and calcium sulphate—unless by the plural of the word Strabo means merely "salt-particles," as Tozer takes it.
3 On "soil which is burnt out," see Vol. II, p. 454, footnote 1.
4 "At the present day the coastline has been advanced so far, that the island of Lade, off Miletus, has become a hill in the middle of a plain" (Tozer, op. cit., p. 288).
Strabo. ed. H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.
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