THE morning of our departure from Naples came, and we departed, this time very early. Long before “the saffron-tinted dawn,” as I remember when a boy at school I used to translate the Homeric phrase, had touched the red pillar of smoke above Vesuvius, I was up and doing my experienced best to arouse my companion, by arranging the electric lights in such an artistic fashion that their unveiled and concentrated rays struck full upon his “slumber-curtained eyes.” But he is an excellent sleeper, and the effort was a failure. Therefore stronger measures had to be found.

At length we were off, the extreme earliness of the hour saving me something considerable in the matter of hotel tips. By the time we reached the station, however, every Italian connected with the place was wide-awake and quite ready to receive the largesse of the noble foreigner. I think that I had to fee about ten men at that station, at least eight of them for doing nothing. Gratuities were dispensed to the bus-conductor who introduced us to a porter; to the porter who led us three yards to the ticket office; to an official who inspected the tickets after we had taken them; to two other officials who showed us respectively the platform from which the train for Brindisi started and the place where the luggage must be booked; to a superior person who announced that he would see the luggage properly booked, and to various other inferior persons, each of

whom prepared to carry some small article to the platform. Then being called upon suddenly to decide, and very much afraid that the said small articles would vanish in transit, I determined upon the spur of the moment to accompany them to the carriage, leaving my nephew to attend to the registration of the heavier baggage.

Even in that crowded tumultuous moment I had, it is true, my doubts of the wisdom of this arrangement, but remembering that on the last occasion when he performed this important office, the intelligent booking-clerk had managed to relieve my companion of half a napoleon, by the simple process of giving change to the amount of twenty centimes instead of ten francs twenty centimes, I was sure that experience would have made him very, very cautious. Presently he arrived radiant, having accomplished all decently and in order at the moderate expense of another few francs of tips.

“Have you got the luggage-ticket?” I asked with sombre suspicion.

“Rather,” he answered; “do you suppose that I am green enough to come without it?” and he showed me the outside of a dirty bit of paper. The outside, remember, not the inside, for thereby hangs a very painful, moving tale.

Well, we started, this time in great comfort, since, except for an Italian sportsman arrayed in quaint attire, we had the carriage to ourselves. We steamed past Pompeii and Sorrento, thence for hours climbing over huge mountain ranges covered with snow, sometimes almost to the level of the railway line. After these came vast stretches of plain. Then in the afternoon we travelled for many miles along the seashore, a very lonely strand fringed with pines blown by the prevalent winds to curious, horizontal shapes, as though a gardener had trimmed them thus for years. Ultimately once more we headed inland across the foot of Italy, and

at last, after a journey of about thirteen hours, to my great relief, for I feared lest another train off the line might make us lose our boat, ran into Brindisi.

Here to our joy the local Cook was in attendance, who put us into a cab, strictly charging us to “pay nothing to nobody.” He announced further that he would follow presently to the mail steamer Isis with the heavy baggage, for which he took the ticket.

We reached the Isis, a narrow, rakish-looking boat, found our cabin, and began to arrange things. While we were getting rid of the dust of our long journey I heard a voice outside, the voice of Cook, though strangely changed and agitated.

“Mr. Haggard,” said the voice, “Mr. Rider Haggard.”

“Yes,” I answered; “what's the matter? I've paid for the passages at the office.”

“It isn't the passages, it's your luggage,” he replied through the door; “ it's gone!”

I sank upon my berth. “Gone?” I said feebly, “gone where?”

“To Reggio,” replied the mournful voice, “Reggio on the other side of Italy, where you booked it to.”

“It was booked to Brindisi,” I shouted.

“Oh no, it wasn't,” wailed the voice, “it was booked to Reggio; here's the ticket.”

“Do you hear that?” I said to my nephew, who, with his dripping head lifted from the basin, was staring at vacancy as though he had seen a ghost; “do you hear that? He says you booked the luggage to Reggio.”

“I didn't,” he gasped; “I gave them the tickets for Brindisi.”

A horrible thought struck me. “Did you examine the voucher?” I asked.

Then almost with tears he confessed that he had overlooked this formality.

“My friend,” I went on, “do you understand what you have done? Has it occurred to you that this

exceedingly thick and uncomfortable brown suit, with three flannel shirts, a leather medicine-case, and some wraps and sundries are all that we possess to travel with to Cyprus, where, such is the hospitable nature of its inhabitants, we shall probably be asked out to dinner every night?”

“We've got some cigarettes and a revolver, and you can have my dinner-jacket, it is in the little bag,” he answered with feeble inconsequence.

I took the dinner-jacket at once; it was several sizes too small for me, but better than nothing. Then I expressed my feelings in language as temperate as I could command. Considering the circumstances it was, I think, wonderfully temperate.

At this juncture the voice of the patient (and most excellent) representative of the world-wide majesty of Cook spoke as though in reverie through the door.

“It is a strange thing,” he said, “these sad accidents always happen to you gentlemen with double names. The last time it was to the great artist gentleman—how did he call himself? Ah! I have it. Mr.—Mr.— Melton Prior. He went on with nothing, quite nothing. His luggage too travelled to Reggio.”

Enough. Let oblivion take that dreadful hour. But the odd thing is that this is the second time in my life that the said “sad accident” has happened to me. Once before, bound to the East, did I arrive upon the mail-steamer at Brindisi to find that by some pretty caprice of the Italian railway officials my portmanteaus were at Milan, or elsewhere, and that I must travel to Egypt and sojourn there in what I stood up in, plus the contents of a hand-bag. I remember that on this occasion my sufferings were somewhat soothed by the melancholy state of an Australian family, who found themselves doomed to voyage to Sydney with an outfit that would not have cut up into an infant's layette. Their luggage also had gone to Reggio.

As a matter of curiosity I should like to know why the Italians play these tricks with the belongings of travellers, as is their common and undoubted habit. To take the present case, it is true that my nephew neglected to study the scrawl upon the voucher, but really he was not to blame, for he gave the clerk the tickets for Brindisi, by which that functionary was bound to register the luggage. Moreover, every official in the station knew that we were going to Brindisi—a fact upon the strength of which many of them, under this pretext or that, had managed to extract something from my pocket. Yet quite calmly, although there was no press of business for we were almost the only passengers, they sent the luggage to Reggio. My own belief is that sometimes this kind of thing is done as a bad practical joke, or possibly to annoy the foreigner within their gates, and sometimes for the purposes of pillage. If this be so, the effort is eminently successful, especially when the unfortunate victim has to catch a mail for the East and must leave his effects to take their chance.

The Isis is one of the swift boats which carry the mail from Brindisi to Port Said. The bags leave London at nine on Friday night. By seven or eight on Sunday night they should be at Brindisi, and by Wednesday night or Thursday morning at Port Said, where the big boat awaits them.

It is very curious to see these bags come on board. Somebody announces that the mail is in, and an officer takes his station opposite the gangway at a little table on which lies a great lined and printed form, while another officer stands by the gangway itself. Quartermasters and sailors also station themselves at convenient spots between it and the mail-room. Presently there is a rumble, and a covered van drawn by a wretched-looking horse appears in the strong ring of electric light upon the quay. Attending it are an extraordinary collection of ragamuffins, of whom the use now

becomes apparent. The van is unlocked by some one in charge, and the first ragamuffin is given a sack and a tally-stick. Up the gangway he trots, delivers the tally-stick to the quartermaster at its head, who calls out the destination of each bag to the officer at the table, who in his turn checks and enters it upon the sheet. That carrier trots away to the right towards the mail-room, where he delivers his bag and descends by a second gangway to the quay for another.

Meanwhile his companions are following him like a stream of ants, each with a sack of letters on his shoulder and a tally-stick in his hand. When the tally-sticks come to the number of ten, they are placed in the section of a box that stands on the deck at the feet of the quartermaster. A hundred tally-sticks exactly fill this box, which is then replaced by another empty box. Thus an additional check is kept upon the number of the bags.

Now that van is empty and another arrives, and so on and on for hours, till at last all the mail is safely aboard, checked, and sorted. I believe that on this particular Sunday night the count amounted to something over two thousand bags, which is not very heavy. One of the officers told me that the letters, &c., in which Great Britain sent her last Christmas wishes to the East filled nearly four thousand bags. As may be imagined, the introduction of the penny Imperial post is not likely to lessen these totals.

Before the mail was all on board we were fast asleep, waking up the next morning to find the Isis tearing at about eighteen knots (she can run twenty-three) through a stormy sea and beneath a wet and sunless sky. By midday our course was taking us through the beautiful islands of the Greek Archipelago, to some of which we passed quite close. Here it was that we found most reason to mourn the lack of sunlight, which in this dripping weather caused even those green Ionian slopes

to look cold and grey. Amongst other places we saw that Leucadian crag whence the Greek poetess Sappho leapt into the sea. Studying the spot I came to the conclusion that her nerve must have been almost as remarkable as her genius. Women very rarely commit suicide by jumping off a great height, especially into water. By the way, I wonder if Sappho was as beautiful as the bust in the Naples Museum, that was discovered at Pompeii or Herculaneum, I forget which, seems to suggest. Tradition describes her as small and dark, so perhaps the head is a fancy portrait by some great artist of a later age. So real and so full of life and intelligence is it, however, that whoever was its model must have been both a lovely and a clever woman. Indeed, genius seems to sit upon that brow of bronze and to look from those wide enamelled eyes.

Leaving Brindisi late on Sunday night, early on the Wednesday morning we sighted the low shores of Egypt. By eight we were steaming past the well-remembered breakwater at Port Said, very empty now on account of the war and the coal famine, and in another half-hour had cast anchor alongside the great liner which was ready to receive our mails.

Once I spent three or four days in Port Said waiting for my steamer, and may claim, therefore, to know it fairly well. Of all the places I have visited during many travels I can recall but one that strikes me as more dreary. It is a fever-stricken hole named Frontera at the mouth of the Usumacinto River in Tabasco, that can boast the largest and fiercest mosquitoes in the whole world.

However on this occasion we were destined to see but little of Port Said, since the vessel that was to take us on to Cyprus, named the Flora, would sail as soon as we had transhipped her mails. Accordingly, bidding farewell to the Isis and her kind commander, we took a boat and rowed across to the Flora, a small and ugly-looking vessel painted black, and belonging to the

Austrian-Lloyd. On board of her I found no one who could speak any tongue I knew, and it was with some difficulty that at last, by the help of the steward's assistant, who understood a little French, I was able to explain that we wished to proceed to Larnaca.

At the time it struck me as so odd that the English Government mails should be carried in a vessel thus distinctly foreign, that afterwards in Cyprus I inquired into the reason. It seems that the Colonial Office, or rather the Treasury, are responsible. The Austrian-Lloyd line, being in the receipt of a subsidy from their Government, were able to make a lower tender for the transport of mails than another line, owned by a British company. So notwithstanding the manifest inconveniences of employing an alien bottom for this important purpose, which in certain political conditions might easily prove dangerous, the home authorities decreed that the contract should go to the foreigner. Perhaps they thought that the sacred principles of Free Trade, or rather of subsidised foreign competition, ought to prevail even in the matter of the conveyance of her Majesty's mails.

Another thing became evident, that Cyprus is not a place of popular resort, since my nephew and I were the only first-class passengers in the ship. Unless he be a Government official, or some friend or connection of one of the very few British residents, it is not often, I imagine, that the Flora takes a traveller to the island. Still she provides for them, by printing a set of rules in English and hanging them on the companion. They cover much ground; in them even politeness finds its place, since the reader is reminded that passengers being “persons of education, will pay a due regard to the fair sex.” Reflection, however, seems to have suggested that this axiom might meet with too liberal a rendering. At any rate, farther down we are informed with grave sincerity that “gentlemen are not allowed to enter the cabins of the ladies.”

After the dull weather we had experienced between Italy and Egypt, the twenty-four hours' run of our lonely voyage to Larnaca was very pleasant, for the sun shone brightly, the wind did not blow, and the sea was blue as only the Mediterranean in its best moods knows how to be. When we got up next morning—we were provided, each of us, with a whole four-berth cabin, but the Flora does not boast a bath—it was to find that Cyprus was already in sight: a long, grey land with occasional mountains appearing here and there.

Onward we steamed, watching a single white-sailed bark that slid towards us across the azure sea like some dove on outstretched wings, till at length we cast anchor in the roadstead off the little port of Larnaca, a pretty town lying along the seashore. Some miles away, and to our left as we face it, rises the mountain of the Holy Cross—I think that it is, or used to be called Oros Staveros by the Greeks, and by the Latins Monte Croce, at any rate in the time of Pocock.

Felix Fabri, the German monk who made two pilgrimages to Palestine in or about the year 1480, tells how he visited this monastery and saw its relics. It will be remembered that St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who when an old woman journeyed to the Holy Land in 325 of our era, was so fortunate as to discover beneath the alleged site of the Holy Sepulchre, the veritable cross of our Lord together with that of one or both of the thieves who suffered with Him. But of this more hereafter. The cross of the good thief who, why I know not, has been named Dysma, she is said to have brought to Cyprus and established upon this mountain. Whether anything of it remains there now I cannot say, as I made no visit to the place either on this occasion or on a former journey in the island some fourteen years ago. This is what old Felix says about it. I quote here and elsewhere from the most excellent and scholarly translation of

his writings by Mr. Aubrey Stewart, M.A., which is unfortunately practically inaccessible to most readers, as it can only be obtained as part of the Library of the “Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society” at a minimum cost of ten guineas:—“She”—i.e. St. Helena—“brought her own cross, that which had been Dysma's, entire from Jerusalem to this mount, and here she built a great convent for monks, and a church within which she placed this cross as an exceeding holy relic. She ordered a chamber or closet to be built in the wall over against the altar, and placed the cross within it; and there it stands unmoved even to this day, albeit the monastery itself has long since been overthrown, even to the ground, by the Turks and Saracens, and the monks of the Order of St. Benedict who once dwelt therein have been scattered. The position and arrangement of this cross in its place is wonderful. The cross stands in a blind window, and both its arms are let into holes made in the walls, and its foot is let into a hole made in the floor. But the holes which contain the arms of the cross and the foot of the cross are large out of all proportion, and the cross nowhere touches the wall, but is free and clear from contact with the wall on every side. The miracle which is noised abroad about the cross is that it hangs in the air without any fastening, and withal stands as firm as though it were fixed with the strongest nails or built into the wall, which nevertheless it is not, because all the three holes are very great, so that a man can put his hand into them and perceive by touch that there is no fastening there, nor yet at the back or at the head of the cross. I might indeed have searched this thing more narrowly than I did, but I feared God, and had no right to do that which I had forbidden others to do. I climbed this mount to show honour to the cross, not to try whether there was a miracle or not, or to tempt God. That this cross may be the more worthy of reverence, they have joined to it a piece of the true Cross of Christ.”

Felix Fabri was easily satisfied, as a mediæval monk should be. So much for the cross of Dysma.

Soon we were rowing ashore in the Government boat, a distance of three-quarters of a mile or so, for Larnaca is not a harbour, but an open roadstead—there are now no

harbours worthy of the name in Cyprus. Landing at the pier we were at once conducted to the custom-house, and explained that we had nothing to declare.

“But have you a revolver?” asked the officer.

I answered that I had.

“Then I must trouble you to hand it over,” he replied. “I will give you a receipt for it, and you can claim it when you leave the island.”

I looked what I felt, astonished, but obeyed. On inquiry it appeared that the Cyprus Government has recently passed some legislation as to the importation of firearms. It would seem that murders had been somewhat frequent in the island, mostly carried out by shooting, hence the law. Whether it was intended to prevent respectable travellers who purpose journeying in the mountain districts from carrying a pistol for their own protection, is another matter. Doubtless in fact it was not; but in Cyprus they have a great respect for the letter of the law, and therefore put this somewhat unnecessary query. For instance, they have another regulation—aimed, I suppose, at the exclusion of phylloxera — against the importation of seeds or plants, which has been known to work in an unforeseen manner. Thus a year or two ago a foreign royalty, I think it was the Prince of Naples, visited the island wearing a carnation in his buttonhole. His Royal Highness must have been somewhat amazed when a custom-house official leant forward and gently but firmly removed the contraband flower.

I am told that this story is quite true, but it may be only a local satire upon the kindly providence of a patriarchal Government.

It is right to add, however, that there is not the slightest need for a traveller of the ordinary stamp to carry any defensive weapon in Cyprus. Since the English occupation of the island at any rate, now some twenty years ago, no place can be more safe. In the wildest parts of it he who behaves himself has nothing

to fear from the natives, a kindly, gentle-natured race, Turk or Christian, although, as I have said, not averse to murdering each other upon occasion. But of this also more hereafter.

Having delivered up the weapon of war and been given an elaborate receipt for the same, we proceeded to our hotel accompanied by a motley collection of various blood and colour, each of them bearing a small piece of our exiguous belongings, whereof the bulk, it will be remembered, had travelled to Reggio. These folk, however, are not exorbitant in their demands and do not grumble or ask for more. Tourists have not come to Cyprus to spoil it; I never heard of an American even setting foot on the island, therefore a shilling here goes as far as five elsewhere.

The hotel at Larnaca is now I believe the only one in Cyprus. It stands within a few feet of the shore—safely enough, for the sea is tideless—is comfortable, with large, cool rooms, and absurdly cheap. I grieve to add that its proprietor cannot make it pay. No travellers visit this lovely and most interesting isle, in ancient days the garden of the whole Mediterranean, therefore there are no hotels. Once there was one at Limasol, but it failed and converted itself into a hospital. He who would journey here must either rely upon tents, which are a poor shelter before the month of April, or upon the kind and freely offered hospitality of the Government officials. Naturally this lack of accommodation frightens away tourists, which for many reasons in a poor country like Cyprus is a vast pity. Yet until the tourist comes it is idle to expect that conveniences for his reception will be provided. So this matter stands.

Where Larnaca now lies was once the ancient Citium, of which the marsh near at hand is believed to have been the harbour. Quite half of the present town, indeed, is said to be built upon the necropolis of Citium, whence comes its name, Larnaca, derived, it is supposed,

from Larnax, an urn or a sepulchre. The town is divided into two parts, Larnaca proper and the Marina along the seashore, which is reported to have been recovered within the last few centuries from the bed of the ocean.

After luncheon we went to a house whose owner deals occasionally in curiosities. Of these and all antiquities indeed the export is forbidden except to the British Museum, private digging having been put a stop to in the island, as its inhabitants aver, in the especial interest of that institution. Here we saw a few nice things, but the price asked was impossible, £12 being demanded for a set of little glass vases which I should have valued at 40s. So we left the place, richer only by an Egyptian or Phœnician spear-head of Cyprian copper, a very excellent specimen, and walked to the upper town about a mile away to take tea with Mr. Cobham, the Commissioner.

Mr. Cobham lives in a beautiful house which he has purchased. For generations it had been the abode of the British consuls at Larnaca, but was abandoned by them many years ago. Here in a noble room he has his unique collection of ancient books written by travellers during the last five or six centuries, and others dealing with, or touching on, Cyprus and its affairs. It is from these sources that its learned author has compiled the work known as Excerpta Cypria, which consists of translations from their pages, a book invaluable to students, but now unhappily out of print. I considered myself fortunate in being able to purchase a set of the sheets at an advanced price in the capital, Nicosia, where it was printed.

Set upon a wall of the saloon in this house and although newly painted, dating from a century and a half or more ago, is a fine, carved example of the royal arms of England. This very coat, as Mr. Cobham has ascertained, used to stand over the doors of the old British Consulate during the tenancy of his house by

the consuls. When they left it was taken down and vanished, but within the last few years he found it in a stable in Larnaca, whence the carving was rescued, repainted by some craftsman on board an English man-of-war which visited Cyprus, and after a hundred years or so of absence, returned in triumph to its old home.

Cyprus is fortunate in possessing in Mr. Cobham an official who takes so deep an interest in her history, and spares no expense or pains in attempting its record. On the occasion of my visit he spoke to me very sadly of the vandalism which the authorities threaten to commit by the throwing down of the seaward wall, curtain-wall I think it is called, of the ancient, fortified city of Famagusta, in order, principally, that the stone and area may be made use of for the purposes of the railway, which it is proposed to construct between Famagusta and Nicosia. Of this suggested, but as yet happily unaccomplished crime, I shall have something to say on a later page.

CURTAIN WALL, FAMAGUSTA

ON the day following that of our arrival in Cyprus the Flora reappeared from Famagusta and about noon we went on board of her to proceed to Limasol, some forty or fifty miles away, where we were engaged to stay a week or ten days. The traveller indeed is lucky when he can find a chance of making this journey in the course of an afternoon by boat, instead of spending from ten to fifteen hours to cover it in a carriage. Although Cyprus in its total area is not much, if any, larger than the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, locomotion is still difficult owing to the impassable nature of the ways and the steepness and frequency of the mountains. When I visited it fourteen or fifteen years ago there were no roads to speak of in the island, except one of a very indifferent character between Larnaca and Nicosia. The Turks, its former masters, never seem to make a road; they only destroy any that may exist. Now in this respect matters are much improved. The English Government, out of the pitiful sums left at its command after the extraction from the colony of every possible farthing towards the payment of the Turkish tribute, has by slow degrees constructed excellent roads between all the principal towns, with bridges over the beds of the mountain torrents. But as yet in the country districts nothing of the sort has been attempted.

With us were embarked a number of lambs, little things not more than a week or two old, bought, I suppose, for the provisioning of the ship. At this season

of the year everybody in Cyprus lives upon lamb. It was melancholy to see the tiny creatures, their legs tied together, heaped one upon another in the bottoms of large baskets, whence, bleating piteously for their mothers, they were handed up and thrown upon the deck. A more satisfactory sight to my mind were one or two cane creels half filled with beautiful brown-plumaged woodcock, shot or snared by native sportsmen upon the mountain slopes.

On board the steamer, a fellow-passenger to Limasol, whither he was travelling to negotiate for the land upon which to establish a botanical garden, was Mr. Gennadius, the Director of Agriculture for the island. He told me what I had already observed at Larnaca—that the orange and citron trees in Cyprus, which on the occasion of my former visit were beautiful to behold, are to-day in danger of absolute destruction, owing to the ravages of a horrible black scale which fouls and disfigures fruit and leaves alike. (Avnidia coceinea or Avnidia orantii.)

For the last dozen years or so this blight has been increasingly prevalent, the mandarin variety of fruit alone showing any power of resisting its attacks. The proper way to treat the pest is by a number of sprayings with a mixture of from twenty to twenty-five per cent. of soft soap to eighty or seventy-five per cent. of warm water. A dressing thus prepared destroys the scale by effecting a chemical union of the alkali of the soap with the fatty matter in the organism of the parasite, or failing this stifles it by glazing it over and excluding the air necessary to its existence. Mr. Gennadius believes that if this treatment could be universally adopted, scale would disappear from Cyprus within a few years.

But here comes the difficulty. For three centuries the Cypriote has been accustomed to Turkish rule with its great pervading principle of Kismet. If it pleases Allah to destroy the orange-trees (in the case of the Christian peasant, read God) so let it be, he says, and shrugs

his shoulders. Who am I that I should interfere with the will of Heaven by syringing? Which being translated into Anglo-Saxon means, “I can't be bothered to take the trouble.” If the Director of Agriculture in person or by proxy would appear three or four times a year in the sufferer's garden with the wash ready made and a squirt and proceed to apply it, the said sufferer would look on and smoke, making no objection. Beyond this he will rarely go.

Therefore unless the blight tires of attack it begins to look as though the orange is doomed in Cyprus. This is a pity, as that fruit does very well there, and the mildew which threatened it at one time was taken at its commencement and conquered by means of powdered sulphur puffed about the trees with bellows, Government distributing the sulphur at cost price.

About three hours after leaving Larnaca the vessel passes a sloping sward clothed with young corn and carob-trees that, backed by lofty peaks of the Trooidos range, runs from a hill-top to the lip of the ocean. Here once stood Amathus, a great city of immemorial antiquity which flourished down to Roman times if not later, and ultimately, it is said, was destroyed by an earthquake. Now all that is left of it are acres of tumbled stone and a broken fragment of fortress, whether ancient or mediæval I cannot say, against the walls of which the sea washes. It is told that here, or at some later town built upon the same site, Richard Cœur-de-Lion landed when he took Cyprus from the Emperor Isaac Comnenus.

Wonderful indeed is it for us, the children of this passing hour, to look at that grey time-worn coast and as we glide by to reflect upon the ships and men that it has seen, who from century to century came up out of the deep sea to shape its fortunes for a while. Who were the first? No one knows, but very early the fleets of Egypt were here. Then followed the Phœnicians, those

English of the ancient world as they have been called, who like eagles to the carcass, gathered themselves wherever were mines to be worked or moneys to be made. They have left many tombs behind them and in the tombs works of art, some of them excellent enough. Thus before me as I write stands a bronze bull made by Phœnician hands from Cyprian copper, a well-modelled animal full of spirit, with a tail that wags pleasingly upon a balled joint.

After the Phœnicians, or with them perhaps, were Greeks of the Mycenian period. Their tombs also celebrate a glory that is departed, as the British Museum can bear witness. Next to the Greek the Persian; then the satraps of Alexander the Great; then the Ptolemies; then galleys that bore the Roman ensign which flew for many generations; then the Byzantine emperors—these for seven centuries.

After this a new flag appears, the lions of England flaunting from the ships of war of Richard the First. He took the place and sold it to Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem so called, whose descendants ruled here for three centuries, till at length the island passed into the hands of the Venetians. These only held it eighty years, and after them came the most terrible fleet the Cyprian Sea has seen, that which flew the Crescent. For three centuries Cyprus groaned and withered under the dreadful rule of the Turk, till at last a few gentlemen arrived in a mail-steamer and for the second time in the history of the island ran up the flag of Britain. How long will it float there, I wonder?

It was very interesting to watch the beautiful gulls that followed the vessel off this coast, the wind blowing against them making not the slightest difference to the perfect ease of their motion. So near did they hang that I could see their quick, beady eyes glancing here and there, and the strong bills of a light pink hue. From time to time as I watched, one of them would

catch sight of something eatable in the water. Then down he went and suddenly from the feathers of his underpart out shot his claws, also pink-coloured, just as though he were settling upon a tree or rock. Why, I wonder, does a gull do this when about to meet the water? To break his fall perhaps. At least I can suggest no other reason, unless in the dim past his progenitors were wont to settle upon trees and he is still unable to shake off an hereditary habit.

At length on the low mountain-hedged coast-line appeared the white houses, minarets, and scattered palms of Limasol, with its jetty stretching out into the blue waters. The town looked somewhat grown, otherwise its aspect seems much the same as when first I saw it many years ago.

So we landed, and after more custom-house formalities, marched through the crowded streets of the little town, preceded by stalwart Cypriotes bearing our belongings, to dine (in borrowed garments) with the kind friends who were awaiting us upon the pier.

Our first occupation on the following morning was to retain the services of three mules and their coal-black muleteer, doubtless the offspring of slaves imported in the Turkish days, known to us thenceforth by a corruption of his native name or designation which we crystallised into “Cabbages.” For a sum of about thirty shillings a week this excellent and intelligent person placed himself and his animals at our disposal, to go whither we would and when we would.

Our first expedition was to a massive tower, or rather keep, called Colossi, which stands at a distance of about six miles from Limasol, in the midst of very fertile fields upon the Paphos road. Off we went, my nephew and myself riding our hired mules and the rest of the party upon their smart ponies, which in Cyprus are very good and cheap to buy and feed.

I have now had considerable experience of the mule

as an animal to ride, and I confess that I hate him. He has advantages no doubt. Over rough ground in the course of an eight or ten hours' day he will cover as great a distance as a horse, and in the course of a week or less he will wear most horses down. Also he will live somehow where the horse would starve. But what a brute he is! To begin with, his fore-quarters are invariably weak, and feel weaker than they are. The Cypriote knows this and rides him on a native saddle, a kind of thick padded quilt so cruppered that he is able to sit far back, almost on the animal's tail indeed, as, doubtless for the same reason, the costermonger rides a donkey. To the stranger, until he grows accustomed to it, this saddle is most uncomfortable, but old residents in the island generally prefer to use it upon a long journey. Also it is dangerous to the uninitiated, since the stirrups are very short. Not being fixed they slide from side to side, suddenly lengthening themselves, let us say to the right, with any unguarded movement, which will produce a proportionate curtailment on the left and the unexpected consequence that the traveller finds himself face downwards on the ground. With a European saddle this particular accident cannot happen, also it is more comfortable for a short journey. As a set-off to this advantage, however, the rider's weight comes upon that portion of his steed which is least able to support it, namely the withers. The result is that the mule, especially if pushed out of its customary amble, sometimes falls as though it were shot, propelling him over its head.

It is a mistake to suppose, also, that these creatures are always sure-footed; many of them stumble abominably although they do not often actually fall. Never shall I forget my first mule-ride in Cyprus in the days when there were no roads. It was from Nicosia to Kyrenia, a distance of about sixteen miles over a mountain path. The muleteer into whose charge I was given was a huge man weighing at least eighteen stone, and I

thought to myself that where this monster could go, certainly I could follow.

In this I was right, I did follow, but at a very considerable distance. Mr. Muleteer perched himself upon his animal, doubtless one of the best in the island, looking in his long robes for all the world like a gigantic and half-filled sack, and off we ambled. Scarcely were we clear of the town when my mule, unaccustomed, I suppose, to the weight upon his withers and the European saddle, began to stumble. I do not exaggerate when I say that he stumbled all the way to Kyrenia, keeping me absolutely damp with apprehension of sudden dives on to my head down precipitous and unpleasant places. Meanwhile Mr. Muleteer, very possibly anticipating my difficulties, had been careful to place about five hundred yards between us, a distance which he maintained throughout the journey. I yelled for assistance — in fact I wished to persuade him to exchange mules—but either he would not or he could not hear; moreover he had no knowledge of my tongue, or I of his. So we accomplished that very disagreeable journey.

Once, however, I made one much more dangerous, this time over the rarely travelled mountains of Chiapas in Mexico. My companions, I remember, had excellent mules—they lived in the country; that given to me as the lighter weight was weak and poor, with no fore-legs worth mentioning. We scrambled up the mountains somehow, but when it came to descending, the fun began. A road in Tabasco, then at any rate, was made of three component parts. First, a deep and precipitous ditch worn out by the feet of generations of animals, covered at the bottom with from six inches to a foot of red butter, or clay quite as greasy as butter, down which one slowly slithered. Secondly, stretches, sometimes miles in length, of swamp land where the path consists of little ridges of hard clay about two feet apart, the space between each ridge into which the mule must-step, filled with some

three feet of liquid and tenacious mud that often reached to the saddle-flap. Thirdly, when the swamps were passed great tracts of the most grizzly precipices, which to my taste were worst of all. Along these steeps the path, never more than three to five feet in width, would run across boulder-strewn and sloping rock very slippery in nature. Below yawned chasms more or less sheer, of anything from two to fifteen hundred feet in depth.

Now a mule always chooses the extreme edge of a precipice. For this reason: its load is commonly bound on in large, far-protruding bales or bags. Were it therefore to walk on the inner side of the path, it would constantly strike its burden against the cliff, so, not being troubled with nerves, it clings to the outer edge. A common result is that in going round a corner it meets another mule proceeding from the opposite direction. Thereon in the attempt to struggle past one of the pair vanishes into space and with it the load, merchandise or man.

On this particular Mexican journey I very nearly came to a sudden and untimely end. The mule will not go your way, he always goes his own. At one point in the precipice path it forked, the lower fork being rough but safe and solid, the upper, which travelled round some twenty yards and then again joined the lower, smooth but exceeding greasy. The mule insisted upon taking the top road, with the result that when we reached its apex he began to slide. Down we shot, ten or fifteen paces to the very edge of that awful cliff and, I confess it without shame, I have rarely been in such a fright in my life. Indeed I thought that I must be gone, there seemed no help for it, since to dismount was quite impossible. At the utter verge of the gulf, however, the animal put on a sort of vacuum brake of which a mule alone has the secret, and when its head was absolutely hanging over it, we stopped. That day also this same trusty creature fell with me in the midst

of a flooded river, and in the evening I ended an entertaining journey by being slung across another roaring torrent some eighty yards wide in a loop of string attached to a very rotten rope, along which I was pulled in jerks. But of the varied experiences of that expedition I must not stop to tell. I lived through it, so let its memory be blessed.

Still I do not wish to asperse the mule, as upon a long journey a really good ambler is worth untold wealth. Such as a general rule, however, do not fall to the lot of the visitor, who has to take what he can get at the time; as frequently as not, pack animals, which have never carried a man before.

The mule is very cunning. I saw one in Cyprus, a noted creature which always looks to see whether the man who purposes to ride him is or is not wearing spurs. If he is he does not mount that day, or at least until the spurs are off. The next thing this mule looks at is the whip. Should it be a goad such as the natives use, he resigns himself to circumstances; if a mere useless walking-stick, well, he will not travel fast that trip.

One more thing about the mule; it is hopeless to try to ride him in the company of horses. The horse has his paces of walk, trot, and canter, and the mule his, an amble, so that however close together their riders may find themselves at the end of a day's journey, during the course of it they will be widely separated.

Much of the land through which we rode to Colossi was under crops of wheat and barley, the latter now coming into ear. The cultivation struck me as generally very poor, but what can one expect in a country where they merely scratch the surface of the soil, and so far as I could see never use manure? So shallow is their ploughing that in most cases squills and other bulbous roots are not dislodged by it, but grow on among the corn, where, dotted about, also stand many carob-trees, of which the fruit, a bean, is the basis of Thorley's and

other foods for cattle. On the patches of uncultivated land a great many very beautiful anemones, the harbingers of spring, were in flower, also large roots of asphodel with its stiff sword-shaped leaves. This was the flower of which the Greek poets were so fond of singing. Their wars and labours o'er, the heroes are to repose“… in the shadowy field Of asphodel.” In point of fact it is in my opinion an unpleasing plant, the flowers, which spring from a tall stem, being small individually and neutral-tinted. Also they have this peculiarity; if cut and set in a room, they cause the place to smell as though many cats had slept there.

A ride of about an hour brought us to Colossi. That the tower in its present shape was built or repaired in the Lusignan time is evident from the coats of arms—very beautifully cut—of the orders of the Knights Templars and St. John which still appear upon the east face of the fortress. On one of these shields, that below the other three, all the four quarters carry a fleur-de-lys and nothing else. Another, the centre of the three in the upper line, immediately beneath the crown which seems to take the place of a crest, has four crosses in the dexter quartering, and a rampant lion on the rest. I say of the three coats, but as a matter of fact there are only two, the third, which has been removed, being represented by an ugly gaping hole. It seems that some cantankerous old person who still lives in the village had a lawsuit, which he lost, as to the ownership of this tower of Colossi. In order to reassert his rights, however, he wrenched out one of the coats-of-arms and took it off to his house, where it remains. In the interest of the archæology of the island the Government ought to insist upon its being restored, or if necessary to replace it by force.1

TOWER OF COLOSSI

The tower itself, according to my rough pacings, is a square of about fifty-seven feet internal measurement, and from sixty to seventy feet in height. It is a very massive building still in fair order, although I suppose that it has not been repaired for centuries. Now—so low are the mighty fallen—it serves only as a grain and chaff store for the surrounding farm. Its bottom storey, which is strongly vaulted, evidently was used for soldiers' quarters and dungeons. Above is a fine chamber now partitioned off, which occupies the whole square of the castle and is adorned with a noble, vaulted fireplace stamped on either side with a fleur-de-lys. The tradition is that Richard Coeur-de-Lion spent his honeymoon with Berengaria in this chamber after rescuing her vi et armis from the Emperor Isaac, whom he defeated in the plains below. There is another story which I have heard but am unable to trace, namely that Richard in his hurry to attack the forces of the Emperor outrode his companions, and reaching this tower of Colossi, shook his lance and galloped about it alone calling to Isaac, who was a poor creature and had not the slightest wish to accept the invitation, to come out and fight him.

A narrow winding stair of the usual Norman type, whereof the ends of the steps themselves form the central supporting column, leads to the cement roof, which is flat, as is common in Cyprus. Hence the view is very beautiful, for beneath lies a wide stretch of country, now looking its best in the green garment of springing crops, while to the right the eye is caught by a great salt lake, once a source of considerable revenue to the island. This it might be again indeed, were it not that with the peculiar ineptitude and want of foresight which distinguished the agreement concluded by the Government of this country as to the occupation of Cyprus, we have promised the Turks not to work it in competition with other salt lakes of their own on the mainland. Loveliest of all perhaps is the blue background of the measureless

smiling sea, dotted here and there with white-sailed ships.

Projecting from this roof upon one side is a curious grating of massive stone, of which presently I guessed the use. Immediately beneath hung the portcullis of the castle, whereof the wooden rollers or pulleys are still to be seen. Doubtless this grating was designed as a place of vantage whence the defenders could let fall stones or boiling oil and water upon the heads of those who attacked the drawbridge.

Some rich man ought to buy Colossi, sweep away the filthy farm-buildings about it, and restore the tower to its original grandeur. With suitable additions it would make a delightful country-house.

Night was falling before we came home to Limasol. The last glow of sunset still lingered on the white walls and red roofs of the scattered houses, while above them here a feathery palm, and there a graceful minaret stood out against the pale green sky in which the moon shone coldly.

ON Sunday we attended church in the Sergeants' room, a congregation perhaps of twelve or fifteen people. Limasol has a chapel belonging to it which was once used for the troops, but as it seems that the War Office, or the Treasury, I am not sure which, lay claim to the altar rails and benches, no service is now held there. In Cyprus as elsewhere there is such a thing as Red Tape.

After luncheon I accompanied Mr. Michell, the Commissioner, to a grand Greek wedding to which he had kindly procured me an invitation. On arriving at the house we were conducted upstairs to a large central room, out of which opened other rooms. In one of these stood the bride dressed in white, a pretty, darkeyed girl, to whom we were introduced. By her, arrayed in evening clothes, was the bridegroom, a Greek, who is registrar of the local court, and about them their respective parents and other relatives. In the main apartment were assembled a mixed crowd of friends, guests, and onlookers. Near its centre stood a marble-topped table arranged as an altar with two tall candlesticks wreathed in orange blossoms, a cup of sacramental wine, two cakes of sacramental bread, a silver basket holding two wreaths of orange blossom with long satin streamers attached, and a copy of the Gospels beautifully bound in embossed silver.

Presently a procession of six priests entered the room, attired all of them in magnificent robes of red and blue

worked with silk, gold and silver. They wore tall Eastern-looking hats very much like those affected by Parsees and had their hair arranged in a pigtail, which in some instances hung down their backs and in others was tucked up beneath the head-dress. All of them were heavily bearded.

Most of these priests were striking in appearance, with faces by no means devoid of spirituality. Indeed, studying them, it struck me that some of the Apostles might have looked like those men. The modern idea of the disciples of our Lord is derived in the main, perhaps, from pictures by artists of the Renaissance school, of large-made, brawny individuals, with wild hair and very strongly-marked countenances, quite different from the type that is prevalent in the East to-day. It is probable that these fanciful portraits have no trustworthy basis to recommend them to our conviction; that in appearance indeed the chosen twelve did not differ very widely from such men of the more intellectual stamp, as are now to be seen in Cyprus and Syria. But this is a question that could be argued indefinitely, one moreover not susceptible of proof.

Tradition, however, curiously unvarying in this instance, has assigned to the Saviour a certain type of face which, with differences and modifications, is not unlike that of at least two of the priests whom I saw at this ceremony. They looked good men, intellectual men, men who were capable of thought and work—very different, for example, in their general aspect and atmosphere to the vast majority of those priests whom the traveller sees in such a place as Florence. Still the reputation of these Greek clergy is not uncommonly malodorous. Critics say hard things of them, as the laity do of the priests in South America. Probably all these things are not true. In every land the clergyman is an individual set upon a pedestal at whom it is easy to throw dirt, and when the dirt strikes it sticks, so that all the world may

see and pass by on the other side. Doubtless, however, here as elsewhere there are backsliders, and of these, after the fashion of the world, we hear more than of the good and quiet men who do their duty according to their lights and opportunities and are still.

When all the preliminaries were finished the bride and bridegroom took their places before the table-altar which I have described, and crossed themselves ceremoniously. Then the service began. It was long and impressive, consisting chiefly of prayers and passages of Scripture read or chanted by the different priests in turn, several men standing round them who were, I suppose, professionals, intoning the responses with considerable effect. At an appointed place in the ceremony a priest produced two rings with which he touched the foreheads and breasts of the contracting parties, making with them the sign of the cross. One of these rings was then put on by the bridegroom and the other, oddly enough over her glove, by the bride.

At later periods of the service the silver-covered book of the Gospels was given to the pair to kiss, and cotton-seed, emblematic apparently of fertility, like our rice, was thrown on to them from an adjoining room. Also, and this was the strangest part of the ceremony, the two wreaths that I have described were taken from the silver basket and set respectively upon the brow of the bridegroom and the veil, already wreath-crowned, of the bride, where it did not sit at all well, giving her, in fact, a somewhat bacchanalian air. The bridegroom also looked peculiar with this floral decoration perched above his spectacles, especially as its pendent satin tails were seized by six or eight of his groomsmen of all ages who, with their help—the bride being similarly escorted by her ladies—proceeded to drive the pair of them thrice round the altar-table. Indeed this part of the service, however deeply symbolical it may be, undoubtedly had a comic side. Another rite was that of the kissing by the priests of the

wreaths when set upon the heads of the contracting parties, and the kissing of the hands of the priests by the bride and bridegroom.

After these wreaths had been removed the newlymarried pair partook of the Communion in both kinds, biting thrice at the consecrated cake of bread that was held to their mouths, and drinking (I think) three sips of the wine. This done the elements were removed. The ceremony ended with a solemn blessing delivered by the head priest and the embracing of the bride and bridegroom by their respective relations. At this point the bride wept after the fashion of ladies in her situation throughout the world. Indeed she was moved to tears at several stages of the service.

After it was over, in company with other guests we offered our congratulations to the pair, drank wine to their healths and partook of sweetmeats. Also we inspected the nuptial chamber, which was adorned with satin pillows of a bright and beautiful blue. I am informed, but of this matter I have no personal knowledge, that the friends of the bride stuff her mattress with great ceremony, inserting in it pieces of money and other articles of value. So we bade them good-bye, and now as then I wish to both of them every excellent fortune in life.

It struck me as curious that with so many churches close at hand this rite should have been celebrated in a room. The last solemn ceremony connected with the fortunes of man at which I assisted in a private house was in Iceland amid the winter seas, far away from this southern home of Venus. At a stead where I was staying dwelt an aged man, a relative of the owners of the farm whom they were supporting out of charity. There is no poor-law in Iceland, so relations are legally obliged to take its place, a state of affairs that must lead to curious complications.

While I was in the house—a lonely place far from

any other stead—the old man died. They made him a coffin and laid him in it, and I was invited to be present at the ceremony which followed. It consisted chiefly of a long and most beautiful chant which, as I was told, had come down for many generations but has never been printed. All present in the room, perhaps a dozen people, intoned this solemn chant, standing round the coffin where the dead man lay with the light shining upon his snowy beard and calm majestic face. Then they prayed and the coffin was closed. Afterwards I saw a little party of rough, earnest men carry it over the rocks down to the head of the fiord where a boat was waiting. There they laid it and rowed away till they were swallowed up in the awesome loneliness of mountain, sky, and sea which seemed to sleep beneath the blue and ghostly shadows of the Iceland summer night.

To return to Cyprus; later in the afternoon of the wedding we went for a ride to the military camp, about three miles from Limasol. Once there was a regiment quartered here, but the garrison is now, I think, reduced to a single company. It would be difficult to find a healthier or more convenient site whereat to station soldiers, the place being high and the water excellent. Perhaps those empty huts will be filled again some day.

On our way back we passed through a grove of the most gigantic olive-trees that I ever saw. Those in the Garden of Gethsemane seem small compared to them. Having a rule in my pocket I dismounted and took the measure of one of these. It proved to be approximately fifty feet in circumference by sixteen in diameter at the ground, but of course was almost hollow. How old must that tree be? Taking into consideration the hard wood and slow-growing habit of the olive, I imagine that in the time of the Romans, and very possibly in those of the Ptolemies, it was already bearing fruit. Perhaps a Mycenian, or one of Alexander's legionaries, planted it, who can say? Probably, too, it will last for another three

or four hundred years before, in the grip of slow decay, that end overtakes it which awaits everything earthly, not excepting the old earth herself.

One morning Mr. Mavrogordato, the Commandant of Police for the Limasol district, to whose kindness I owe many of the photographs of scenes in Cyprus which are reproduced in these pages, took us to see the ancient fortress of the town, now used as its prison. The road to this castle passes through a disused Turkish graveyard where Mr. Mavrogordato has had the happy thought to plant trees which, in that kindly air and soil, are now growing up into a welcome patch of greenery and shade. This Castle is a massive building in stone belonging apparently to the Venetian period, that is, above ground, for the chapel and vaults below are Gothic. The interior is kept most scrupulously clean and whitewashed. Round the central well run galleries in two storeys, which galleries are divided into cells whereof the iron gates are large and resplendent brass padlocks. I do not think that I ever saw padlocks which shone so bright. From side to side of the second storey, stretched across the deep well beneath, is an ugly-looking black balk of timber, and screwed into it are two bolts and eyes of singularly uncompromising and suggestive appearance. This is the gallows beam, so placed and arranged that the prisons in the cells have the advantage of a daily contemplation of the last bridge of evil footsteps. An execution from that beam, and there have been several, I believe, must create quite an excitement among the wrong-doers of Limasol.

It is curious, by the way, although I daresay that the thought may never have occurred to the reader, how singularly ugly are the instruments of judicial death and torment. Take a rack, for instance. Even those who had not the slightest idea of its sinister uses would exclaim—“What a hideous thing!” I have seen a certain rack in one of the old cities of North Holland, Alkmaar

or Hoorn, I think, whereof the mere appearance is distressing; yet it has none of the superfluous complications of more highly finished instruments of its class. Indeed it is of a stern simplicity; a board, two rollers, two windlass handles and trestle legs bolted together, very stout and broad-footed. Yet the man who made it contrived to fill its every line with a horrible suggestiveness. Thus the plank, like the bottom of some old coffins, is cut in and out to the shape of the human body, and each other part has some separate quaintly-dreadful look. Again how ugly are a beheading-block and its companion axe. Even a pair of stocks is not ornamental, and I am told that the new electrical machine of death now used in the United States is a thing hideous to behold.

The subject is disagreeable, so I will not treat of it further, except to say generally that there seems to be some mysterious rapport between violent sufferings and deaths and the instruments which man has found most convenient to produce them. Here we have another exemplification of the old proverb—like to like—the cruel things to the cruel deeds. But this matter is too large to enter upon in the pages of a book of travel.

On the occasion of my visit, amongst other convicts there were in the Limasol prison, contemplating the gallows-beam aforesaid, four men who were accused of the murder of a fellow-villager suspected of having poisoned their cattle. Murder is a crime of not uncommon occurrence in Cyprus, where many of the inhabitants are very poor and desirous of earning money, even in reward of the destruction of a neighbour with whom they have no quarrel. It has been proved in the course of investigation of some of these cases that the fee paid was really absurdly small, so low as ten shillings indeed, or, as one of the judges informed me, in the instance of a particularly abominable slaughter, four shillings and no more. Some of the victims suffer on account of quarrels about women, as in Mexico, where in a single village street on a Sunday

morning, after the orgies of a Saturday night, I have seen as many as three dead, or at least two dead and one dying. More frequently, however, in Cyprus the victim is a downright bad character of whom a community are determined to be rid, so that in fact the murder, as in the present example, partakes of the nature of lynch-law.

After the commission of the crime its perpetrators, if suspected, hide themselves in the mountains, where they must be hunted down like wild beasts. One party of these outlaws defied arrest for quite a number of months, during which time they took several shots at the pursuing Mr. Mavrogordato. Ultimately, however, they were themselves shot, or caught and hanged.

The view from the top of the castle was perhaps even more beautiful than that of Colossi. In front, the boundless sea whereon poor Berengaria of Navarre, rolling in the roads of Limasol, suffered such dire perplexities and exercised so wise a caution. Behind, the slopes of the grey mountains with Trooidos towering above them, white-capped just now with snow. To the right the salt lake, and immediately beneath, the town dotted here and there with palms.

Just at the foot of the fortress is the Turkish quarter, for the most part nothing better than a collection of mud hovels. The population of Cyprus, it may be explained, is divided into Turks and pure Cypriotes. These Turks, I suppose, are the descendants of those members of the invading Ottoman army under Mustafa which conquered Cyprus three centuries ago, who elected to remain in the island as settlers. The proportion is roughly—Turks one-third of the population, Cypriotes two-thirds. The Turks, who generally live in villages by themselves, are going down the hill rapidly, both in numbers and wealth, being poor, lazy, fatalistic, and quite unfitted to cope with their cleverer Christian compatriots. In many instances, however, they are respected and respectable members of the community, brave in person and upright in conduct.

Few of them can afford more than one wife and as a rule their families seem small.

The richer and more successful class of Cypriotes have a habit of adopting Greek names, but in fact very few of them are Greeks except for so much of the Mycenian blood as may remain in their veins. Still some of them intrigue against the British Government and affect a patriotic desire for union with Greece, that even the disillusionment of the Turkish war has not quenched. These aspirations, which, in some instances at any rate, are said to be not uninfluenced by the hope of rewards and appointments when the blessed change occurs, are scarcely likely to be realised. If Cyprus is ever handed over to any one by Great Britain, it must be to its nominal suzerain the Sultan, to whom the reversion belongs. But surely, after the stories of the recent massacres of Christians, and other events connected with Turkish rule, British public opinion, exercised as it is profoundly by the existing if half-avowed alliance between this country and the evil system which the Sultan represents, could never allow of such a step. It would be monstrous to give back Christians into his keeping, and a crime to plunge Cyprus once more into the helpless, hopeless ruin, out of which under our just if sorely hampered government it is being slowly lifted.

After inspecting Mr. Mavrogordato's stud—-if that be the correct expression—of homing pigeons which with characteristic energy—not too common a quality in Cyprus—he is breeding up from imported birds, we descended from the roof to the foundations of the castle. Here we visited a large vaulted place whereof the windows have been built up in some past age. Now, we see by the light of our lanterns, it is a rubbish room, and before that, as I imagine from several indications, under the Turkish régime, probably it served as a magazine for the storage of powder. In the old days, however, this place was a chapel and here it is said, upon what exact

authority I know not, that Richard Coeur-de-Lion was married to Berengaria of Navarre. The only account of these nuptials that I can lay my hand on at this moment is from a contemporary chronicle of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or Vinosalvo. He, it will be observed, although writing of Limasol, or Limouzin as he calls the town, does not mention the church in which the wedding was solemnised. If there was more than one available, which is to be doubted, it seems most probable that the chapel of the fortress would have been chosen. This is what Geoffrey says:—“On the morrow, namely on the Sunday, which was the festival of St. Pancras, the marriage of King Richard and Berengaria, the daughter of the King of Navarre, was solemnised at Limouzin: she was a damsel of the greatest prudence and most accomplished manners, and there she was crowned queen. There were present at the ceremony the Archbishop and the Bishop of Evreux and the Bishop of Banera, and many other chiefs and nobles. The king was glorious on this happy occasion, and cheerful to all, and showed himself joyous and affable.”

How strange are the vicissitudes of walls! The fortunes of the short-lived generations that inhabit them are not so variable, for these stones last longer and see more. What a contrast between this place in its present state, lumber-strewn and lit only by a few dim lamps, to that which it must have presented in the year 1191 when the warrior king, Richard, one of the most remarkable and attractive characters who occupy the long page of our English history, took to himself a wife within their circuit. It is not difficult, even to the dullest and least imaginative of the few travellers who stray to this unvisited place, to reconstruct something of that pageant of the mighty dead. The splendid figure of the king himself, clad in his shirt of mail and broidered tabard gay with the royal arms of England. The fair bride glittering in her beautiful silken garments and rich adornment

CYPRIAN FARRIERS

of gems. The archbishop and bishops in their mitred pomp. The great lords and attendant knights arrayed in their various armour. The crowd of squires and servitors pressing about the door. The altar decked with flowers, the song of such choristers as could be found among the crews of the galleys—all the gathered splendour, rude but impressive, of perhaps the most picturesque age that is known to history.

Then these great folk, thousands of miles away from their northern home, who had laboriously travelled hither exposed to the most fearful dangers by land and sea, enduring such privations as few common soldiers would now consent to bear, not to possess themselves of goldmines or for any other thinly-veiled purposes of gain, but in the fulfilment of a great idea! And that idea—what was it? To carry out a trust which they conceived, wisely or in foolishness, to be laid upon them—the rescue of the holy places from the befouling hand of the infidel. Well, they are gone and their cause is lost, and the Moslem, supported by the realm which once they ruled, still squats in the Holy Land. Such is the irony of fate, but for my part I think that these old crusaders, and especially our hot-headed Richard of England, cruel though he was at times, as we shall see at Acre, are worthy of more sympathy than a practical age seems inclined to waste upon them. Peace to their warlike, superstitious souls!

On leaving the castle we visited an inn, in the yard of which stood scores of mules. It was an odoriferous but interesting place. Under a shed at one side of it sat about a dozen smiths at work, men who hire their stands at a yearly or monthly rent. Fixed into the ground before each of them—it must be remembered that these people sit at their work, which is all done on the cold iron without the help of fire—was a tiny anvil. On these anvils the craftsmen were employed in fashioning the great horseshoe nails of the country, or in cutting out

and hammering thin, flat, iron plates which are used in the East for the shoeing of mules and donkeys. These discs that are made with only one small hole in the centre, must in many ways be prejudicial to the comfort and health of the beast, or so we should think, since they cause its frog to grow foul and rot away. The teachings of practical experience, however—for which after some study of such things I have great respect — seem to prove this kind of shoe to be best suited for use upon the stony tracks of the country. These plates are secured to the animal's hoof by six of the huge-headed nails that I have mentioned, and if properly fixed will last for several months without renewal.

The instrument used to trim the hoof before the shoe is fastened, is a marvellous tool, almost of the size of a sickle with a flat knife attached to it as large as a child's spade. Probably all these implements, especially if connected in any way with agriculture, such as the wooden hook with an iron point which they call a plough, are essentially the same as those that were familiar to the Phoenicians and the Mycenian Greeks. In the Holy Land, at any rate, as we shall see later, they have not changed since the time of our Lord.

That this was so as regards the shoeing of horses in or about the year 1430 is proved by the following passage which I take from the travels of Bertrandon de la Brocquiére of Guienne, who made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1432. He says:—“I bought a small horse that turned out very well. Before my departure I had him shod in Damascus; and thence as far as Bursa, which is fifty days' journey, so well do they shoe their horses that I had nothing to do with his feet, excepting one of the fore ones, which was pricked by a nail, and made him lame for three weeks. The shoes are light, thin, lengthened towards the heel, and thinner there than at the toe. They are not turned up, and have but four nail-holes, two on each side. The nails are square, with a thick and heavy head. When a shoe is

wanted, and it is necessary to work it to make it fit the hoof, it is done cold, without ever putting it in the fire, which can readily be done because it is so thin. To pare the hoof they use a pruning knife, similar to what vine-dressers trim their vines with, both on this as well as on the other side of sea.”

This description might well apply to the shoeing of animals in Cyprus and Syria to-day.

From the inn we walked to the municipal market, where we found many strange vegetables for sale, including radishes large as a full-grown carrot. Nothing smaller in the radish line seems to flourish here, and I am informed that for some occult reason it is impossible to intercept them in an intermediate stage of their development. Perhaps, like mushrooms, they spring up in a single night. I am grateful to these vegetables, however, for the sight of them made clear to me the meaning of a passage by which I have long been worried. I remember reading, I forget where, in the accounts of one of the pyramid-building Pharaohs—Chufu, I believe—that he supplied tens of thousands of bunches of radishes daily to the hundred thousand labourers who were engaged upon the works.

What puzzled me was to know how Chufu provided so enormous and perennial a supply of this vegetable. The radishes of Cyprus solve the problem. One of these would be quite enough for any two pyramid-builders. I tasted them and they struck me as stringy and flavourless. Another old friend in a new form was celery tied in bunches, but such celery! Not an inch of crisp white root about it, nothing but green and leathery head. It appears in this form because it has been grown upon the top of the ground like a cabbage. Many people have tried to persuade the intelligent Cypriote to earth up his celery, but hitherto without result. “My father grew the herb thus,” he answers, “and I grow it as my father did.” Doubtless the Phoenicians, ignorant of the

CYPRIAN BOOT-SHOP

arsenic it is said to contain, liked their celery green, or perhaps it was the Persians.

Meat and game, the former marked—so advanced is Limasol—with the municipal stamp for octroi purposes, are also sold here. There on one stall next to a great pile of oranges, lie half-a-dozen woodcock, brown and beautiful, and by them a brace of French partridges now just going out of season, while further on is a fine hare. On the next, hanging to hooks, are poor little lambs with their throats cut, scarcely bigger than the hare, any of them; and full-grown sheep, some not so large as my fat blackfaced lambs at Easter. A little further on we came to a cobbler's shop, where we inspected the native boots. These are made of goatskin and high to the knee, with soles composed of many thicknesses of leather that must measure an inch through. Cumbersome as they seem, the experience of centuries proves these boots to be the best wear possible for the inhabitants of the mountainous districts of this stony land. On the very day of which I write I saw a Cypriote arrayed in them running over the tumbled ruins of an ancient city and through the mud patches whereby it was intersected, with no more care or inconvenience than we should experience on a tennis lawn.

Now I have to tell of Amathus, the place we passed on our journey down the coast, to-day a stone-strewn hill covered with springing corn. Even in the far past Amathus was so ancient that no one knew with certainty of its beginnings. It is said to have been founded by the Phœnicians; at any rate in it flourished a temple to the god Melkarth, and with it a famous shrine erected in honour of Venus. The mythical hero, Theseus, according to one account, is reported to have landed here with Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, who died in childbirth in the city, although the story more generally accepted says that he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Whatever truth there may be in all these legends—and probably it is but little—this is certain, that in its day Amathus was a great town inhabited by a prosperous and powerful people. It lies about five or six miles from Limasol and is approached by a road which runs along the sea, whence it is separated by a stretch of curious black sand which blows a good deal in high winds. On the way Mr. Mavrogordato pointed out to me an ingenious method whereby he is attempting to turn that barren belt into profitable soil. He seems to have discovered that this sand, wherein one might imagine nothing would grow, is suitable to the needs of the black wattle. At any rate the trees of that species which he planted there, although scarcely more than a year old, are now large and flourishing shrubs.

As we drew near to Amathus I perceived curious

holes by the roadside, covered in for the most part with rough slabs of stone. Once these holes were tombs, rifled long ago. Then we came to the site of the town stretching down to the sea-beach, where stand the remnants of a castle which we saw from the steamer. Now it is nothing but a hillside literally sown with stones that, no doubt, once formed the foundations of the dwellings of Amathus. I say the foundations, for I believe that the houses of these ancient cities, as in the villages of Cyprus to-day, were for the most part built of green brick, or what here in Norfolk we should call clay-lump, which in the course of centuries of sun and rain has melted away into the soil. The temple, public buildings, and palaces must have been magnificent, and as I shall show presently, wonderful care was lavished upon the tombs; but the habitations of the great mass of the citizens were in all likelihood humble and temporary structures, or so I think. It is the same in Egypt, where the old inhabitants grudged neither wealth nor labour in the preparation of graves, their everlasting abode, but were content to fashion their earthly lodgings of the Nile mud that lay at hand.

Amathus must have been very strong, indeed it would be difficult to find a site better suited to defence. It is surrounded by steep natural ravines which served the purpose of moats, and surmounted by a towering rock with precipitous sides, along whose slopes the city lay. Upon this rock, says tradition, stood an impregnable citadel; indeed the site is still called “The Old Castle” by the peasants of the neighbouring village of Agia Tychenos. Now all these countless stones furnish their humble tillers with a seed-bed for wheat and barley. The inexperienced might imagine that no place could be more unsuitable for the growing of crops, but in fact this is not so, seeing that in the severe Cyprian droughts stones have the property of retaining moisture to nurture the roots which otherwise would perish.

On arriving at the foot of the hill we rode round it to visit the tombs which lie behind and beyond, taking with us a supply of candles and several peasants as guides. These sepulchres were, I believe, discovered and plundered more than twenty years ago by General Cesnola, the consul, whose splendid collection of antiquities is to be seen in America. The first we reached lay at the bottom of a deep pit now rapidly refilling with silt washed into it by the winter wet. In the surrounding rubbish we could still see traces of its violation, for here lay many fragments of ancient amphoræ and of a shattered marble sarcophagus. After the rains that had fallen recently the path through the hole leading into the tomb was nothing but a pool of liquid mud through which, to win an entrance, the explorer must crawl upon his stomach, as the soil rises to within about eighteen inches of the top blocks of its square doorway. The task seemed dirty and in every way unpleasing, but I for one did not travel to Cyprus to be baffled by common, harmless mud. So I took off my coat, which in the scant state of our wardrobe I did not care to spoil, and went at it, on my hands and toes, that the rest of me might avoid the slush as much as possible.

It was a slimy and a darksome wriggle, but quite safe, in this respect differing somewhat from a journey of a like nature which I made a good many years ago. That was near Assouan in Egypt, where at the time certain new tombs had just been discovered which I was anxious to explore. These tombs were hollowed in the rock at the top of a steep slope of sand, which choked their doorways. Seeing that, as at Amathus, there was just sufficient space left beneath the head of the doorway of one of them for a man of moderate size to creep through, I made the attempt alone. Writhing forward, serpent-wise, through the sand, presently I found myself in the very grimmest place that I have ever visited. It was a cave of the size of a large room, and when my eyes

grew accustomed to the faint light which crept through the hole, I saw that it was literally full of dead, so full that their bodies must once have risen almost to the roof. Moreover these dead had not been embalmed, for round me lay their clean bones by hundreds and their skulls by scores. Yet once this sepulchre was at the service of older and more distinguished occupants, as under the skeletons I found a broken mummy-case of good workmanship, and in it the body of a woman whose wrappings had decayed. She died young, since at the time of her decease she was just cutting her wisdom teeth.

As I wondered over these jumbled relics of the departed, I remembered having read that about the time of Christ, Assouan was smitten with a fearful plague which slew its inhabitants by thousands. Doubtless, I thought, here are the inhabitants, or some of them, whose bodies in such a time of pestilence it would have been impossible to embalm. So they must have brought and piled them one on another in the caves that had served as sepulchres of the richer notables among their forefathers, till all were full. I remembered also that plague germs are said to be singularly long-lived and that these might be getting hungry. With that thought I brought my examination of this interesting place to a sudden end.

Just as I was beginning my outward crawl, foolishly enough I shouted loudly to my companion whom I had left at the entrance of another sepulchre, thinking that he might help to pull me through the hole. Almost immediately afterwards I felt something weighty begin to trickle on to my back with an ever-increasing stream and in a flash understood that the reverberations of my voice had loosened the over-hanging stones already shaken and shattered by earthquakes, and that the sand was pouring down upon me from between them. Heavens! how frightened I was. Luckily one does not argue under

such circumstances where, indeed, he who hesitates is lost. If I had stopped to think whether it would be best to go back or to go forward, to go quick or go slow, it is very probable that long since I should have added an alien cranium to those of that various pile . Instead I crawled forward more swiftly than ever I crawled before, notwithstanding the increasing weight upon my back, for the sand fell faster and faster, with the result that as no stone followed it to crush me, presently, somewhat exhausted, I was sitting fanning myself with a grateful heart in the dazzling sun without.

To return to Amathus and a still older tomb: this doorway beneath which we passed was also square and surmounted by four separate mouldings. Once through it, we lighted our candles to find ourselves standing in a kind of chapel, where I suppose the relatives of the dead assembled at funerals or to make offerings on the anniversaries of death. Out of this chapel opened four tombs, each of them large enough to contain several bodies. They are empty now, but their beautiful workmanship is left for us to admire. Thousands of years ago—though to look at them one might think it yesterday—the hard limestone blocks of which they are built were laid with a trueness and finish that is quite exquisite. Clearly no scamped work was allowed in old Phœnician tombs. In these graves and others close at hand, General Cesnola found many antiques of value. Indeed one of our guides, who was employed to dig for him, assisted at their ransack.

Some readers may remember a violent controversy which arose among the learned over the allegation that Cesnola unearthed the most of his more valuable antiquities in a single treasury at Curium. The said antiquities, however, being, so the critics declared, of many different styles and periods, it was found difficult to understand how they could have been discovered in one place, unless indeed Curium boasted a prehistoric British Museum with a goldroom

attached. Here I may say that a few days later I visited Curium in the company of official gentlemen, who informed me that they were present when excavations were made with the object of investigating these statements. The statements, they said, were not proved.

Bearing this dispute in mind, I asked the Cypriote guide whether General Cesnola found his most important objects heaped in one place at Curium. He answered that antiquities were found here and there; that often Cesnola himself was not present when they were found, but that as they were dug up from the tombs they were collected by the workmen and taken care of, to be given over to him whenever he might come. I quote this bit of evidence for what it is worth, as in future generations, when all these burial-places have been thoroughly ransacked, the matter may become of interest because of the side-light which it throws upon ancient history.

Much of our knowledge of the remote past is derived from tombs, and yet to my mind our pleasing habit of violating the dead, whether for purposes of gain or in order to satisfy our thirst for information, is not altogether easy to justify. It is a very ancient habit. Because of it the mummies of Rameses, the Pharaoh of the Oppression, of the wondrous-faced Seti, his father, of the monarchs of, I think, the Her-hor dynasty, and a host of others, about the period of the Persian invasion were moved from their immemorial resting-places to the hiding hole of Deir-el-Bahari. Long before this indeed the rulers of Egypt, knowing the danger, were in the habit, at intervals of several hundred years, of despatching royal commissioners to inspect the bodies of the great departed and ascertain that they slept safe and undisturbed. I myself have seen writings upon the outer wrappings of the deceased which notified that such and such a commission inspected the corpse of such and such a divine king—he who lay within the wrappings—now “sleeping in Osiris,” and found his coffins and corpse intact.

In this particular instance the efforts of the ancient Egyptians to preserve the earthly remnants of those who ruled over them thousands of years before, did but postpone the evil day. Tens of generations went by, and in a fashion interesting enough but too long to describe here, the hiding-place of Deir-el-Bahari was discovered. Modern savants hurried to the place—one of them told me not long afterwards that he nearly fainted with joy when by the light of candles held above his head, he discovered the richness of that hoard. Up the deep and narrow well were dragged the corpses of kings and queens as great in their own time as Victoria or Napoleon. As they were borne to the steamer the fellaheen women, inspired by some spirit of hereditary veneration, ran along the banks of Nile weeping, tearing their hair and throwing dust upon their heads because the ancient lords of their land were being taken away and none knew where they would lay them. Now rent from their wrappings, their half-naked bodies lie in the glass cases of a museum to be stared at by every tourist. The face before whose frown whole nations trembled and mayhap Joseph or Moses bowed the knee, is an object for the common jest of the vulgar, and so will remain until within a few decades or centuries it is burnt in a conflagration, or torn to pieces by a drunken rabble, or perchance—happier destiny—crumbled into dust as must happen soon or late, to be thrown out upon the dung-heap for hens to scratch at.

Is it right? I ask who have been a sinner. Myself in the neighbourhood of Abydos, to take one example out of several whereof the recollections to-day fill me with some remorse, I found the mummy of a child. She was a little girl, who, poor dear, had lived and died in the first centuries of the Christian era, of Greek parentage, probably, for her skin was exceeding white. She lay wrapped in coloured bandages, not unlike some of the cottons which are manufactured to-day, and on a piece of mummy cloth which covered them, her

parents had drawn a cross in red pigment and scrawled beneath it in Greek characters the word “Christos.”

I hold that holy rag in my hand as I write and it shames me that I do so, but if I had not taken it the Arabs who were with me and who showed me the hiding-place, would have sold it to the next traveller. I remember that on the same journey we unwrapped the head of a mummy purchased from some tomb-breaker for a few piastres. Oh! what a face appeared! That man who had lived four thousand years ago might have been a king, or a high-priest, so majestic were his withered features. Certainly his blood must have been noble and his place high. Yet his end was that a doctor sawed his skull open to see how it was embalmed. May he forgive me for the part I took in that business, who then was younger and more thoughtless.

At the time perhaps I did not understand quite as well as I do now—I mention this in my excuse—how sincere and solemn was the belief which among the old Egyptians led to this practice of embalming. Of all people who have ever lived, not even excluding those of our Christian faith, they held most firmly to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Therefore they preserved that body against the hour of its awakening, and the idea of its disturbance, or destruction, was to them horrible. It was a futile faith, as they themselves recognised, since knowing that no efforts of their own could guard against future events—such as the arrival of the Nile tourist— they multiplied images and pictures of the deceased, hoping that some one of them might survive for the Ka or Double to haunt, and the Khu, or Spirit, to reanimate at the appointed season. Piteous and idle plan, since dust must to dust, be it soon or late. Still their faith may fulfil itself in other ways, and we may venture to believe that at the last the Spirit they were so sure of will not be left without its tabernacle.

Yet is our offence as great, although with a strange

and gross materialism we suppose, when we consider the matter at all, that the fact of these folk having died so long ago makes them fair prey for our greed or curiosity. But what is time to the dead? Ten million ages and a nap after dinner, unconsciousness can know no difference—to consciousness refound they must be one. On awakening in each case the recollections would be as vivid, the aspirations, the motives, the thoughts, the beliefs, the sorrows, hopes and terrors as firm and distinct. Once the senses are shut, time ceases to exist, if in truth it exists at all. Then is the offence of the violation of this hallowed dust so carefully hid away, any the less because it has slept five thousand years, than it would be in the case of a resurrection man who drags it from the grave it has occupied six hours, to sell it to the dissecting-table? We are so apt to judge of the dead by a standard of the possible feelings of the survivors, forgetting that they may have their own feelings. Also the survivors, or rather the departed contemporaries, may still be shocked.

These poor Phoenicians of Amathus had no such high hopes, although from time to time there were plenty in Cyprus who shared them. Yet they built their sepulchres with extraordinary expense and care, facing towards the sea as though they wished to watch the sun rise and set for ever. We break into them under the written order of the British Museum, or secretly by night, and drag their ear-rings from their ears, and their rings from their fingers, and set their staring skulls upon back shelves in dealers' dens in Limasol where once they ruled, to be sold for a shilling—skulls are cheap to-day—to the first relic-hunting traveller. Well, so it is and so it will ever be.

The next tomb we came to had a beautiful V-shaped doorway, though only the top of the inverted V was visible above the rubbish. I did not go in here, being already sufficiently plastered with mud, almost from head

to foot indeed, but my companion, who is young and active, achieved the adventure. As it turned out it might very easily have been his last, for in climbing up the walls of the pit again, his foot slipped on a little piece of greasy earth and down he went backwards, dragging two Cypriotes with him in such fashion that all three of them lay in a tangled heap at the bottom of the hole. The sight was ludicrous enough, but as the older of the two guides explained to us, had it not been for his quickness and address my nephew would certainly have met with a serious accident. The man saw from the way he was falling that his head or neck must strike against a stone at the bottom of the pit, and managed to thrust his arm and thick sleeve between the two. Once my own life was saved in a very similar fashion, except that no human agency intervened. I was galloping a pony along an African road when suddenly it crossed its legs and went down as though it had been shot. In falling my head struck a stone on the road with great force, but by chance the thick cloth hat which I was wearing, being jerked from its place, interposed itself as a kind of doubled-up cushion between my temple and the stone, with the result that I escaped with slight concussion. I remember that the shock of the fall was so great that my stout buckskin braces were burst into four pieces.

That my nephew's danger was not exaggerated by the Cypriote is shown by the fact that, within the last few years, at the mouth of this or the very next tomb a German professor was killed in precisely the same way. Indeed, now that I think of it, I remember reading of his sad death in a paper. The poor gentleman, who was accompanied only by an old woman, having finished his inspection began to climb up the sides of the pit when a stone came out in his hand and he fell head first to the bottom. He only lived about five minutes and our friend, the protecting Cypriote, helped to carry away his body.

After this experience, having had enough of the interesting but dirty pursuit of “tombing,” we mounted our mules and rode round the hill of the ancient city, a stone-strewn and somewhat awkward path. The streets there must have been very steep in their day and a walk up to the citadel on business, or to buy a slave or two kidnapped on the shores of Britain as a special line for the Cyprian market, excellent exercise for the fat old wine-bibbing merchants, whose scattered bones and broken drinking-cups we had just been handling yonder among the tombs.

Now the place is melancholy in its desolation. There is nothing left, nothing. It might have formed the text of one of Isaiah's prophecies, so swept of life is it and of all outward memorials of life. I could only find one remnant. On the face of a towering rock we discovered a short uncial Greek inscription which is beginning to feel the effects of weather. Our united scholarship pieced this much out of it: “Lucius Vitellius, the great conqueror, erected this from his own.” Here the information comes to a full stop, for we could not make out any more. Perhaps some reader of this page may know with certainty which Lucius Vitellius is referred to and why he was engaged in conquering at Amathus. Is it perchance Lucius Vitellius, the father of the emperor who was governor in Syria, in A.D. 34? If so he might well have described himself as “the great humbug” instead of the great conqueror, as is proved by the famous story that is told of him concerning Caligula and the moon. According to Tacitus, however, he was a good governor. “I am not ignorant that he had a bad name in Rome and that many scandalous things were said of him, but in the administration of the provinces he showed the virtues of an earlier age.”

I daresay that yonder crumbling screed may be the only actual monument that is left to-day of this Vitellius, his pomp, his cunning, and his flattery.

As we returned home the scene was very beautiful. In the west the sun sank gorgeously, his fan-like arrows breaking and reflecting themselves from the dense purple under-clouds that had gathered and lay low upon the horizon of the slumbering deep. High above in the fathomless blue spaces of the Cyprian heavens, rode the great moon, now rounding to her full, her bright face marked with mountain scars. And the lights that lay on sea, sky and land, on the plain of Limasol and the mount of ruined Amathus, who shall describe them—those changeful, many-coloured lights, so delicate, so various and so solemn?

On the day after our visit to Amathus I attended the Court-house to listen to the magisterial examination of the men (whose numbers had now increased to six) whom I had seen previously in jail awaiting their trial upon a charge of murder. The court was crowded with the relatives of the accused; zaptiehs, or policemen; a selection of idlers from among the general public; a goodly number of Greek advocates crowded together in the front bench, and the six prisoners themselves all squeezed into a dock which was much too small for them, where they stood in a double row listening to the evidence with an indifferent air, real or affected. For the rest Mr. Mavrogordato, as I am told a veritable terror to evildoers, conducted the case for the prosecution, bringing out his points with great clearness, while the district judge, Mr. Parker, sat as a magistrate's court. The judicial functions of the legal officials in Cyprus are by the way rather curiously mixed, the same individual being able, apparently, to sit in varying executory capacities.

The case was opened by the different advocates announcing for which of the prisoners they appeared. Then Mr. Mavrogordato took up his parable and began to examine the Greek doctor through an interpreter, whose somewhat lengthy translations made the proceedings

rather slow. When, after a couple of hours, we had just got to the point where he turned the body over, growing weary I went home to lunch. To this hour I cannot say whether or no those reputed murderers, or if any, which of them, still adorn the land of life, or whether under Mr. Mavrogordato's guidance, they have passed beneath that black beam which spans the central well in the old castle at Limasol. I think very possibly, however, that they were all acquitted or reprieved, for although I am certain that they, or some of them, did the deed, from the opening of the case, out of the depths of a not inconsiderable experience of such inquiries, I am convinced that every ounce of the evidence in possession of the prosecution was absolutely and solely circumstantial. Moreover, although they had dug him up again and looked for it, the missing knife-point could not be found in the vitals of the late-lamented cattle-poisoning rascal whom somebody had slain. A broken and recovered knife-point goes a long way with a jury, and its absence is equally favourable to the prisoner.

One afternoon I attended some athletic sports at Limasol. It was a general feast-day, in honour of what or of whom I grieve to say I forget, but on that occasion there were festivities everywhere. Earlier in the day I went for a ride to a village some miles distant which also was celebrating sports, that is to say a few loungers were gathered together about an open place in the hamlet, and nobody was doing any work. This I noticed, however, both in the village aforesaid, on the ground at Limasol, and from the spires of all the churches that I could see, a flag was flying. As it was a public holiday one might have expected that this flag would be English, or perhaps here and there, in deference to ancient and long-established custom, Ottoman. It was neither, it was Greek. Everywhere that not very attractive banner flaunted in the wind. I asked the reason but nobody

seemed to know an answer. They suggested, however, that it had something to do with the Greek churches, and added that the upper classes of the Cypriotes who call themselves, but are not, Greeks, always flew the Greek flag.

I submit that this is not a good thing. Throughout the world and at all periods of its history the flag flown is the symbol of the authority acknowledged, or that the population wish to acknowledge. In Cyprus of course the bulk of the inhabitants are not concerned in this matter. The villagers of the remote hills and plains care little about banners, but if they see continually that of Greece displayed on every church tower and high place, and never, or rarely, that of Great Britain which rules them, they may, not unnaturally, draw their own conclusions. It is a small affair perhaps, but one, I believe, which might with advantage be attended to by the Government. Eastern peoples do not understand our system of laissez faire where the symbols of authority are concerned, and are apt to argue that we are afraid to show the colours which we do not fly. The Union Jack is not a banner that should be hidden away in British territory. Nor is this my own view only. It is shared by every unofficial Englishman in Cyprus, though these are few. Officials may have their opinions also, but it would not be fair to quote them.

After the sports were over I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman well acquainted with the customs of the country. He told me that few traces of the old Phœnician rites remain, except that which is still celebrated in some districts upon Whitsunday. Then, as did their forefathers thousands of years since, the villagers go down to the sea and bathe there, both sexes together. It is the ancient welcome given to Venus in the island fabled to be her chosen home, mixed up perhaps with some Christian ceremony of washing and regeneration. The bathers throw water over each other, but so far as

outward appearances go, there is nothing incorrect in their conduct at these quaint and primitive celebrations.

My friend told me also, to turn to another subject, of the vast benefit which the British Government has conferred upon the island by the practical extermination of the locust. All the ancient visitors to Cyprus, or at least many of them, speak of this curse, which twenty years ago, and even on the occasion of my last visit, was in full operation. An ingenious Greek gentleman devised the remedy. Roughly the system is this. Locusts, impelled thereto by one of those wondrous instincts that continually amaze the student of nature, at the appointed season select certain lands wherein to lay their eggs, which must not be too deep or too shallow, and when the pests begin to grow must furnish certain food on the surface of the sandy soil necessary to their support. Observation soon enables skilled persons to discover these spots. Then the system first invented by Mr. Mattei and perfected by my late friend, Mr. Samuel Brown, is brought into operation.

Briefly it consists of the erection of screens of canvas many yards in length edged at the top with shiny American cloth, in front of which screens are dug deep trenches. About a fortnight after the locusts are hatched out of the egg, having exhausted the supply at the breeding-place, they begin their march across country in search of nutriment. Then it is that strange things happen to them, for climbing up the canvas screens which they find barring their path, their feet slip upon the leather and down they slide backwards into the ready-made grave beneath. Before they can crawl up again others tumble on the top of them, and so it goes on till the trench is full. Now observant human beings arrive, cover it in to prevent effluvium and move the screen a few yards further on to another trench that they have prepared, where this page of locust-history repeats itself. It might be thought that learning wisdom—from his

fellows' fate—the locust would in time educate himself to go round the screen. But not so, for of all this insect's characteristics obstinacy is the most prominent. He means to travel a certain path; if it involves his death, so much the worse, at least he will travel till he dies. Doubtless it is this singleness of purpose, this incapability of changing his mind, that makes the locust so great and formidable.

And formidable he is, or was, as any one will know who has ever seen a stretch of growing corn, or a grove of fruit-trees, or any green thing that is of service to man, over which the locust has passed. Joel the prophet knew him long ago, before ever Messrs. Mattei and Brown had at last taught humanity how to beat him (i.e. in an island like Cyprus). “He hath laid my vine waste and barked my fig-tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white. … How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture: yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate.” And again—here he describes them at their work. Could it be more wonderfully done, could any words give a more vivid picture of the overwhelming invasion of this bane and the waste it leaves behind?

“A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them. … Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame that devoureth the stubble.”

Such indeed is the sound that has been heard to rise from the millions of their moving jaws.

However, as I have said, thanks to the continued exertions of the Government, locusts are now practically exterminated in Cyprus.

What their ravages have been in the island for ages past may be gathered from a single quotation which I take from the writings of Benedetto Bordone, the geographer,

of Padua, whose work was published in 1528. It is only one example, but it will serve:—“But among so much good, that there may be nothing in this world without its bitterness, the luck of the island has this one drawback, mingling with its blessings so heavy a curse that men can hardly bear up against it—that a vast multitude of cavalette or locusts appear with the young wheat: these as they pass from place to place are so many in number that like a thick cloud they hide the sun: and where they light they devour and consume not only the grain and grass, but even the roots below ground, so that one might say that fire had blasted everything. Yet they use all diligence to destroy these insects, and make a very great outlay to seek out the eggs while they are in the earth, and they do indeed in some years find of them thirty thousand bushels. Besides this they use yet another remedy of a strange kind; they send to Syria to fetch a certain water, with which they soak the ground, and where it is thus soaked the eggs burst and produce none of these insects.”

What water was this, I wonder?

CHARMING as is Cyprus in many ways, it is a place where the traveller, especially the English traveller, and still more the unofficial dweller in the land, has some reason to congratulate himself if he was born with the gifts of patience and humility. In practice the island is inhabited by two classes only, the Government officials and the native Cypriotes. Between these there is a great gulf fixed, in itself a bad thing as I think, since it is not good for any man, or body of men, to be continually surrounded by people whom they consider very much their inferiors. In Africa I have known weak folk driven crazy by this plethora of authority, and nine individuals out of ten it makes conceited. Only really large - minded men can bear the weight of unquestioned power and remain unspoiled, men big enough to know how frail and small the rest of us are.

To return — wide as that gulf may be, it is not altogether easy to float there. In other words, an inhabitant who is not an official has no “position” in Cyprus, and is collectively relegated to a class by himself, or so it seemed to me. It is, however, very much to be regretted that this class is not larger. In that event not only would life become less narrow in the island, for red tape in quantity does constrict the intellect; its rulers also would be exposed to the tonic and stimulus of competent and independent public opinion. At present of factious opposition to the Government from the Greek party and others there is plenty, of intelligent and suggestive

criticism at the hands of equals and compatriots, little or none at all.

The questions of social status and precedence do not affect the traveller, however, though if he be of an observant mind they may amuse him. What does affect him are the hide-bound Cyprian regulations. One I have mentioned, and its inconveniences—that having to do with revolvers—but it is as nothing compared to those which overtake the individual who ventures to come to Cyprus armed with a fowling-piece in the hope of shooting duck or woodcock. I, unfortunate, had sent mine on, and finding it awaiting me at the custom-house at Limasol, suggested that I might take it away. Thereon I was informed very politely that I must comply with a few formalities. First, it proved imperative that I should obtain from the Government at Nicosia a certificate that I was a fit and proper person to be allowed to carry so dangerous a weapon as a shot-gun. Secondly, a value must be set upon the said gun which must be approved. Thirdly, the fourth part of the value thus ascertained must be paid over in cash to the custom-house officer, who, on the owner quitting the island within a certain period of time and satisfying him that he had not disposed of the gun, would repay three-quarters of the total amount so deposited, the Government retaining the rest for its trouble. Fourthly, a game-licence must be taken out. This I think an excellent regulation.

It can easily be imagined that by the time I had written the necessary letters, signed the necessary documents, paid the necessary deposit and interviewed the necessary number of officers, I wished almost that I had thrown my gun into the sea before I was foolish enough to bring it to Cyprus. Even now when the trouble is done with, I venture to ask whether all these formalities are really needful in the case of a person known to be a bonâ-fide traveller who proposes to tarry for a few weeks only in the land? The same question

might be asked of other Cyprian regulations and of their method of enforcement.

A more serious matter, as I myself experienced, for which indeed the Government is not responsible, although I think it might take action to prevent the inconvenience, is connected with the Turkish telegraph line which purports to deliver messages in Cyprus. What happens, and has happened perpetually for the last year or so since the cable was hopelessly broken, and intermittently before that time, is that a message taken by the Turkish line, without warning or other enlightenment to the sender in whatever part of the world he may be, passes over their wires to Port Said or Beyrout, where it is left to lie until a ship is sailing. Thence it is sent on by post and re-telegraphed from Larnaca to its address by the Eastern Telegraph Company, for which service is charged a fee of one and ninepence.

In my case I despatched a cable to Italy, by the Eastern Telegraph Company, to which I had previously arranged to receive an immediate reply. No answer came and I grew anxious. Days passed and finally the reply did come, a week late, having been forwarded by post from Port Said! My hostess informed me that within a single year the same thing had happened no less than thrice to people staying in her house. For a specimen result I quote an instance that occurred just before I arrived. The father of a lady who was staying with a friend in the island, died in England, and the sad news was at once telegraphed to her. This message was sent by the Turkish wires with the shocking result that the person concerned first learned of her bereavement through a casual perusal of the advertisement columns of the Times. The cable itself was delivered a day or two later than the newspaper.

It would seem that the Government might move to put a stop to this constant and intolerable scandal

of a telegraph line accepting and being paid for messages which it has neither the intention nor the means of delivering. I am informed, however, that it does not do so because such action might raise “a political question” and give offence to the Turks. If I were in a position of authority I think that I should take the risk of that offence and of the use of a little plain language.

Still notwithstanding these and other drawbacks, unavoidable perhaps in a country soaked with oriental traditions, Cyprus is in many ways a most delightful spot, and it is remarkable that more English people do not live there, at least for the winter season. Actual residence in the island to all but those inured to heat, involves a three months' stay in summer under canvas or in huts on the mountain heights of Trooidos, whither the officials move annually from Nicosia. This is a sojourn that must become monotonous in spite of the delightful air and scenery of the pine forests, since lawn-tennis parties and picnics, where the guests are continually the same, will pall at last on all except the youngest and most enthusiastic. For the other nine months of the year, or most of them, the climate is pleasant and healthy.

I know that in the last respect, it has a different reputation; arising I believe from the fact, that when it was first acquired from the Turks, some regiments of debilitated troops were sent from Egypt to recover health in Cyprus. Those in authority proceeded to secure this object through the great heats of summer by setting them down in overcrowded tents upon an undrained marsh, where they sickened and died in considerable numbers. Also in old days the island's reputation for wholesomeness was of the most evil.

I have discovered many references to this in the course of my reading, but lack the time to search them out now; also to do so would be to overburden these pages. Here are one or two extracts, however, upon which I am

ON TROOIDOS

able to lay hands, that will suffice to prove the point. They are taken, for the most part, from Excerpta Cypria. Felix Fabri writing in the fifteenth century says that on returning from a certain expedition inland in Cyprus—“When we reached the sea in our galley we found that two pilgrims were dead, one of whom was a priest of the Minorite order, a brave and learned man, and the other was a tailor from Picardy, an honest and good man. Several others were in the death agony. We, too, who had come from Nicosia, cast ourselves down on our beds very sick; and the number of the sick became so great, that there was now no one to wait upon them and furnish them with necessaries.” He goes on to tell how they put out to sea and met with sad adventures:—“During this time one of the knights ended his days most piteously. We wound a sheet about him, weighted his body with stones, and with weeping cast him into the sea. On the third day from this another knight, who had gone out of his mind, expired in great pain and with terrible screams,” and so forth.

Again Egidius van Egmont, and John Heyman, whose work was translated from the Dutch in London in 1759, say:—“It is known by experience that the inhabitants of this island seldom attain to any great age, owing possibly to the badness of the air; malignant fevers being common here, especially towards the end of summer, and during our stay in the island, though it was in the spring, a contagious distemper swept away great numbers at Nicosia. But the air is most noxious at Famagusta and Lernaca owing to the vapours rising from the fens and saltpans in the neighbourhood. And at Lernaca the air is most unhealthy when the sun is above the horizon.”

Also Richard Pococke, whose well-known work was published in London in 1743, writes:—“These mountains and the shallow soil, which is mostly on a white free-stone, make it excessively hot in summer and the

island is very unhealthy especially to strangers, who often get fevers here, which either carry them off, or at least continue for a considerable time, the disorder lurking in the blood and occasioning frequent relapses.”

To come to quite recent times Monsieur Delaroiére, whose book, Voyage en Orient, was published in 1836, talking of Larnaca says:—“We went out to this shrine, which is charmingly situated near a great lake and wooded hills, but the air is very unwholesome. In a visit we paid to the sheik we saw the insalubrity of the place stamped on every face; the pale and leaden complexions testified to habitual fever.”

These short quotations, which could be easily supplemented by others of like tenor, suffice to show that the healthiness of Cyprus has always been in bad repute. Why this is so I cannot say, for, given the most ordinary precautions, among warm countries it is certainly the most wholesome that I have visited. I have scarcely heard of a death that could in any way be attributed to climate among the European officials, and children of northern blood seem to flourish there. Probably its reputation may be set down to the lack of those ordinary precautions and the insanitary condition of the place in the past. Few people whose reading has not been more or less extensive know the extent of the mortality throughout all lands in bygone generations. A great proportion of the death rate everywhere was, I am convinced, due to typhoid which nobody knew how to treat or how to avoid. It had not even any specific name except the generic term of “feaver.” For proof of this such works as the Verney Memoirs may be consulted. It is probable that a traveller from Cyprus visiting London about the year 1600 might have returned and described the city as most unwholesome.

Living in Cyprus is extraordinarily cheap. A family can flourish there and have many comforts, such as

riding-horses, &c., who at home would be obliged to look twice at a bus fare and consider a visit to the pit of a theatre a great luxury. Servants also are inexpensive and, on the whole, might be a great deal worse. One in a house where I received hospitality was really a very good, all-round man. He went by the name of Cristo or Christ, an appellation common enough in Cyprus, though one from the use of which northern people would refrain. There was a boy also, an amusing young rascal, who when taken into service evidently was half starved. Then he made up for it, for to my own knowledge he could devour a large tin of bad potted lobster with appetite and without ill effects; nor did he shrink from swallowing at a draught a whole tureen of mint-sauce. On such diet he grew wondrous fat.

In Cyprus everybody depends upon the sun, which is presumed to be, but is not, always on show, at any rate in the winter months. Fireplaces in the dwelling-rooms are a luxury introduced by the English, pleasant enough and even needful in January and February. When the sun refuses to shine inconveniences ensue. Thus the washing generally comes home wet and I could discover but one means of airing it—to place the garments which it was proposed to wear on the following day in bed and sleep upon them. This receipt I frequently adopted. Old travellers will know the plan and young ones may note the same.

Fourteen years or so ago when I was there, Cyprus was a very happy hunting ground for the lovers of antiquities. Then many desirable things could still be purchased. For instance there were objects of silver that I suppose must be of mediaeval date, or a little later; worked buckles that were worn by the inhabitants on great occasions, round or shell-shaped and very beautiful, of which in those days I obtained several pairs. Also there were curious reliquaries to be worn about the neck, generally fashioned in the form of a hollow cross,

inside of which was placed a bit of saint or some other sacred scrap. Now few such objects are to be found. Nearly all have vanished. I searched the bazaar at Nicosia and every likely place in the other towns, without discovering even a single pair of buckles. I could find nothing except one small reliquary. Veritable antiquities are almost as rare to-day, owing largely to the prohibition that has been put upon private digging in the interests of the British Museum.

On my first visit I was rather fortunate. Thus in a village not far from Cyrenia I bought for a small sum from the man who dug it up, a beautifully worked oriental bowl of bronze, dating, I should think, from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In this bowl the finder discovered coins which he sold for the sum of three hundred pounds, their value by weight. What coins they were I cannot say, for he had parted with every one and could give no clear description of them.

Also I obtained from him a piece of glass which he had found, that at once struck me as very curious. It is about six inches high, round, with a narrow neck, and its great peculiarity lies in the fact that it has five spirals of glass that spring from near the bottom of the bowl, clearing its arch to join the vessel again at the root of its neck. This vase I carried in my hand on horseback for many a weary mile, fearing accidents, and ultimately brought it safe to England. Here, as I saw that he was much struck with it, I gave it to my friend, Sir John Evans, who read a paper on the piece at the Society of Antiquaries, in whose records it is published.1 It seems that the vessel is Roman and unique. Sir John Evans ingeniously discovered the method by which it was made, and even caused a replica to be manufactured, how, it would be too long and difficult to explain. This replica I still possess.

Another find was a marble head that once has worn

a bronze helmet. It seems to be of a very good Greek style and period. At first I thought that it had adorned a statue of a goddess, but a well-known expert tells me that after taking measurements, &c., he believes it to be a contemporaneous portrait of Faustina, of which lady of that name, I am not certain, but I imagine, the elder. This head, the best thing of the sort that I can find in any Cyprian collection, either in the island or the British Museum, I discovered serving the gentleman who ploughed it up as a door-stop. But although he valued it so little it took me two years to reduce it into possession, as I think that the man who owned the land where it was found, claimed an interest in the marble. Another beautiful object that came my way was a corroded silver ring found in a tomb with an engraved scarabæus bezel. This ring the late Mr. Samuel Brown, who gave me a whole collection of Cyprian pottery, offered to me for any price I chose to fix. But I had spent all my money, so I said that I would take it home and sell it for what I could get on his account. I disposed of the ring for ten guineas to a well-known dealer who passed it on to the British Museum for twenty guineas. Afterwards I felt sad when one of the great experts there informed me that it was the best thing of the sort they had secured for many a day, being, it would appear, an early and exceedingly good copy of some famous work of art by, I think, Praxiteles. And the moral of that is, as the Queen said to Alice, never be economical when you see what your instinct tells you is a good antique, or you will live to regret your virtuous impulse.

Also I procured one or two other objects which I submitted to the British Museum. They said they were worth keeping—and kept them, by way of exchange kindly presenting me with plaster casts edged round with blue paper. Perhaps they are better there. I like to think so.

Now it is otherwise. Except the spear-head already

mentioned, one silver coin of Alexander is all my harvest, and of this I found a better example years ago. About Alexanders, my friend, Mr. Christian, an old resident in the island, told me a wondrous and authentic tale. Some peasants digging, found an earthenware pot and in it nearly a thousand gold coins, for the most part stamped with the head of that monarch. The peasants disposed of them for their weight in gold, and they were afterwards sold by the fortunate purchasers for seven or eight pounds each. Where are they now, I wonder? Imagine the feelings of the happy man who suddenly discovered a pot full of a thousand such coins as these.1 By the way I remember that a lady once showed me a magnificent necklace made of gold coins of Alexander of different sizes, which had been given her as a wedding present. Perhaps part of that Cyprian find went to make this necklace. But of antiquities I must stop talking, since they may have more fascination for me than for my readers.

Our next expedition was to the site of ancient Curium, which is said by Herodotus to have been peopled by Argives. To reach this ruined city we passed the tower of Colossi and lunched in the police-station of the beautiful and fertile village of Episcopi, a pleasant place for picnics. Thence we rode on a mile or so to the waste that once was Curium, through whole rows of tombs, every one of which are said to have been plundered by the omnivorous Cesnola. In front of us rose a steep hill upon whose face could be seen more tombs or rock chapels. Up this mount we climbed and at the summit came to the ancient city. As usual it was nothing but a tumbled heap of stones, but here the anemones grew by thousands among them and made the place most beautiful. Presently we found ourselves on the site of a

temple. The great columns prostrate and broken, the fragments of shattered frieze, and the bits of mosaic flooring revealed by tearing up the sod, all told the same unmistakable story of fallen greatness and a magnificence that time, man, and earthquake have combined to desolate. A little further on we reached a spot where the ground is literally strewn with fragments of broken statues, some of them almost life-size, but the greater number small. I picked up the lower parts of two of these stone statues and put them into my—or rather the zaptieh's pocket. As I anticipated, they make excellent letter-weights. What a falling off is here! The effigies of the gods of old—the feet that were bedewed with tears of amorous maidens and of young men anxious to succeed in piratical expeditions, serving as the humble necessary letter-weight! Well, perhaps it is more honourable than to be broken up to fill the shovel of a Cyprian roadmaker.

By this spot is a well or pit which is said to be quite full of these broken statues. Probably they were thrown here on some occasion when the temple was sacked. Picking our path on horseback through the countless stones for two-thirds of a mile or so, we came to another and a larger temple. This was the great fane dedicated to Apollo Hylatus. A wonderful place it must have been when it stood here in its glory, peopled by its attendant priests and the crowd of worshippers flocking to its courts with gifts. The situation on that bold highland brow is superb and must be most splendid of all at dawn when the first level rays of the sunrise sweep its expanse. Doubtless the ancients placed the temple of their sun-god here that it might catch his arrows while darkness yet veiled the crowded town below, the wide, fertile plain which we call Episcopi, and the fields about the Norman tower of Colossi—compared to these old columns but a mushroom of yesternight.

It is not possible, at any rate to the uninstructed

traveller with scant time at his disposal, to follow the exact configuration of this temple of Apollo and its courts, nor indeed if he knew them, would these details be of any great assistance to the imagination. Everywhere are tumbled stones, shattered pillars, some of them elegantly wreathed, overthrown altars and cavernous holes, in the depths of which underground cisterns and passages become visible. In short the cult of the worship of Apollo and his brother and sister divinities—always excepting that of Venus who is immortal—is not more ruined, neglected, and forlorn than this unvisited place, once its splendid sanctuary. Apollo was a joyous god, but evidently he had his stern side. At any rate not far away a headland runs out into the sea, and from its precipitous bluff those who had offended against his majesty—or had differences of opinion with his priests—were hurled to expiate their crimes by a terrifying death. At least so says tradition.

Leaving the temple of the lost Apollo our animals scrambled on through the stones till at last these ceased and we came to a stretch of bush-clad country. This is now one of the Government reserves kept thus to enable the timber of which the Turks denuded the island to spring up again safe from the ravages of man and beast. In such reserves goats are not allowed to graze, for of all animals these do the most damage to young timber, which they gnaw persistently until it perishes. It is not too much to say that where there are many goats no forest can arise. Cyprus in bygone ages was a densely wooded land. Strabo, writing in the first year of the Christian era, says of it:—“Such then is Cyprus in point of position. But in excellence it falls behind no one of the islands, for it is rich in wine and oil and uses home-grown wheat. There are mines of copper in plenty at Tamassos, in which are produced sulphate of copper and copper-rust, useful in the healing art. Eratosthenes talks of the plains as being formerly full of wood run to riot, choked

in fact with undergrowth and uncultivated. The mines were here of some little service, the trees being cut down for the melting of copper and silver; and of further help was ship-building, when men sailed over the sea without fear and with large fleets. But when even so they were not got under, leave was given to those who would and could cut them down to keep the land they had cleared in full possession and free of taxes.”

Alas! far different is the case to-day. The Turks suffered the timber to be destroyed in all save the most inaccessible places, and the wasteful habits of the peasants who, if allowed, will cut up a whole tree to make a single sheep-trough, completed the ruin. So it came about that at last the land which used to supply Egypt with all the wood necessary to build her fleets was almost denuded save on the mountain peaks of Trooidos, with the result that the rainfall lessened alarmingly. Since its advent the British Government has done its best to remedy this state of affairs. As it has no money to spend in planting it has adopted another and perhaps on the whole a more effective method. Although the trees have vanished in Cyprus, by the wonderful preservative agency of nature their seeds remain in the soil, and if goats can be kept off the hills where forests stood, forests will again arise. Thus, although to speak of it anticipates my story a little, it was with a most real pleasure that in travelling from Nicosia to Cyrenia I saw the tops of great mountains which fourteen years ago I remembered naked as a plate, covered to-day with a thick growth of young firs that must now be fifteen or twenty feet in height. A generation hence and those mountain tops will once more bear a splendid forest. Care, however, is required which I do not think is always exercised. The new-formed forest should be thinned, as the wise woodman knows how to do, and the peasants allowed the use of the thinnings. This would prevent their destroying the trees by secretly firing the country, either from

irritation and spite, or to get the benefit of the young grass which springs up afterwards.

In this particular reserve near Curium of which I speak, however, to my surprise I saw a flock of sheep and goats in the charge of a herd. On asking how this came about, Mr. Michell, the commissioner for the Limasol district, who kindly accompanied us and gave us the advantage of his knowledge and experience, told me that the owners of these animals claim ancient rights of which they cannot be dispossessed. These rights endure until the man dies, or sells his flock. They are however untransferable, nor may he add to the number of the animals which he grazes. Thus by degrees the matter mends itself.

In the midst of this bush-clad plain stands the ancient stadium of Curium, where according to tradition the old inhabitants of classic times celebrated their chariot races. In considering the place I was much puzzled by one detail. The course is about two hundred yards or six hundred feet long, but according to my rough pacings it never measured more than eighty-four feet at the end where the chariots must turn. I could not understand how three or four vehicles, harnessed with four horses abreast, could possibly manage to negotiate this awkward corner at full speed without more smashes than would tend to the success of the entertainment. On reflection I am convinced that chariot races were not run in this place. It has never, I think, been a hippodrome, but was intended solely for athletic games and foot-running. To this supposition its actual measurements give probability, as they tally very well with those which were common in old days.

This stadium is still singularly perfect; its walls being built of great blocks of stone which here and there, however, must have been shaken down by earthquakes, for nothing else could have disturbed masonry so solid. The visitor can see also where the spectators sat, and in

the midst of that desolate scrub-covered plain it is curious to think of the shouting thousands gathered from Curium, Amathus, and perhaps Paphos, who in bygone generations hailed the victor in the games and hooted down the vanquished. Now the watching mountains above, the eternal sea beneath, and the stone-ringed area of their fierce contests remain—nothing more. All the rest is loneliness and silence. Dust they were, to dust they have returned, and only wondering memory broods about the place that knew them. These relics of a past which we can fashion forth but dimly, seem to come home with greater vividness to the mind when a traveller beholds them, as on this spot, in the heart of solitudes. Seen in the centre of cities that are still the busy haunts of men they do not impress so much.

So we turned back to Limasol, riding by another road along the headlands which overhang the ocean, and pausing, as I did now and again, to watch the wide-winged vultures sweep past us on their never-ending journeys. Very solemn they looked hanging there upon outstretched pinions between the sky and sea, as they hung when the first Phœnician galley rowed to the Cyprian shores, as they will hang till the last human atom has ceased to breathe among its immemorial plains and mountains.

HOPE, almost eclipsed off the Italian shores, rose again like a star at Limasol, for thither came post-cards from the Brindisi Cook saying that our lost luggage had actually been discovered and despatched to the care of the Alexandria Cook, who would forward it at once. Indeed it was time, for one feels, however generous-hearted may be the lender, that it is possible to wear out a welcome to a borrowed dress-suit. The Flora came in; we rushed to meet her, but nobody on board had even heard about our luggage. Then followed expensive cables and in due course a fateful answer from the deluded Alexandria Cook: “Cyprus quarantine restrictions forbid shipment.”

I confess that at this point I nearly gave way, but recovering, commenced the study of the maritime regulalations of Cyprus, to be rewarded by discovering that the importation of “rags and worn clothing was prohibited until further notice.” The “worn clothing” referred to, I may explain, are the cast-off garments that have clad the pilgrims to Mecca, or the donkey boys of Cairo. Applied in any other sense no traveller or inhabitant could appear in a presentable condition on the island, since that which they carry on their backs would be “worn clothing.” Yet, such is the inexorable stupidity of officials in the East, thus was the clause—none too clearly drafted, I admit—rendered by I know not whom in Alexandria.

Then followed more telegrams, letters of mingled threat and entreaty, and so forth, till many days afterwards

at length the luggage reappeared and with it a very pretty bill. The matter seems small, even laughable when written down in after-days, but at the time it was troublesome enough, especially as the remote places of the earth are just where a visitor must dress most carefully.

On the termination of our stay at Limasol, our plan was to go by sea to Paphos, forty miles away, where our mules would meet us, thence to ride to Lymni where an enterprising English syndicate is attempting to reopen the old Phœnician copper mine, and lastly by Pyrga and Lefka to the capital, Nicosia; in all about five days' hard travelling, for the most part over mountains.

As the time of departure drew near, mighty and exhausting were the preparations. Packing is always a task as laborious to the mind as to the body. But when it means thinking out what is to go on the mules, what to go to Nicosia, what to the final port of departure, what to be thrown away as too cumbersome to carry, and what must be kept with the traveller at all hazards in the very probable event of these various parcels and belongings vanishing away to be seen no more, then positive genius and genius of a peculiar sort is required to deal with the emergencies of the situation. However at last Cabbages, that is the muleteer, departed with his animals on which were laden camp-beds, kettles, pounds of tea, candles, and I know not what besides, with instructions to await our arrival at Paphos. The day passed on and it was announced that the Flora was once more in sight.

We went to the office and it was suggested that I should take the tickets. Now Paphos is a harbour where the voyager can only land in fine weather, whence, too, if it be not fine he is carried on to Egypt, where he must wait until the unwearying Flora again begins her weekly round. As it happens, in the course of my life I have had some experience of remote places where one cannot land or embark. Indeed a mishap which once I

met with at one of these in a far country entailed upon me a considerable risk of being drowned, a large expenditure of cash, some anxiety of mind, and a five days' journey in a railway train. But although it is rather interesting, I will not tell that tale in these pages.

“I suppose,” I said to the agent, “that we shall be able to land at Paphos?”

“Oh! I think so,” he replied casually, whereon I intimated that I would wait to take the tickets till the boat came in.

In time one learns to put a very exact value on the “I think so” of a shipping agent. In this instance it assured me that there was not a chance of our visiting the temple of Venus on the morrow.

The Flora came in and with her my friend, Mr. Charles Christian, who was kindly going to conduct us upon our tour.

“Shall we be able to land at Paphos?” I shouted.

He shook his head. “All the agents say we can,” he said, “but the captain and the boatmen say we can't.”

Then resignedly I suggested that we had better give it up, since I could not face the risk of making an involuntary trip back to Egypt. Mr Christian agreed and it was given up, though with great regret, a message being despatched to Cabbages to travel with his mules to Nicosia.

It was a true disappointment to me thus on my second visit to the island, as on my first, to be prevented from visiting the very home of Aphrodite, the place that the goddess chose to set her foot when she rose from the foam of the sea. Not that there is, as I understand, much more to be seen at either Old or New Paphos—Paleopaphos and Neopaphos; they are six or eight miles apart—than among the ruins of other ancient cities in the island. Still I wished to look upon the place where St. Paul once reasoned with Sergius Paulus, the Deputy. What a spectacle even for those ancient shores of Chittim that have witnessed so many things—the mighty Apostle

before the gates of the wanton shrine of Venus, thundering denunciations at the wizard Elymas and smiting him to darkness with the sword of the wrath of God! I desired to have stood upon that road which, as Strabo tells us, “was crowded year by year with men and women votaries who journeyed to this more ancient shrine” from all the towns of Cyprus, and indeed from every city of the known world. I desired also to have seen the tumbled wrecks of the temple, that “sacred enclosure” which Perrot and Chipiez recreate so vividly and well that, as I cannot better them, I will quote their words, where“everything spoke to the senses; the air was full of perfume, of soft and caressing sounds, the murmur of falling water, the song of the nightingale, and the voluptuous cooing of the dove mingled with the rippling notes of the flute, the instrument which sounded the call to pleasure or led the bride and bridegroom to the wedding feast. Under tents or light shelters built of branches skilfully interlaced, dwelt the slaves of the goddess, those who were called by Pindarus in the scoliast composed for Theoxenius of Corinth, the servant of the persuasion. These are Greek or Syrian girls, covered with jewels and dressed in rich stuffs with bright-coloured fringes. Their black and glossy tresses were twisted up in mitras, or scarves of brilliant colour, with natural flowers such as pinks, roses, and pomegranate blossoms hung over their foreheads. Their eyes glittered under the arch of wide eyebrows made still wider by art; the freshness of their lips and cheeks was heightened by carmine; necklaces of gold, amber and glass hung between their swelling breasts; with the pigeon, the emblem of fertility, in one hand, and a flower or myrtle-branch in the other, these women sat and waited.”

But Aphrodite was against me who serve Thoth, a foreign Egyptian god with whom she had naught in common, and doubtless did not admire, since—except in Ladies' Colleges—learning does not consort with loveliness. So her shrine remains and will remain unvisited by me. I regretted also not being able to examine the copper-workings of the ancients at Lymni with the vast pit whence

the ore was dug, the mountains of slag that lie around, and the tunnel hundreds of yards long which the genius and perseverance of the men of our generation have burrowed through the solid rock with a lake of water above their heads, in search of the lode which is waiting somewhere to make the fortunes of those who find it.1 Last of all and most of all perhaps, was I sorry not to see the beautiful stretch of mountain country which lies in this part of the island.

Yet it was well that we did not attempt the adventure travelling overland, as for a while we contemplated, for immediately thereafter it came on to rain and rained for days. Now a journey on muleback over the roadless Cyprian hills in rain is not a thing to be lightly undertaken. The paths are slippery and in places dangerous, but worst of all is the continual wet which, wrap himself as he will in macintoshes, soaks baggage and traveller. If he could dry himself and his belongings at the end of the day, this would matter little, but here comes the trouble. The fire made of wild thyme or what not that suffices to cook his food in a police-station or a tent, will not draw the moisture from his clothes or blankets. So he must sleep wet, and unless the sun shines, which in these seasons it often does not do for days together, start on wet next morning. In any country this is risky, in Cyprus it is dangerous, for here, as all residents in the land know, a soaking and a subsequent chill probably breed fever.

I may add that certain passengers, pooh-poohing doubts, went on by the Flora to Paphos, to find themselves in due course in Egypt, whence they returned ten days or so later. One gentleman, Mr. Mavrogordato indeed, did succeed in landing, but from another steamer. When the Paphos boatmen learned by signal or otherwise that he was on board this ship, which as I understand, having cargo to discharge, rolled off the port for

days, they clad themselves in lifebelts and made an effort, with the result that ultimately he was landed, also in a lifebelt and little else. The journey, I gather, was risky, but there comes a time when most of us would rather take the chance of being drowned than after a prolonged, involuntary tour return miserable and humiliated to the place of starting.

At length came the eve of our departure from Limasol, not for Paphos, but for Famagusta viâ Larnaca and Acheritou. In the afternoon we went for a walk and gathered many wild flowers, and as the sun set I betook myself to stroll upon the jetty. It was a calm evening and the solemn hush which pervaded the golden sky and the sea, still heaving with recent storm, made the place lovely. Some brutal boys were trying to drown a cat, but to my delight the poor creature escaped them and scrambled along the rough planks to the shore. They followed it into the town, and I was left alone there listening to the water lapping against the piers and watching an old fisherman in a fez sitting still as a statue, his line between his fingers. He did not seem to belong to the nineteenth century. He might have lived, and doubtless in the persons of his progenitors did live, one or two or three or four thousand years ago. I smoked my cigarette and contemplated him, half expecting that presently he would draw out a brass bottle, as was the fortune of fishermen in the “Arabian Nights,” and thence uncork a Jinn. But the brass bottle would not bite, or the fish either. Somehow it reminded me of another scene—a little pier that runs out into the icy waters of the North Sea at Reykiavik, whence on such an eve as this I remember seeing a boy angling for the flat fish that lie in the yellow sands. Only here in Cyprus were no eider-duck, and there in Iceland rose no minarets or palms.

I do not suppose that I shall see Limasol again, but thus while memory remains I wish ever to recall it, with

its twilight stillness, its illimitable darkling ocean, its quaint eastern streets and buildings, and over all of them and the mountains beyond a glorious golden pall of sunset.

On a certain Sunday—everybody seems to travel upon the Sabbath in Cyprus—the three of us, my nephew, Mr. Christian, and myself, started in a rattle-trap carriage dragged by four scaffoldings of ponies, one of which was dead lame, for Larnaca, about forty-five miles away. There were many agitations about this departure. First of all arrived a sulky-looking Greek, who declared that the carriage could not take the luggage and refused to allow it to be loaded. This was rather gratuitous on his part, as it seems that he had no interest in the conveyance, except some possible unearned commission. Then it was doubtful whether the dead-lame horse could go at all; but after a nail had been extracted from his bleeding frog he was pronounced to be not only fit, but eager for the journey. At this season of the year it is customary in Cyprus to turn the horses and mules on to green barley for three weeks, whence they arrive fat and well-seeming. This is why all draught animals were then so hard to hire.

At length with many farewells we creaked off through the narrow streets and difficult turnings of Limasol, to find ourselves presently in the open country. Here among the springing corn I saw white thorns in bloom, though I think that their species differs slightly from our own; also many carob-trees, some of them in the warmer situations now beginning to form their pods.

Trees, by the way do not as a rule belong to the owner of the soil. If you buy a piece of land in Cyprus, it will be to find that the timber on it is the lawful possession of somebody else, with all rights and easements thereto pertaining. These must be purchased separately, a fact that makes the possession of property under the prevailing Turkish law a somewhat complicated and vexatious affair.

I noticed that at the extremity of the boughs many

of these carobs, especially in the case of old specimens, were disfigured by bunches of red and rusty leaves. On inquiring the reason Mr. Christian informed me that the harm is due to the ravages of rats which live in the hollow boles and gnaw the juicy bark of the young shoots. Sometimes they destroy the entire tree, but the Cypriotes are too idle to kill them out. They prefer to lose their crop. The goats too damage everything that they can reach, and show extraordinary ingenuity in their efforts to secure the food they love. Thus with my own eyes I saw a couple of these intelligent animals reared up upon their hind-legs, their fore-feet propped together in mid air for mutual support, their bearded heads outstretched to pluck the succulent shoots above. The group thus formed would have furnished an admirable subject for a sculptor, but I have never seen it represented in any work of art, ancient or modern. Perhaps it is too difficult for easy treatment, or it may be of rare occurrence. One of the methods by which Cyprian peasants avenge injuries upon each other, is to attempt to destroy the olive-trees of an offending neighbour by cutting the bark with knives. Some of the olives which we passed upon this journey were disfigured with curious wart-like growths upon their ancient boles, which Mr. Christian informed me, as he believed, had been produced by such acts of petty malice practised perhaps hundreds of years ago. In these instances of course the trees had ultimately recovered.

The country through which we passed was on the whole very desolate. Although a good deal of the land seemed to be under cultivation of a kind, we saw few villages. These, I suppose, lay hidden behind the hills, but in truth the population is scant. Different indeed must it have been in the days of the Roman occupation. Then there were enough people in Cyprus to enable the Jews who had settled there to put two hundred and forty thousand to the sword in the course of a single

revolt, that is, a hundred thousand more than the present population of the island.

After we had driven for nearly five hours and beguiled the tedium of the road by lunching in the carriage, we came to a half-way house or hovel, called Chiro-Kitia, i.e. Kitia of the Pigs. Although it looked somewhat dreary in the rain which fell from time to time, it was a prettily situated place, hill-surrounded, fronting a bold brown mountain which lay between it and the sea, and standing over a green and fertile bottom with olive-gardens and fig-trees through which a torrent brawled. The inn itself, if such it can be called, had a little verandah, reached by external steps, half ladder and half staircase. From this verandah we entered the guest-room, which was whitewashed and scribbled over with writings in English, Turkish, Greek, and French; with drawings also whereby long-departed travellers had solaced the weary hours of their stay. This room was stone-paved and furnished with a table, a bench, a bed, and some rush-bottomed chairs. Here the mistress of the rest-house, the mother of several pretty little girls, who were standing about in the mud ragged and bootless, presently arrived with refreshments, a sort of cream cheese that is eaten with sugar, and tiny cups of sweet Turkish coffee accompanied by glasses of water with which to wash it down.

Mr. Christian asked me how old I thought this good woman might be. I replied nearly sixty, and indeed she looked it. He said that she was about twenty-six, and that he remembered her not many years ago as a pretty girl. Since that time, however, she had presented the world with an infant regularly once a year, and her present weary, worn-out aspect was the result.

“You shouldn't have so many children,” said Mr. Christian to her in Greek.

“God sends them,” she answered with a sad little smile.

This poor woman, with another of her familiar troubles close at hand, was in the unhappy position of being separated from her husband, now doing “time” under the care of Mr. Mavrogordato. She told us that he had come into this misfortune on the false evidence of the keeper of a rival rest-house some few hundred yards away; the only other dwelling in the place, indeed. As to our house and the owner there was a sad, and if true, a cruel tale of how its host, he of the jail, seeking to better his fortunes had put up a mill upon a piece of land at the back of the dwelling; how the rival had waited until the mill was erected and then claimed the land, and various other oppressions and distresses which resulted in assaults, false evidence, and for one of them, a term of retirement. Mr. Christian told me that the story was accurate in the main, and added that out of such quarrels as these come most of the frequent Cyprian murders. It is quite likely that the injured man will emerge from jail only to lie up behind a wall with a loaded gun, thence in due course to return to the care of Mr. Mavrogordato steeped in the shadow of a graver charge.

The scene from the verandah, at least while it rained, was not much more cheerful than the story of our hostess. To the right lay a little patch of garden with nothing particular growing in it, surrounded by an untidy fence of dead thorns. Behind this were filthy sheds and stables, in one of which kneeled half-a-dozen angry-looking camels, great brown heaps, with legs doubled under them, showing their ugly hock-joints. The saddles were on their backs but the loads lay beside them, and resting against these reposed their drivers, smoking; motley-garbed men with coloured head-dresses, half-cap, half-turban, who stared at the wretched weather in silence. In front of the house a pair of geese were waddling in the mud, while a half-starved cat crouched against the wall and mewed incessantly. Presently we had a little welcome excitement, for along the road came a

Turk mounted on a donkey. He was followed by three wives also mounted on donkeys, one or two of them bearing infants, and shrouded head to foot from the vulgar gaze of the infidel, in yashmaks and white robes that in such chilly weather must be somewhat cheerless wear. They passed chattering and arguing, their poor beasts piled up behind the saddles with what looked like, and I believe were, feather-beds, for whatever else these people leave behind, they like to take their mattresses. Then the prospect was empty again save for the groaning camels, the geese, the thin cat, and the pretty little ragged girls who stood about and stared at nothing.

Wearying of these delights after an hour and a half or so, as the rain had stopped at length, I went for a walk along the edge of the stream which looked as though trout would flourish there, did it not dry up in summer. Here, growing among the grasses I found several beautiful flowers, ranunculi, anemones, and others that were strange to me. Also I noted our English friends, chaffinches and sparrows, looking exactly as they do at home, only somewhat paler, as is the case with almost every other bird I saw. I suppose that the hot sun bleaches them. One sparrow that I saw flying about was pure white, and the larks of which there are two varieties, crested and common, are almost dust-coloured. By the way these larks never soar like their English cousins.

At length the poor screws being rested, or a little less tired, we resumed our journey, travelling for some distance through hills. What a pity it is that it does not please the War Office to make Cyprus a half-way house for troops on their road to India, where they might grow accustomed to a warm climate without running any particular risk to health. Also there would be other advantages. The great lesson of the present war in Africa is the value of mounted infantry who can shoot, think for themselves, and ride over rough country. What a training-ground Cyprus would afford to such

troops as these. There are horses and perhaps the best mules in the world in plenty; the country is wild and mountainous, and nothing would be hurt in manœuvring men. Moreover every conceivable physical difficulty can be found here and dealt with for practice as occasion may require. There is heat, there is cold, there are droughts and rains, flooded torrents to be bridged and precipices to be climbed; forests to take cover in and plains to scout over; besides many more advantages such as would appeal to a commander anxious to educate his army to the art of war in rough countries.

Why then does not the Government always keep a garrison of say five or ten thousand mounted men manœuvring through the length and breadth of Cyprus? This would assist the island and produce a force that ought to be absolutely invaluable in time of war. Also, the place being so cheap, the cost would be moderate. I give the suggestion for what it is worth.

It was past nine at night when at last we crawled into Larnaca, the journey having taken three hours longer than it should have done owing to the weakness of our miserable horses. Next morning we started for Acheritou near to Famagusta, where we were to be the guests of Messrs. Christian, who are now completing their contract for the great drainage works and reservoirs which have been undertaken by the Government of Cyprus with money advanced by the British Treasury. Of these I shall have something to say in their place.

Leaving Larnaca in a high wind, for the first few miles we passed through a very grey and desolate part of the island, having the sea on our right and flat swampy lands upon our left. Striking inland we halted for a few minutes to look at a curious stone tower of the Lusignan period, in appearance not unlike a small Colossi, which raises its frowning walls among the dirty mud dwellings of a dilapidated, poverty-stricken, Turkish village. There is nothing remarkable about the building

which is now tenanted only by goats and pigeons, except its age. Doubtless it was once the stronghold of some petty noble, built for refuge in times of danger. Afterwards we came to a place, Pergamos, where stood some deserted-looking huts, out of one of which ran a large rough-haired dog.

“That dog is all that is left of the Dukobortzi,” was Mr. Christian's cryptic remark.

I inquired who or what the Dukobortzi might be and learned that they are a sect of vegetarian Quakers from the Caucasus distinguished from their countrymen, and indeed the rest of mankind, by various peculiarities. Thus they have no marriage ceremony, all their earnings go into a common fund, and whole families of them sleep in a single room. One of the chief articles of their faith, however, is a horror of killing. This it was that brought them into conflict with the Russian Government, who persecuted them mercilessly because, being men of peace, they refused to serve in the army. In the end the English Society of Friends exported them, settling two thousand or so in Cyprus and another three thousand in Canada. A place less suited to this purpose than Pergamos could scarcely be found in the whole island. To begin with the Dukobortzi are vegetarians, and the land being here unirrigated will only grow vegetables for about half the year. Also the climate of the locality, which is very hot, was not at all congenial to emigrants from the Caucasus with a perfect passion for overcrowding at night. So the poor people sickened rapidly and a considerable number died. Some of them went to labour at the irrigation works, but were quite unable to bear the sun. Then they tried working at night and resting during the heat, but still it did not agree with them. In the end they were helped to join their co-religionists in Canada, and now all that remains of them is the rough-haired Russian dog, which must feel very lonely. They were it seems in most respects an estimable people,

gentle and kindly, but clearly this was no Promised Land for them.

Cyprus seems to be a favourite dumping-ground for philanthropists who wish to better communities that cannot flourish elsewhere. I remember that when I was last in the island some well-intentioned persons had forwarded thither a motley assortment of Whitechapel Jews, who were expected to turn their old hats into shovels and become raisers of agricultural produce upon lands that had been provided for the purpose. Needless to say they entirely refused to cultivate the said lands. The unfortunate Commissioner of the district had been placed in charge of them and never shall I forget his tale of woe. He furnished them with implements, but they would not plough; with seeds, but they declined to sow. As the charitable society in England was endowing them with sixpence a head per diem, and food is cheap in Cyprus, things went on thus until the fund dried up. Then the Commissioner descended full of wrath and interviewed the head of the settlement, who met him, as he told me, clad in a tall black hat and adorned with lavender kid gloves. Much argument followed, till at last the exasperated Commissioner exclaimed—

“Well, you must either work or starve. Will you work?”

The kid-gloved representative shook his head and murmured “No.”

“Will you starve?” asked the Commissioner.

Again the answer was a gentle but decided “No.”

“Then what the devil will you do?” shouted the enraged official.

“We will telegraph to the Lord Mayor of London,” replied the representative suavely. “In fact, sir, we have already telegraphed.”

The end of the matter was that the members of the community dispersed to the coasts of Syria, where, when last heard of, they were understood to be doing well in

more congenial lines. The Whitechapel Jew has no agricultural leanings. He prefers to till some richer field.

Leaving Pergamos we crossed an enormous stony plain that is named after it. This tract of country, there is no doubt, would grow certain classes of timber very well, and within twenty years of its planting, produce a large revenue. Unfortunately, however, the Government has no money to devote to the experiment, and private capital is wanting.

Next we came to the pretty village of Kouklia and passed the recently finished dam enclosing an area of two square miles, now for the first time filling up with water. Then we began to travel round the great basin of the Acheritou reservoir, which when finished is to include forty square miles, most of which will be under water during the winter season. It is destined to irrigate the lower part of the Messaoria plain, which comprises league upon league of some of the most fertile soil in the world. On our way we came to a stony pass in the neck of two small hills, where I noticed that every rock was scored with rude crosses. It appears that some years ago frequent complaints were received by the ecclesiastical authorities to the effect that this place was badly and persistently haunted, the ghosts being of a violent and aggressive order, given to sallying forth at night with uncanny shouts and leapings, to the great disturbance of peaceable travellers on the highway. Feeling that the thing must be dealt with, every available priest and bishop assembled, and cursed and exorcised those ghosts by all lawful and efficient means; stamping them morally flat and abolishing them so that from that day to this not one of them has been heard or seen. To make their triumph sure and lasting the holy men cut and painted these crosses upon the rock, with the result that no “troll” of dubious origin can now stop there for a moment.

At length we saw the house that the Messrs. Christian have built to live in while the works are in progress. It is splendidly placed upon a bluff overlooking the great plain, and from a distance, I know not why, has the appearance of a small ruined temple. Very glad were we to reach it about three o'clock in the afternoon, and partake of a lamb roasted whole in the Cyprian fashion, with other luxuries.

Just below this house start the six miles of massive dam that runs across the plain to form the retaining wall of the vast body of water which is to be held up. As yet this water is allowed to escape, but next winter, when the dam is completed, it will be saved and let out for purposes of irrigation. There is nothing new in the world. In the course of the building of the dam were discovered the remains of one more ancient, also running across the plain, but enclosing a smaller area; indeed its sluice is to be pressed into the service of the present generation. I examined it, and came to the conclusion that the masonry is of the Roman period. Mr. J. H. Medlicott of the Indian Irrigation Department, the very able engineer who has designed these great works and carried them out so successfully, is however of opinion that it is Venetian. Probably he is right. This at least is clear, that people in days long dead could plan and execute such enterprises as well as we do to-day. Roman or Venetian, the stone-work is admirably laid and bound together with some of the hardest and best cement that ever I saw.

The Messrs. Christian, who have contracted to complete this undertaking, employ about three thousand men and women, mostly on a system of piece-work. In the evening I walked along the great dam and saw them labouring like ants there and in the trenches which are to distribute the water. They were then engaged in facing the dam with stone which is fitted together but not mortared, carrying up great blocks upon their backs

WALL, OF NEW RESERVOIR, ACHERITOU

ANCIENT SLUICE GATE AT ACHERITOU

and laying them in place under the direction of overseers. At first the provision of this facing stone was difficult and expensive, as the stuff had to be carted six or seven miles; indeed its cost threatened to swallow up most of the contractors' profits. Then it was, that within half a mile of the place where the material was needed, very luckily Mr. Charles Christian in the course of an evening walk discovered an outcrop of excellent stone, soft to work but with the property of hardening in water. The cutters get it out by a simple but effective system, no doubt that which has been followed by their ancestors for thousands of years. A skilled man can loosen a great number of suitable blocks in a day, apparently with ease. When I tried it, however, I found the task somewhat beyond me.

From the strong resemblance of the material I believe that this was the very stone used by the builders of the ancient dam below the house. Doubtless they discovered the quarry as Mr. Christian did, although oddly enough the natives who had lived in the neighbourhood all their lives, declared that nothing of the sort existed for miles around. It was the old case of eyes and no eyes.

I said some pages back that living in Cyprus is cheap, and of this here I had an instance. The house put up by Messrs. Christian for their convenience while directing the works is spacious, two-storeyed, and capitally built of stone, with, if I remember right, a kind of mud roof laid upon rafters covered with split cane mats. Properly made and attended to, such roofs last for years. The whole cost of the building, which was quite large enough to accommodate with comfort seven or eight people and servants, was less than £300, including the large verandahs. In England it would cost at the very least a thousand, and probably a great deal more.

THAT night a great gale blew roaring round the house as though we had been in Coll, or at Kessingland, instead of southern Cyprus. In the morning the wind had dropped, but the sky was heavy with ominous-looking rain-clouds floating here and there in the blue deeps. After breakfast we mounted the ponies that had been provided for us, a blessed change from the familiar mule, and set out to explore the Messaoria plain and the Kouklia dam. This magnificent plain, which varies in breadth from ten to twenty miles, runs practically the whole length of the body of the island from Famagusta on the east to Morphu on the west, that is, a distance of about fiftyfive miles. Once it was a dense forest, now it is open level country cultivated here and there, but for the most part barren. On either side of it, north and south, stretch the two ranges of Cyprian mountains, that of Kyrenia and that of Trooidos, and it is the decomposed, basic-igneous rock brought down from these mountains in the winter-floods by the river Pidias and other torrents that form the soil of the plain.

What a soil it is! Deep brown in colour, of an unknown thickness—it has been proved to fifty feet—and I suppose as rich and productive as any in the world. Hitherto, or at any rate since the Venetian days, two natural accidents however have made it comparatively valueless, that of drought and that of flooding. The greater part of this end of the plain which I am now describing, for instance, has been a swamp in winter and

an arid wilderness in summer. It is to remedy this state of things that the irrigation dams have been constructed, to hold up the waters in winter and pour their life-giving streams forth again in summer.

In the future all this vast area of land, or thousands of acres of it that will fall under their influence, ought to produce the most enormous crops. On this point I see only one fear; upon the top surface of the soil, and in places going a foot or two into it, are little veins of white salty substance, deposited, I suppose, from the floods. These may make the surface earth sour and, until they are evaporated, affect the health of crops. I know that the same thing happens in Coll in the Hebrides, where new-drained lands have to be treated, I think with lime, in order to sweeten them. It is my belief that here, however, one or two deep ploughings and the exposure of the earth to the scorching heat of a Cyprian summer would do this work effectively. I have suggested to Mr. Christian that he should cut out a block, or blocks of soil to the depth of three feet, enclose them as they stand in boxes with the natural vegetation growing on the top, and ship them to me. This he has promised to do, and I shall then submit them for analysis to the chemists of the Royal Agricultural Society, to which I belong, who will doubtless be able to advise as to the nature and power of the salts, and to say what method should be adopted to be rid of them.

Now when flooding is prevented and water will be available for irrigation, it seems to me that upon the Messaoria, if anywhere on the earth, farming ought to pay. I can imagine no more interesting and, as I believe, profitable experiment, than to take up let us say five thousand acres of this area upon easy terms such as no doubt the Government would grant, paying its price for example by a certain tithe of the profit of the produce terminable in a certain number of years. This land might then be farmed by the process, simple, where

labour is so cheap, of making raised roadways to divide it into blocks with an irrigation ditch at the foot of each, along which roadways a pair of steam ploughs could travel, cultivating the expanse between.

Consider the advantages. An inexhaustible soil which the silt from the irrigation water would go far towards manuring, if indeed, with an occasional fallow, other manure is necessary. Fields that can, whenever needful, be absolutely cleaned of weeds and rubbish by ploughing and laying them dry for a few months in the fierce summer sun which kills every root and seed. A great variety of possible crops from cotton down, whereof very often two could be taken in succession in a single season. For instance wheat or barley to be harvested about May, followed by maize to be harvested in autumn. A port, Famagusta, within seven or eight miles, and a splendid market for most products at Port Said, and for the barley in England, where it is much in request among brewers on account of its saccharine and golden brightness. A district where the ordinary cattle and horse sicknesses seem to be unknown except anthrax, which can be avoided with common care; where, moreover, oxen and sheep fatten marvellously upon grasses, lucerne, and the carob beans of the country, and meet with a ready sale at good prices in Egypt. Such are some of the most obvious merits of this neglected plain; added to which must be the ample supply of very inexpensive and fairly intelligent labour.

Of course there are drawbacks also, or the place would be a paradise. To begin with it is very hot in summer, when Europeans must be careful about exposing themselves to the sun, although this heat is generally tempered by the wind blowing up from the sea which is near at hand. Next the Messaoria plain has a reputation for fever. Personally I believe this to be exaggerated, as is shown by the fact that among the three thousand men, women, and children employed by the Messrs. Christian,

the number of casualties from sickness has been very small indeed, and this although they frequently sleep in the trenches of newly-turned earth at all seasons of the year. The doctor, an Armenian, who from his appearance and speech I took to be a Scotchman, and a gentleman who seemed to understand his business very thoroughly, told me however that occasionally they had cases, resulting for the most part from the use of the swamp water, of a horrible and sometimes fatal ailment which he called “marbled” fever. This sickness is, I believe, known by the same name in parts of Central and South America. Sufferers from it feel icy cold with an exterior temperature that sinks a good deal below normal, whereas the interior temperature is 105° or 106°. The symptoms are those of congestion, I think of the blood-vessels, and indeed congestion is found on necropsy. Also there are other fevers, but the doctor said that they were not common and that the general health was good.

For a long while before their house was built the Messrs. Christian, Mr. Medlicott, and their various English assistants lived as best they could in native huts or tents. Yet I think I am right in saying that during the two years or so while the works have been in progress, none of them have suffered from serious illness, although the nature of their occupation prevented them from refuging from the summer heat for the accustomed three months on Trooidos. This fact speaks for itself, and on the whole I incline to the belief that with ordinary care and precautions, healthy residences and pure water—boiled for preference —adult Europeans of temperate habits would have little to fear from the climate of the Messaoria plain. There is, however, a danger I have mentioned before which cannot always be avoided, that of a soaking followed by a chill, producing fever. This must be risked. After all it is not uncommon in hot countries.

Another drawback is that to prove successful such farming must be under absolutely honest and intelligent

supervision. The casual company manager despatched from England would in eight cases out of ten bring it to financial grief. The farmer should live on the spot, giving his own constant care to every operation. Otherwise those interested in the venture would be certain to hear from time to time that this or that crop had failed. What they would not hear is that the overseer had neglected to irrigate the cotton, or whatever the crop might be, and thus destroyed the prospects for the year, because he was away on a holiday at Nicosia, or perchance had taken a trip to Egypt, leaving a native in charge. But this necessity for the eye of the owner or faithful steward holds good of every business in all parts of the world. “The farmer's foot is the best manure” runs the old agricultural saw.

To sum the matter up, although, being a farmer, and understanding something of the question, I should like to dwell upon it at greater length, I can only say that if I were a young man, owning, or with the command of £10,000 capital, nothing would please me better than to make such an experiment upon the irrigable portion of the Messaoria, near to the Kouklia dam for choice. I believe that, given health and strength, I should return thence in fifteen years or so with no need to farm anything except the fortune I had acquired.

Indeed it is sad to see so much wealth, agricultural and other, lying ungarnered in Cyprus while millions of pounds of English capital, as many of us know to our cost, are squandered in specious, wild-cat schemes at the very ends of the earth. Were the island in the heart of West Africa or China, for instance, companies would be formed to exploit it, and in due course lose their money and the lives of their managers. But as it is only a British possession close at hand nobody will trouble.

The great cry of Cyprus is for capital. Whatever may be the fate of the present copper-mining venture at Lymni, there is no doubt that with enough money the

old lode could be discovered. The same thing applies to the other copper areas: the ancients could not mine deep, the metal must be there, and, now as of old, to the value of sums uncountable; yet nobody will even put down a bore-hole to look for the deposits. In conversation I ventured to suggest to the Governor, Sir William Haynes-Smith, that the Government should do this on their own account, since if once they proved the mines they could make handsome terms with the companies which would come forward to work them. The answer was, “We have no money, the Turkish tribute takes all our money.”

This is true. Every year the British taxpayer is informed that a grant of £30,000 has been made in aid of the revenues of Cyprus. He is not informed that never a penny of that £30,000 comes to Cyprus; that, on the contrary, Cyprus has a surplus of revenue over expenditure, even in its present starved condition, of more than £60,000 a year. This £60,000 is taken, nominally, towards paying the tribute of £93,800 per annum, promised to the Turk when we took over the island. The £30,000 annually granted by Parliament, ostensibly in aid of the revenues of Cyprus, goes to make up the balance which cannot be wrung from the island. But—and here is the point—that money is never seen at Constantinople. It stops in the British Treasury. In 1855, a loan of I forget how much, raised by Turkey, was jointly guaranteed by France and England. Needless to say, under these circumstances Turkey does not trouble to pay the bondholders their interest. Neither does France pay as a joint-guarantor, why I know not, but probably because we are afraid to ask her. So John Bull pays. What is more, he was tricked. The revenue received by the Porte from Cyprus was assessed at double its actual amount. Also he pays four per cent., whereas at the present rates of money, on the credit of the British Empire, the loan could easily be converted to one

of two and a half or three per cent. If this were done, practically it would ease Cyprus of its tribute and make it a most prosperous colony. But to do it does not please the Treasury—probably it would involve a good deal of trouble. So year by year we hear of a grant of £30,000 in aid of the revenues of a possession which has an annual surplus of £60,000, that might with assistance and fore-thought, as I believe firmly, within a single generation be multiplied into a surplus of £600,000. Further, the Turkish tribute might be capitalised; indeed to do our Government justice, I believe that efforts, hitherto unsuccessful, have been made in this direction. But as yet nothing happens.

Another possible source of wealth in Cyprus, as I suggested with reference to the Pergamos plain, lies in the judicious planting of valuable timbers which, as the history of the island shows, would grow here like weeds upon land that is practically useless for other purposes. I must instance one more, that of the wine industry. That Cyprus produced excellent vintages in the past is proved by history—the Ptolemies all got tipsy on them, especially, if I remember right, Ptolemy Auletes, Ptolemy the Piper. To this day indeed, although it is so ill prepared, the wine is good. Mavro is a strong, black, rather rough wine, but I prefer the lighter, white variety which we drank at Limasol. Then there is the vintage called Commanderia, famous in the Crusading times and produced upon certain mountains only. This is of the Madeira class, nutty in flavour and very sweet, more of a liqueur than anything else. Indeed when the Madeira vines were killed out by disease, that island was replanted, I believe, from the Commanderia stock, the original vines, it was said, having come from Cyprus. At Kyrenia, our kind host, Mr Tyzer, the judge, gave us some Commanderia to drink which an old woman had brought round in a wine-skin—she only made a few gallons from a patch of vines—and sold to him at a

price of about twopence a bottle. To my fancy it was a wonderful wine, but perhaps I am no judge of such matters. Other specimens which I tasted struck me as heady and cloying to the palate. This is certain, however, that if the cultivation was carried out upon a proper system, a vintage could be produced that now, as of old, would command a high price. Here again is room for enterprise and capital.

To return to our expedition. We rode for miles across the great plain with the beautiful peaks of the mountains showing in bold outline against the sky to our right. All the way we followed wide dykes in course of being delved out of the rich soil to carry the waters that are to be stored behind the dam. In these dykes hundreds of Cypriotes were at work, most of them Christians, but some, if I remember right, Turkish. Men and women labour together here by the piece. Thus one might see a man and his wife, his sons and daughters, engaged in scooping out their allotted task, which had been already carefully measured and pegged. They all seemed very good-humoured and much chaff went on between them and their employer, Mr Charles Christian, because of the non-arrival of the water-cart upon which they rely for refreshment at their thirsty toil. They were dying of drought, they declared, and he would have to send to bury them, whereupon he replied that it was for the good of their health to make them thinner, and so forth.

At length following the endless dykes and observing many things by the way, such as the character of the grasses, we came to the completed Kouklia dam, a splendid work, on the further side of which the waters are now gathering for the first time. It is curious to see how soon the wild duck have found out this new and excellent home, where whole flocks of these beautiful birds now swim peacefully, keeping themselves, however, well out of gunshot. Thence we turned homeward across

the wide dreary plain that as I hope within the next ten years will be rich with luxuriant crops. Indeed this undertaking has already so greatly advantaged the peasants that, as I hear since I left the island, after their simple fashion they put up prayers in the churches imploring that every blessing may fall upon the heads of Messrs. Charles and Percy Christian. They ought also to pray for Mr. Chamberlain, who might, on occasion, be glad of such spiritual assistance. Whatever may be said against that statesman, this at least is true; he is the best Colonial Minister that we have had for many a long year. A business man himself, he understands more or less, and to a certain extent can sympathise with, the needs and aspirations of the undeveloped countries in his charge. To him and no one else it is due that the spell of consistent neglect has been broken and the small sum of £60,000 necessary for the carrying out of these works has been advanced to Cyprus.

On our return we were overtaken by a heavy thunder rain and soaked. Unfortunately, although the house was quite close to us, we could not gallop home since the downpour made the clay soil so slippery that to do so would have been to risk a fall. Therefore we were obliged to walk our horses and get wet. As a change was at hand, however, in this instance the ducking did not matter.

Towards evening we started on a sporting expedition, so at last the gun that I rescued from the Customs with such trouble was of use. We had hoped for some woodcock-shooting among the scrub on the hillsides, but it was so late in the season that enough birds were not left to make it worth while to go after them. The duck remained, however, and to these we devoted our attention.

The place where we were to station ourselves was three or four miles away, a ridge of rock between two lakes over which the wild-fowl flight at sunset. I was

asked if I would walk or ride, and gaily declared in favour of walking. Before I got back I was sorry for my choice. We waded through swamps, we scrambled along an ancient causeway built of blocks of stone, many of them missing, and over a slope of rough ground to the appointed ridge, where we took up our posts, four of us, at a distance of about two hundred yards from each other. It was a lonely and beautiful spot, set in a bow of the hills like the section of an amphitheatre, its vast open circus lying behind us. In front, looking towards the sea and another lake whence the duck were to come, lay a desert plain covered with low scrub across which the fresh wind whistled. Above was a stormy heaven, splendid to look at but not favourable for fowl-shooting, since the heavy clouds blotted out the light. What is wanted on these occasions is a clear sky marked with light fleecy clouds, for against these it is easy to see the birds as they sweep towards the guns.

I took my place, sitting on one rock and laying my cartridges ready upon another over which my head projected, wrapping myself up also in a coat which I had brought with me, for now the air felt very damp and cold, especially after our arduous trudge. For a long while nothing happened and I was left in the midst of the intense silence to examine the drear scenery, the ancient rocks worn and hollowed by aeons of weather, and the flowers and grasses which grew about me. The sun set, the sky darkened and darkened, the black masses of clouds seemed to dominate the earth. At last I heard a sound of whistling wings and about a hundred yards to my right I saw a flight of duck, their long necks extended, shoot past me like arrows and vanish. Then came another flight sixty yards off, or more, at which I ventured a useless shot that echoed strangely along the stony ridge. Now the night fell rapidly like something tangible. One little lot of fowl passed in front of me within forty yards, and of these I

managed to see and bag the last, which fell with a heavy thud fifty yards or more from where it had died in air. After this it was hopeless; the duck had been disturbed too late by the beaters sent to flush them in the pans towards the sea.

On they came in thousands and tens of thousands; the air was full of the rush of their wings, and the earth echoed with their different cries—the deep note of geese, the unearthly call of curlew, and the whistling pipe of teal. Sometimes they seemed to pass so close to me that they nearly struck my head, but against the black clouds nothing was visible except a brown line that vanished almost before it was seen. I fired wildly and once or twice heard the thud of a falling bird far behind, but these I never retrieved. As sport our expedition was a failure; moonlight and a clear sky were needed, both of which were absent. But in its wildness, in the sense of infinite, winged life rushing past us, in the last view of that desolate country as the darkness embraced it, it was a perfect and unique experience. I am old enough to be no longer very anxious for a bag, therefore I enjoyed that evening's expedition with its one resulting widgeon, more than many a day's pheasant-shooting when the slain, carefully raised for the occasion, might be counted by hundreds.

At length it grew pitch dark, so that it was difficult for us to find each other in the gloom. Still more difficult was our homeward journey, steering by the appropriate light of Venus which glowed before us, lying low upon the sky. First came the causeway. This relic of antiquity which shows how careful its inhabitants, now so long dead, once were about their roads in Cyprus, is some eight feet wide and built of large blocks of stone. On either side of it lie the waters of the swamp, several feet deep in places. Much of this massive raised roadway has been-destroyed by floods or other accidents of time, so that here and there one must leap from block

to block or subside into the pools between. Now “Stepping-Stones by Starlight” would make a good title for a novel but are in fact an awkward path, and very glad was I when with the assistance of a Cypriote, who seemed to be able to see in the dark, I had negotiated the last of them. After these stepping-stones we advanced over a mile or two of greasy mud about six inches deep. Then came some ploughed patches of ground with ditches in them, and another long stretch of mud, this time covered with water. Struggling to its edge we found ourselves on a path strewn with boulders, and fell down in deep but invisible ruts. Next followed a stroll through a large patch of standing barley which was reeking wet and reached almost to our middles, where we were exposed to the attentions of the “skilos” or homeless dogs, which in Cyprus are such a nuisance. At last, however, about nine o'clock we saw the welcome lights of home. I confess that I was glad to reach its shelter, thoroughly tired out as I was and absolutely wringing wet with perspiration, a fruit of the labours of that interminable walk. Little expeditions of this sort teach us that we are not so young as once we were. Still I enjoyed our abortive duck-hunt.

My nephew, fired by the sight or rather the sound of more wild-fowl than he had ever dreamt of, announced his intention of being back at the place by the first streak of dawn to catch the birds as they passed from the marshes out to sea. I congratulated him upon his superb energy, but declined to share the adventure, foreseeing in the depths of my experience as in a magic crystal exactly what would happen. It did happen. About an hour after we had finished breakfast on the following morning, two hot and weary young men appeared carrying guns and cartridges, but nothing else. They had risen a little too late, the duck were up before them and they reached the distant ridge just in time to see the last flock of geese vanishing seaward.

The rains had departed for the present and the day was lovely, with so clear an air that every little peak and pinnacle of the mountains seemed close at hand. It was with great regret that on so fair a morning we bade farewell to our hosts and started for Famagusta. I should have liked to stay longer at Acheritou. The place has many charms, not the least of which is its solitude.

The tower, where according to ancient tradition Desdemona was actually stifled by Othello, is an odd place for picnics, yet thither on our arrival we were escorted through the ancient gates of Famagusta. Indeed the feast was spread exactly where the poor victim lived and died, that is, if ever she existed beyond the echoes of romance.

In the Venetian days Famagusta, which is said to be built upon the site of the ancient Arsinoë, was a great commercial port. Now its harbour is choked and, principally because of the heat within the walls, such population as remains to the place lives about a mile away, in a new town called Varoshia. How am I to describe this beautiful mediæval monument! An attempt to set out its details would fill chapters, so I must leave them to the fancy of the reader. The whole place is a ruin. Everywhere are the gaunt skeletons of churches, the foundation walls of long-fallen houses, and around, grim, solid, solemn, the vast circle of the rich-hued fortifications. What buildings are here! Millions of square yards of them, almost every stone, except where the Turks have cobbled, still bearing its Venetian mason's mark. Walls thirty feet thick; great citadels; sally ports; underground foundries still black with the smoke of Venetian smithies; fragments of broken armour lying about in the ancient ash-heaps; water-gates, ravelins, subterranean magazines; gun embrasures, straight and enfilading; enormous gathering-halls now used as grainstores; tortuous, arched vaults of splendid masonry, the solid roof-stones cut upon the bend; piers running out to

DESDEMONA'S TOWER, FAMAGUSTA

RUINS OF ANCIENT CHURCH, FAMAGUSTA

sea commanding the harbour mouth; every defence and work known to mediæval warlike art. Then round them all, hewn in places through the solid rock, the mighty ditch sixty feet or more in depth. It was an impregnable stronghold this Famagusta, and in the end it fell to the power of the greatest of all generals, Hunger, and not through the batterings of Mustafa the Moslem, known as the Destroyer, and his vast army.

The Turk came and conquered, how I will describe presently, and from that hour the glory of Famagusta departed. To begin with, no Christian was allowed to live within the gates. Even the visitor of distinction must not ride or drive there, but walk humbly as became a representative of a conquered faith. “Where the Turk sets his foot, there the grass will not grow,” but here the saying is reversed, the grass grows everywhere amid the empty walls. Indeed barley is sown where men dwelt in thousands, and the Christian churches, some of them, were turned into baths for the comfort of the Mussulman, while the rest rotted into ruin. One of the three hundred and sixty-five of these ruined fanes—it is said that there were this number—that of St. Peter and St. Paul, a very noble and beautiful building, is now a Government grain-store, a desecration which I do not think ought to be allowed under the rule of England.

The grand Gothic cathedral wherein lie the bones of many knights and noted men of the Lusignan period whose wealth, intelligence, and labour reared it up, is now a mosque. I am not learned enough to describe its architecture in detail, this should be left to those who understand such matters. I can only say that it is lovely. In the front are three pointed, recessed arches, the centre pierced by the doorway surmounted with exquisite carved work. Above are three windows in similar style, all of them now walled up, and above them again two ruined towers. Fixed on to one of these, that to the left of the spectator as he faces the building, is a

wretched and incongruous Moslem minaret, a veritable pepper-pot. Within the place is bare and empty, with here and there a carpet, or a tawdry pulpit.

Is it right, I ask, now that the country is again in the hands of a Christian power, that this ancient shrine dedicated in the beginning to the God we worship, should be left in the hands of the followers of Mahommed? I say, and the remark applies also to the cathedral at Nicosia, that in my humble judgment this is wrong. A matter of policy, that is the answer. But has policy no limits? Would it be so very hard and dangerous for this great empire to say to those Turks who are now its subjects: “This is a Christian place which your fathers snatched with every circumstance of atrocity and violence from Christians. Take your shrines elsewhere. The land is wide and you are at liberty to set your altars where you will.” It is true that they might answer: “Does it lie in your mouth to protest when you turn other buildings equally sacred in your eyes into grain-stores, and clerks sit upon their altars to take count?”

For generations the Turks have used Famagusta as a quarry, exporting most of the stone of its old buildings to Egypt. Now, it is commonly said, our Government proposes to follow their evil example, since the present railway and harbour scheme involves the destruction of the beautiful curtain-wall abutting on the sea and the use of the material it contains in the projected works. I have been assured by a competent engineer and others who can judge, that such an act of vandalism is absolutely unnecessary; that this monstrous thing will be done, if it is done, principally for the sake of the shaped stone that lies to hand. Will nobody stop it? If the Colonial Office refuses to intervene, where are the Company of Antiquaries and where is Public Opinion? Where too is the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments?

Famagusta is one of the most perfect specimens of

mediæval fortification left in the world. It can never be reproduced or reborn, since the time that bred it is dead. Now in our enlightened age, when we know the value of such relics, are the remains of the old city to be wantonly destroyed before our eyes? I trust that those in authority may answer with an emphatic “No.”

In itself the scheme for clearing out the ancient harbour and making of Famagusta a port connected by railway with Nicosia is good. But the haven thus reconstructed, although old Sir John Mandeville, more regardless of the truth than usual even, declares that it was one of the first harbours of the sea in the world,1 can never be of great importance or competent to shelter liners and men-of-war. Also I imagine that it will be incapable of defence except by sea-power. Now at Limasol it is different. There, owing to the natural configuration of the shore, a harbour where fleets might ride could be made with two entrances far apart, and having seven or eight miles of high land between it and the ocean, so that in practice nothing could touch the vessels that lay within. The necessary dredging would of course cost a good deal, although the bottom to be acted upon is soft and kindly. Perhaps the total expenditure might mount up to a million and a half, or even two millions, the price of a few battle-ships. Battle-ships are superseded in a score of years; the harbour, with proper care, would remain for centuries. We need such a place in this part of the Mediterranean. Is not the question worth the serious care of the Admiralty and the nation?

I COULD see but few changes in Famagusta since I visited it fourteen years ago. Trees have grown up round the tombs where the execrable and bloody Mustafa and some of his generals lie buried; also the Commissioner, Mr. Travers, has planted other trees in portions of the moat where they do not flourish very well owing to the stony nature of the subsoil. Moreover, a large fig-tree which I remember growing in the said moat has vanished—I recall that I myself found a Cyprian woman engaged in trying to cut it down, and frightened her away. Probably when we had departed, she returned and completed the task. Lastly, when I was here before the iron cannon-balls fired into the city by the Turks three centuries since, still lay strewn all about the place as they had fallen. Now they have been collected into heaps, or vanished in this way or in that. Otherwise all is the same, except that Time has thrust his finger a little deeper into the crevices of the ruined buildings.

What a tragedy was the siege of Famagusta! Probably few of my readers, and of the British public at large not one in every hundred thousand, have even heard of that event. Yet if it happened to-day the whole world would ring with its horror and its fame. The Boer war that at present fills the newspapers and the mouths of men has, to this day of writing, cost us at the outside six thousand dead. At the siege of Famagusta, taking no account of those in the city, if I remember right for I quote from memory, more than

forty thousand of the attacking force alone perished beneath the walls.

This in brief was the tale as it is told by Fra Angelo Calepio of Cyprus, an eye-witness and a doctor in theology of the order of Preachers, and others. In the year 1570, according to Fra Angelo, the Sultan Selim was persuaded by his head mufti to undertake the enterprise of the conquest of Cyprus from the Venetians: “avarice, lust of fame, difference of religion, diabolic suggestion, divine permission, an unbounded appetite for new territory to be added to the Ottoman dominion, these were the remote causes for the conspiracy against Cyprus. A nearer cause was the wish of Selim, the Emperor of the Turks, to build a mosque and school.” Cyprus was to furnish the revenues for this pious enterprise. Fra Angelo says also that the Sultan was influenced to the conquest of the island “from his fondness for its excellent wines and the beautiful falcons that are taken there.”

A great army was collected and allowed, owing to the mismanagement of affairs by the Venetians and local authorities, to invest the inland capital of Nicosia. After a gallant defence by the untrained troops and inhabitants within, they took the town. It is curious to read to-day, that grim badinage such as has recently been practised by the Boers investing Ladysmith, was indulged in by the Turks at Nicosia. Thus they drove a donkey up the wrecked wall crying in mockery, “Don't hurt the poor ass, it can do you no harm,” and shouted, “Surrender, for you are in a bad way.”

The horrors that occurred when once the Turkish soldiers were inside Nicosia are too dreadful to dwell on. Here is a single example. Says Fra Angelo: “Among the slain were Lodovico Podochatoro and Lucretia Calepia, my mother, whose head they cut off on her servingmaid's lap. They tore infants in swaddling-clothes from their mothers' breasts, of whom I could baptize only one,” and so forth. On the day following the sack the best-looking

of the surviving lads and girls were sold by auction, “the buyers taking no thought or count of their noble birth, but only of the beauty of their faces.” But these poor victims, or most of them, were not destined to serve as slaves in any Turkish harem. The great galleon of Muhamites and two other vessels were laden with them as a gift to the Sultan, to Mehmed Pasha, and Murad the Sultan's son. But some noble girl or woman, her name is not recorded though surely her glory should live on for ever, thinking that the death of herself and her companions was preferable to so infamous a fate, contrived to creep to the magazine and fire it, with the result that the galleon and two other ships with every living soul on board of them were blown into the air. The incident is in perfect keeping with the horrid history of that period throughout Europe.

Famagusta was invested by Mustafa and between one and two hundred thousand soldiers and adventurers upon September 18, 1570, the defence being under the charge of the immortal Mark Antonio Bragadino, the captain of the city. For nearly eleven months did the little garrison and townsfolk hold out, with but scant aid from Venice. They beat back assault after assault—there were six or eight of them; they mined and countermined; they made sallies and erected new defences as the old were battered down; in short they did everything that desperation could contrive or courage execute. At length when only five hundred Italian soldiers and a few Cyprian men and women were left sound within their gates, and many of their walls and towers had been blown into the air, it was want that conquered them, not the Turk.

Then after between 140,000 and 170,000 cannon-balls, many of which I have seen lying about to this day, had been fired into the city, and the Turks had suffered a loss of from thirty to fifty thousand men, at length the brave Bragadino negotiated an honourable surrender under the terms of which the defenders were to be given their arms, lives, and goods, “a safe-conduct to Candia under an escort of galleys,” and the townsfolk the grace of staying “in their houses to enjoy what was their own, living like Christians without any molestation therefor.”

Upon these terms peace was signed, and the soldiers began to embark in the vessels provided for them. The next evening, or at any rate upon that of August the 5th, the Signor Bragadino, accompanied by about a dozen officers and attended by a guard of fifty men, according to Fra Angelo, and nearly two hundred according to Bishop Graziani, paid a visit to Mustafa who received him courteously and kindly, praising the valour of the defence. The visit concluded, they rose to take leave, whereupon Mustafa asked that the prisoners captured during the siege might be sent to him. Bragadino replied that he had no prisoners. Then the Turk, pretending to be astonished, shouted out, “They were then murdered during the truce,” and bade his soldiers who stood ready to seize and bind the Christians.

Now it was that the brutal ruffian, Mustafa, showed himself in his true colours. The story is best told in the words of Mr. Cobham's translation of Fra Angelo Calepio, although Bishop Graziani's account as rendered by Midgley is almost as good.

“The second day after the murders, August 7th, Mustafa first entered the city. He caused Signor Tiepolo, Captain of Baffo, who was left in Signor Bragadino's room, to be hanged by the neck, as well as the commandant of the cavalry. On August17th, a day of evil memory, being a Friday and their holiday, Signor Bragadino was led, full of wounds which had received no care, into the presence of Mustafa, on the batteries built against the city, and for all his weakness, was made to carry one basket full of earth up and another down, on each redoubt, and forced to kiss the ground when he passed before Mustafa. Then he was led to the shore, set in a slung seat, with a crown at his feet, and hoisted on the yard of the galley of the Captain of Rhodes, hung 'like a stork' in view of all the slaves and Christian soldiers in the port. Then this noble gentleman was led to the square, the drums beat, the trumpets sounded, and before a great crowd they stripped him, and made him sit amid every insult on the grating of the pillory. Then they stretched him on the ground and brutally flayed him alive. His saintly soul bore all with great firmness, patience, and faith: with never a sign of wavering he commended himself to his Saviour, and when their steel reached his navel he gave back of his Maker his

truly happy and blessed spirit. His skin was taken and stuffed with straw, carried round the city, and then, hung on the yard of a galliot, was paraded along the coast of Syria with great rejoicings. The body was quartered, and a part set on each battery. The skin, after its parade, was placed in a box together with the head of the brave Captain Hestor Baglione, and those of S. Luigi Martinengo, G. A. Bragadino, and G. A. Querini, and all were carried to Constantinople and presented to the Gran Signor, who caused them to be put in his prison, and I who was a captive chained in that prison as spy of the Pope, on my liberation tried to steal that skin, but could not.”

According to Johannes Cotovicus, or Johann van Kootwick, a Hollander whose work was published at Antwerp in 1619, this hideous execution of Bragadino was carried out by a Jewish hangman. The same author tells us that the martyr's skin was in the end purchased at a great price by his brother and sons, and, five-and-twenty years after the murder, buried in a marble urn in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. Here is the inscription and a translation:—

NICOSIA looks little changed since first I saw it many years ago. The trees that were planted in portions of the moat by the governor of that day, Sir Henry Bulwer, have grown into considerable timbers, though, by the way, those set upon the rocky soil round the wooden Government House have not flourished as I hoped they would. Also the narrow streets are somewhat cleaner and more wholesome, if any Eastern town where all household slops are thrown out into the gutters or gardens can be called wholesome; that is about all. No, not quite all, for sundry houses have arisen outside the new city, pretty dwellings with gardens round them, inhabited for the most part by officials, and the old Konak, or Turkish government office, after standing for some six hundred years, has been in great part pulled down, and is now a gaping ruin. This seems to me a very wanton and ill-judged act, for the building had many beauties which can never be seen again. Indeed on second thoughts the authorities appear to have shared this view, since when it was pressed upon them by some local antiquaries, they desisted from their destroying labours, leaving the unique gateway untouched, though, unless something is soon done to support it, not, I fear, for long. Now it is a sheltering place for wanderers, at least I found the blackest woman I ever saw, in bed there, who as I passed made earnest representations to me, in an unknown tongue, to what purpose I was unable to discover. It seemed odd to find so very black a person reposing

thus in the middle of the day beneath that draughty antique portal. Otherwise all is the same; even many of the government officers remain, like myself grown somewhat older, although death and migrations to a better post have removed several familiar faces.

I think it was on the day after our arrival that we started with our hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Hart Bennett, on a visit to Kyrenia, the beautiful little seaport which lies across the northern mountains. Our plan was to drive to the foot of these mountains and thence to ride on mule-back to the wonderful old castle of Hilarion, set high upon its almost inaccessible crags. We never got there, however, for the rain stopped us. In my case this did not so much matter, for I had visited the place before, but to my nephew it was a great disappointment. The country between Nicosia and the mountains is very curious and desolate. Here the strata seem to have been tilted on edge by some fearful convulsion in the beginnings of the world, so that more than anything else they resemble long lines of military trenches of brown earth lying behind each other in numberless succession, and topped, each of them, with a parapet of rock.

On arriving at the police-station near the foot of the mountains, we halted to lunch in the company of friends who had ridden out from Kyrenia. Our meeting-place should have been Hilarion, but as I have said the rain stayed us. To climb up into the bosom of that black cloud seemed too forbidding, and had we done so the castle is sheltered by no roof beneath which we could have picnicked.

Nobody seems to know who built Hilarion or who lived there. Mr. Alexander Drummond, writing in 1754, tells us that it is said to have been fortified by one of the Lusignan queens, Charlotta, who was obliged to shelter there when a usurper called James the Bastard, as I think, her half-brother, had been established on the

ST. HILARION

throne by the “Egyptian Power.” Cesnola writes also that it was a stronghold of the Lusignans and used by them as a state prison. Lastly, I remember that when I was there in past years, a well-informed gentleman told me that it had once stood a siege and been captured, whereon three hundred persons, men, women, and children, were hurled from a particularly hideous height into a chasm of the mountains. I do not know if there is any foundation for this legend. At least the place, which still boasts some lovely windows and a huge cistern for the storage of soft water, is very wonderful, set as it is so high among those giddy peaks. With what infinite toil, cost, and pains must some old tyrant have reared its towers. Their style by the way is Gothic.

When the rain began to slacken I went for a walk, to look at a wood of young trees which some enterprising gentleman has planted here. They are doing well, and among them I was so fortunate as to find the bee orchis of our shores in flower. Also, as I think I have said upon a previous page, to my delight I observed that all the steep-flanked mountains round are becoming clothed again with forests of young fir.

In the afternoon, the weather now being fine, we started for Kyrenia on the mules, some of us taking a rough ride across country to visit Bella Pais—or De la Paix as it is called by Cornelius van Bruyn, who wrote about 1693, and other authors—the old Lusignan abbey which stands in the village of Lapais, to my mind the most beautiful spot in all Cyprus. I am not, however, certain that it was an abbey. Drummond (1745) questions this, saying that he supposes it to have been “the grand commanderie of the island owned by one of the knightly orders.” He finds corroboration of his view in the name Della Pays, derived, he says, from the Italian Della Paese, though how this proves that the building was a commanderie I am at a loss to understand. I confess, however, to a certain curiosity as to the true

designation of the ruin. De la Paix means, of the peace; de la Pays, of the country; Bella Pais, beautiful peace; Bella Paese, beautiful country. Whatever may have been the ancient form, the last and modern reading seems the most appropriate.

The building is as I remember it years ago, only somewhat more dilapidated. Certain cracks are wider, certain bits of wall have fallen, its end draws more near. This indeed must come within the next few generations unless the Government will find money to restore one of its most beautiful possessions. At present, as I assured myself by personal inquiry, it is not the will that is wanting, but the means. While the British Treasury grabs at every farthing of surplus revenue, Cyprus has no funds wherewith to preserve her ancient and mediæval monuments.

The place cannot have changed much during the last two centuries. Indeed van Bruyn's description of it might almost pass to-day. One thing that struck him, I remember struck me also. Talking of the underground chamber or crypt, he says “one might fancy it all built five or six years ago.” Even now, over two hundred years later, the masonry is extraordinarily fresh. Also he speaks of a certain very tall cypress. I think that tree, a monster of its kind, is still standing, at least it stood fourteen years ago. Owing to the circumstances under which we left the abbey, on this visit I had no time to seek out its gracious towering shape.

It is difficult to describe such a building as Bella Pais, for to give a string of measurements and architectural details serves little—out of a guide-book. Much it owes to the wonderful charm of its situation. In the solemn old refectory, a beauteous chamber, leading I think to the reader's pulpit, is a little stair in the seaward wall, and at the head of this stair a window, and out of that window a view. If I were asked to state what is the most lovely prospect of all the thousands I have studied in different

MONASTERY OF BELLA PAIS

parts of the world, I think I should answer—That from the little window of the refectory of the Abbey of Bella Pais in Cyprus.

Around are mountains, below lie woods and olive groves and bright patches of green corn. Beyond is the blue silent sea, and across it, far away but clearly outlined, the half-explored peaks and precipices of Karamania. I said it was difficult to describe an ancient building, but who can describe a view which so many things combine to perfect that can scarcely be defined in thought, much less in words? The thousand colours of the Eastern day drawing down to night, the bending of the cypress tops against the sky, the slow flash of the heaving ocean in the level rays of sunset, the shadows on the mighty mountain tops, the solemnity of the grey olives, the dizzy fall of the precipice, the very birds of prey that soar about it—all these are parts of that entrancing whole. But what worker in words can fit them into their proper place and proportion, giving to each its value and no more?

In this refectory they show rings in the wall where Turks stabled their horses when they took the island; also many holes at one end caused, the old native custodian swore, with bullets fired in sport by British soldiers who were quartered here at the time of the occupation. I like to think, however, that the Turk is responsible for these also, and not Mr. Atkins.

I went to look at the old chapel, not the building now used as a Greek church, which we also visited. This chapel is quite in ruins, and weeds grow rankly among the stones that doubtless hide the skeletons of the priests and Templars who once bent the knee upon them. The cloisters still remain with their charming pillared arcades and the marble sarcophagus of which all the old travellers talk. Now the quadrangle they enclose is a grove of oranges which have been planted since my last visit. In van Bruyn's day it was a garden, and

some other voyager a century or so later talks of it as a barley patch. Perhaps the Templars used it as a court set out with flower-beds and fountains.

By the time that we had finished our inspection the rain set in again and night was near. For a while we waited under the shelter of the cloisters hoping that it would stop, but at length made up our minds to a soaking and started. We were not disappointed; it poured, and that is why in the gathering gloom I was unable to look out for my old friend the cypress tree. Moreover the road, or rather the track, was awful and my mule, a proud and high-stomached beast which had waxed fat on green barley, one of the laziest I ever rode. My belief is that he had been accustomed to carry baggage, not men, and baggage mules have their pace. At least being innocent of spurs I could not get him along, and to make matters worse, at every slippery or awkward place he stumbled out of sheer idleness, once very nearly falling in a mud-hole three feet deep. What between the mule, the rain, and the cold, it was, I confess, with joy that at last we dismounted at the door of our host Mr. Tyzer, the judge for the district of Kyrenia.

Before finally bidding farewell to Bella Pais there is one point which I will mention, in the hope that the matter may be looked into, that is, if I am not mistaken in my surmise. While riding through the village my companions and I observed the strangely unhealthy appearance of the children, indeed I am sure that several of these poor, hollow-eyed little creatures are, or were, not long for this world. Now as the site is so high and wholesome, I imagine that their ill looks must be accounted for in some other way. Perhaps the water is contaminated.

The sights at Kyrenia, now vastly improved from what it used to be, are the harbour and the old Venetian fortress. Also in former days there was a Phœnician rock-cut tomb with the skeleton of the occupant in situ

and all its trimmings, such as lamps and jars of earthenware. But of this I can find no trace to-day. Everybody except myself seems to have forgotten all about him. Sic transit gloria—cadaveris. There are still, however, plenty of these Phœnician tombs left in the neighbourhood.

The castle is a fine building of the same type and period as the Famagusta fortifications and those of Nicosia. According to Drummond (1750) “probably the whole work was repaired by Savorniani, who in the year 1525 demolished the old works of these places and re-fortified them.” I do not know if he is correct and am, I confess, ignorant of the fame of Savorniani, although I think I have read somewhere that he was a noted military engineer of the period. Now the place is used as a jail, a fortunate circumstance, since it makes some care of the ancient fabric necessary. Here I would suggest that at very small expense the old chapel could be restored. This is the more desirable as no church exists for the convenience of English residents.

As at Limasol the view from the flat roof of this interesting fortress is very fine, commanding as it does the rugged heights capped by the grey towers of Hilarion, the fertile plain at their foot, and the opposing coast of Asia Minor. Immediately beneath lies the little harbour upon which the Government out of its scanty resources has spent several thousand pounds. To my mind the money might have been better expended elsewhere, since this haven is exposed to the fury of the northern gales, and notwithstanding its protecting moles no vessel of more than two hundred tons can enter it, even in calm weather.

The acting Commissioner, Mr. Ongley, pointed out to me, at the base of one of the round towers against which the sea washes, a little window that to within the last year or two has been walled up. Access was gained to it

HEIGHTS OF HILARION

VENETIAN FORTRESS, KYRENIA (Showing window of secret cell)

by a ladder and the stones removed. Within, he said, was found a cell without visible communication with any other part of the castle, and in it the bones of a human being and those of a chicken. It is suggested that these remains belonged to some political prisoner, sent here, perhaps from Venice, to be walled up with the chicken. Of course under the circumstances he would eat the chicken, after which the rats ate him. I must add, however, that Major Chamberlayne, the Commissioner at Nicosia, who is perhaps the best authority in the island upon the mediæval history of Cyprus, and who actually opened this dungeon, throws doubts upon the story. Myself, I do not quite believe it, for a reason which he did not mention but that appears to me to have weight. I am convinced that upon such an occasion the starving captive would not have left those bones. He would have crunched them up and swallowed them. Perhaps some corpse of which it was necessary to be rid in a time of siege was entombed here. Who can say? At least that cell possesses considerable speculative interest.

This fortress has known the shock of war, although I do not think it offered any notable resistance to the Turks after the fall of Nicosia and Famagusta. Here, in 1465, Charlotta was besieged for a whole year by her brother, James the Bastard, when she seems to have surrendered the place and fled with her husband, Louis, to Savoy.

The coasts of Karamania, which are so clearly visible from Kyrenia and lie at a distance of about thirty miles, are not often visited by travellers, whose throats the inhabitants are apt to cut. They are reported to be a paradise for sportsmen, as ibex and other large game live upon the mountain ranges. For a sum of three shillings I purchased an enormous pair of the horns of one of these wild goats which had found their way across the straits. Ibex, I am told, have a habit when alarmed

of hurling themselves off precipices and landing unharmed upon their horns. In the course of some excursion of the sort the owner of my pair has snapped off the point of one of them. Nature, however, healed the fracture, but the symmetry of the horn is spoiled.

I did not enjoy this visit to Kyrenia so much as I expected, since, as is common in Cyprus, my wetting and chill on the previous day induced a touch of fever. It was mild, however, and yielded to a timely application of quinine.

So back across the mountains to Nicosia and—a Book-Tea—a form of festivity which has just reached the ancient home of Cypris. Myself, I confess, I could have spared it, since of all varieties of intellectual exercise this is the hardest that I know.

Nicosia is a place of many amusements. Thus they play golf there on a course of nine holes. It is odd to do the round with a gentleman in a fez acting as your caddie, and to observe upon the greens—or the yellows, for they are made of sand—Turkish ladies veiled in yashmaks engaged in the useful tasks of brushing and weeding. What in their secret hearts do those denizens of the harem think of us, I wonder? Would not their verdict, if we could get at it, be “Mad, mad, my masters”? But English folk would celebrate book-teas and play golf or any other accustomed game upon the brink of Styx. Perhaps that is why they remain a ruling race, for to do this it is necessary to preserve the habits and traditions of the fatherland, refusing persistently to allow them to be overwhelmed by those of any surrounding people. Witness the triumphant survival of the Hebrew. But that subject is large.

The scene on this golf-course was quaint and picturesque. In front appeared the bold outline of the Kyrenia hills with rugged old Pentadactylon's five fingers pointing to a flaming, stormy sky, and behind rose the palms and minarets of eastern-looking Nicosia. Between

the two lay the wide plain across whose spaces from time to time wended strings of solemn camels, the head of each tied to the tail of its brother in front, or little groups of asses laden with firewood and other goods, a Cypriote seated on the last of them in a posture to be acquired only by centuries of inherited experience. The links themselves are by no means bad, though somewhat limited and extemporary. Thus the bunkers are formed of artificial banks varied by an occasional stone wall, the other hazards consisting chiefly of breaks of asphodel and rocks cropping through the apology for turf. Upon one of these rocks alas! I broke my host's best cleek.

I had long been looking forward to paying a second visit to the museum at Nicosia, which consisted in past years of a few disorderly rooms crowded with miscellaneous antiquities. Having before I left England read reviews of an important new catalogue of the Cyprus Museum, I concluded that all this was changed. The deeper proved my disappointment.

To begin with there is no custodian, so I was dependent on the kind offices of Major Chamberlayne to show me round. After long hammering we were let into the house by a girl, who said she would go upstairs and open the shutters of the rooms. On the ground floor beneath the archway, and in a kind of court, altars, remains of marble horses and chariots, tombstones, busts, unpacked crates of antiquities, some of them marked as having been forwarded years ago, were mixed in great confusion. The more precious objects were in a little chamber opening out of this archway, but it was no easy task to discover the keys which fitted the cases from which the trays had to be taken one by one and then replaced. The Cyprus share of the famous Enkomi treasures of which I have spoken we could not find anywhere. It appears indeed that these objects are still locked up in some Government safe. Throughout the

whole collection the story is the same. So far as the general public and Cyprus are concerned, it is practically valueless. For this sad state of affairs, however, the Government must not be blamed. They have not a single farthing to spend upon such things as relics of the island's past history, however important and interesting these may be.

In this Cyprus collection, to my astonishment I came face to face with an old friend. Many years ago, when first I visited Famagusta, I feloniously did steal a certain cannon-ball which lay about among the ruins just where three centuries ago it had fallen from some Turkish gun. The ladies of our party followed my evil example and stole another. Both of these mementoes we bore back to Government House and there, with the effrontery of hardened offenders, openly displayed them. Now it appeared that not long before a special Governmental edict had been issued against the removal of ancient cannon-balls, and it was pointed out that his Excellency could not suffer his own guests to do those very things which he had forbidden to the public. Bowing to the inevitable I thereupon surrendered my cannon-ball, but the ladies refusing to be influenced by this pure logic, managed to retain theirs, which they afterwards presented to me, so that at this moment I hold it in my hand.

What became of that cannon-ball—mine, I mean—I often wondered, and on this day so long, long afterwards, I found out. There, yes, there neglected in a dusty corner on the floor, in company with the noseless head of a Greek child and the fragments of a Phœnician pot, unhonoured and uncared for, lay the heavy missile that with so much labour I had borne away from Famagusta. There was no doubt about it, I could swear to that lump of iron in any court of law; also it was the only one in the place, and evidently had been deposited here that the authorities might be rid of it. Moreover, by a strange coincidence the very gentleman whose official duty it had

been to relieve me of the stolen property in the first instance, was now at my side.

Life is full of coincidences. Who would have thought that the three of us, Major Chamberlayne, Cannon-ball, and I, would live to meet again thus strangely after so long a lapse of time and in so far off a land? Sorely, I admit, was my virtue tempted, for while my guide was mourning over something out of place in a distant corner, I might easily have transferred the ball to my coat pocket, trusting to fortune and the strength of the stitching to get it away, and unobserved. But so greatly has my moral character strengthened and improved during the last decade and a half, that actually I left it where it was, and where doubtless it will remain until some one throws it on to the museum rubbish heap.

The island of Cyprus is one of the few countries in the world that I have felt sorry to leave. Often I have thought that it would be a delightful place to live in, not in the towns, a frequenter of book-teas, but in solitude as a hermit upon some haunted hill among the shattered pillars of old cities, with vineyard slopes beneath and the sea beyond. Only I should like to be a rich hermit—to the poor that profession must be irksome—and then I would restore Bella Pais and see what the land could grow. A friend of mine did in fact turn anchorite in Cyprus, but I noticed that he always seemed to find it necessary to come home for his militia training, and when I re-visited his hermitage the other day, lo! it was desolate.

Fortunately the road from Nicosia to Limasol by which the traveller departs runs through the very dreariest districts of the island, and thereby eases the farewell. For three hours' journey, or more, on either side of it stretch bare, barren hills, worn to the grey bones, as it were, by the wash of thousands of years of rain and bleached in the fiery Cyprian sun. I daresay, however, that with care even the most unpromising of

this soil would nourish certain sorts of trees, as probably it did in past ages.

Then the denudation would cease, the earth grow green, the flood waters be held up and the former and the latter rain called down, until here too, as on the Kyrenia coast, the land became a paradise.

And so farewell to Cyprus the bounteous and the beautiful.

DOOR OF ST. NICHOLAS, NICOSIA (The Chapter-House of the Knights of St. John)