In an Enchanted Island; or, a Winter's Retreat in Cyprus

Front matter

A WINTER'S RETEEAT IX CYPRUS Pr.INTKD BY sro'inswooDK and co., xeiv-stheet square LONDON AMONG THE RUINS OF FAMAGUSTA IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND Oil % Minier's |lctat in Cyprus BY W. H. MALLOCK AUTHOR OF ' IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ? ' ' SOCIAL EQUALITY ' ' THE OLD ORDER CHANGES ' ETC. ' For always me the fervid languid glories Allured, if heavier suns in mightier skies' LONDON KK'HARP BENTLEY * SON. NEW BURLINGTON STREE1 gnbligfettt in ©rbinaro lo ftr gtajcsta tfel Quetn 1889 All rights reserved CONTENTS CHArTEK rAGE I. The True Traveller 1 II. A Hint of the East 13 III. A Voyage to Dreamland 22 IV. The Threshold of a New Life 35 V. In a Forgotten Capital 53 VI. A Purple Evening 65 VII. A City of the Crusaders 71 VIII. A Day of Views and Visions 81 IX. A Charmed Life 101 X. A Glimpse of Cyprian History 123 XI.

The Eternal Comedy 138 XII. The Eternal Tragedy 160 XIII. A Villa amongst the Mountains .... 175 XIV. The Castle in the Air 187 XV. An Old-world Fortress ...... 201 XVI. The Abbey of Happy Peace 211 XVII. Behind Plate-glass Windows 224 XVIII. The Glories of Famagusta 239 XIX. 'Velut Umbra' 262 XX. The Beginning of the End 273 XXI. The Charm Broken CHAPTEE I THE TRUE TRAVELLER I suppose that this book, if classified in the usual way, would be called a book — a very slight book — of travels ; but I would rather call it myself a record of a fragment of life which was, by the magic of its unfamiliar surroundings, detached like a dream from the things of the modern world — from steam, from progress, from the glorious march of democracy — and suddenly came between them with the lulling and luxurious charm of an interlude from an opera heard between the acts of a farce.

I tell the reader this by way of a timely warning, so that he may know at starting how much or how little to expect of me. The scenes I shall have to dwell upon lie in a classical country which is full of interest for students, for politicians, and for speculators — ?~ B indeed for earnest or practical people generally — but whether the reader will be interested in what I may say of them, will depend very much on what are the tastes or temper with which, if occasion offered, he would visit these scenes himself. Would he visit them eager to unearth prehistoric pots for museums ? to throw a new light on the relations of Phœnician art to Hellenic ? or else to collect facts with which to discredit the Colonial Office ? or to see what money might be made out of the place or people ? Would he be a man with a special object, or still worse, a man with a special subject?

Chapter II

A HINT OF THE EAST In the August of 1887 I happened to be staying in Devonshire, with a friend and neighbour who had returned recently from the East. He was a man of as many wanderings and as many exploits as Ulysses ; and his house from top to bottom was a museum of barbaric treasures. Enormous heads with horns, from the most secret places of Africa, peered down on the glass and flowers of the dinner-table ; the distended jaws of a crocodile yawned over the grand piano ; one went upstairs to bed past rows of poi soned arrows and the blazing ruby discs of enamelled Eastern shields. Indeed, hardly an object caught the eye anywhere which did not literally, to quote a sentence of Macaulay's, carry the mind ' over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars.' One morning, as I was sitting with my host in the smoking-room, he produced from the cupboards of a Japanese cabinet a number of gems, and began telling me their histories.

This, I confess, I did not find specially entertaining ; and I was not sorry when, pausing, he pulled open a drawer, and proceeded to rummage in it for some new subject of conversation. ' Here,' he said at last, ' is another curious speci men.' And he produced and handed me a small tri angular something, heavy, rough in surface, and in colour a dusky green. ' That,' he went on, ' is a fragment of Verd Antique, the famous marble which was so much prized by the ancients, and the quarries of which have for so long been unknown to the modern world.' I asked him where he found it. ' I found it,' he said, ' in Cyprus, in a remote part of the island ; and all about the spot the same priceless stone was to right and left of me in enormous detached masses. More than that, too,' he added ; ' close beside them are other masses of a beautiful clouded yellow.

There they lie ! Nobody knows of them ; nobody but a peasant comes near them. I myself found them only by accident.' I asked him if it might not be practicable to work these quarries profitably. He replied, though without much enthusiasm, that it very possibly might be, provided a man with sufficient knowledge and enterprise should be found willing to undertake the experiment. His tone was not encouraging, and the matter accordingly dropped ; but there was a mixture of romance and speculation in the train TEMPTATIONS TO THE JOURNEY 15 of ideas it had suggested to me, which kept con stantly bringing back at odd intervals to my mind the far-off Eastern island, the unvisited silent spot in it, the veined and grained masses of luxurious green and yellow. Some weeks later I was at a country house in Yorkshire, where portraits, books, everything— even the screens and chintzes and bell-pulls — were redolent of the last century.

It was Sunday ; it was the sleepy hour that succeeds a Sunday luncheon ; and my hostess, by way of imparting a little life to a guest, asked one of her daughters to show me a certain book — a picture-book, so I gathered, but I was unable to catch its name. Presently a folio, bound in faded russia, was deposited on a table and its thick leaves were being turned over for my benefit. I now realised that it was a French book of travels, dealing principally with the eastern shores of the Adriatic, dedicated to the First Consul, and illustrated with fine engravings. Many of these were of unexpected interest — for instance, several of Pola, and of Dio cletian's palace at Spalatro ; but there was one above all that at once arrested and fascinated me. It represented a castle, lying somewhere south-east of Trieste, of the most singular aspect, and in the most singular situation imaginable.

It was perched on the spur of a mountain, with a river and woods below ; and close behind it, gashed in a frowning precipice, was a monstrous cavern, out of which the river issued — a cavern whose mouth, full of unfathomable shadow, was large enough to have swallowed the entire castle at a gulp. This scene took such hold of my imagination that I began seriously to contemplate altering my winter plans so as to visit it ; and the more I dwelt on the scheme the more attractive and practicable it appeared to me. Another castle between Trieste and Venice, which I had long thought of as a place of possible pilgrimage, came back to my mind ; I re flected that I might take it on my way : and my original prospect of a winter and a spring on the Riviera began to undergo a change, like a trans formation scene at a pantomime.

Presently, all of a sudden, another idea struck me, which at once joined itself to the others, giving them an illuminated back ground. This was the idea of Cyprus, with its quarries of virgin marble. I had a general im pression that one could go by steamer from Trieste to it ; and at Trieste I should be already half-way on my journey. I resolved, therefore, that I would add Cyprus to my programme ; and that its possible treasures, which had for weeks been amusing my fancy, should in sober earnest be examined, and perhaps exploited, by myself. I immediately wrote two letters — one to a friend who had lived for years at Venice, and could tell me much about the neighbouring regions east of it ; the other to the distinguished traveller who had shown me the green specimen, asking him for a description of the exact spot where he had found it, and also for THE PRICELESS MARBLE 17 his advice as to the business side of my project.

It was from him that I heard first. A fat envelope came from him, with the specimen itself inside ; and crumpled round the specimen was a letter to the following purport : — ' Along the northern coast of Cyprus runs a chain of lofty mountains, one of which rises into a peculiar peak, in shape rudely resembling the distended hand of a man, and called by the Greeks Pentedactylon, or The Five Fingers. Near this peak is a grotto, withiii which is a fountain. It is well known to the peasants, and should not be hard to find. Close beside it stands an immense solitary cypress tree ; facing it, on the far side of a gorge, is a sheer Avail of rocks, to be recognised by their colouring of brilliant red and orange ; and above it, at a height of some hundred feet, are to be traced the ruins of an old Byzantine church.

Here, in front of the grotto, is lying the green marble.' A few words followed of plain practical advice. I was to get the specimen polished, and submit it to a London expert. If in his opinion the stone would be worth working, I should make an application to the Cyprian Government with regard to it ; the initial expenses would not be great, and it was quite possible that the venture might be really profitable. I did as I was told. I sent the specimen to a polisher. I then took it to a marble merchant, and at the same time wrote to the Governor of Cyprus and explained myself. The marble merchant gave C me an answer exceedingly like that which natural science, if it were only honest, would give in con nection with the Progressist's schemes for man. The stone, he said, was not Verd Antique, though at first sight, no doubt, it very strongly resembled it.

Still, he admitted that it was of considerable beauty, and would, were it procurable in sufficiently large blocks, be also of considerable value. The size and soundness of the blocks were the things on which the value would depend ; and his own opinion was, though he did not profess to feel certain of it, that the blocks would be small, or, if not small, ruined by flaws. Disappointments, as we know, never arrive singly ; and on top of this verdict I received a letter from Venice to warn me against my project of visiting the two castles. If I went at all, said my friend, I should go in the latter spring : such an excursion in the winter months would be miserable. Here was a second blow to the fabric of my delightful plans ; and I began to fear that possibly, after all, I should have to subside on those I had so lightly thrown over in their favour.

But I found that, in spite of dis couragement, it was hard to submit to this. The castles might wait till a more convenient season ; but the idea of Cyprus I could not let slip so easily. For six weeks, beyond horizons of Highland heather, and through mists scented with leaves of November woods in England, I had been seeing visions of tall clustering date palms, ruined temples, and faces turning towards Mecca. My hopes had tasted the RESOLVE TO START 19 unusual as a tiger tastes blood ; and I felt that I should not be satisfied until I had had a draught of it. Besides, it was still possible that the marble quarries might prove to be valuable ; the belief that they were so, having been the parent of my wish to visit them, was now in its broken condition kept alive by its child ; and it endowed, in my eyes, an impa tience to be off somewhere with a semblance of sense and meaning which might else have been wanting.

Add to this that, in the course of a few weeks, I received two letters from the two chief officials hi Cyprus, offering me help and welcome with a cordiality so charming, that, though springing as I knew it did from their own natural kindness, I modestly set down some degrees of its warmth to the well-known pleasure of expecting a new face. Cyprus, therefore, now remained in my mind for a month or so, much as heaven does in the minds of respectable people, as a place I should shortly go to, though I made no preparations for getting there. I went on with my visits, I wrote one or two papers on Socialism, and here and there I spoke at a political meeting. In fact, I ate and drank like the people before the Flood, until one day I surprised myself much as Noah surprised his contemporaries ; I entered into the Ark — that is to say, the offices of the Peninsular and Oriental Company — and took my ticket by the overland route for Alexandria.

I had already made enquiries as to how Cyprus was to be reached, and, unless I wished to waste time on the road, c Alexandria — this seemed certain — -was the first point to make for. But how from Alexandria to get across to Cyprus — by what line of steamers, or on what days the steamers sailed — no one in London was able to tell me confidently. I was obliged, therefore, to rest content in the faith that I should learn particulars on board the boat at Brindisi, and in the hope that I should not — as I learnt was perfectly possible — have to wait at Alexandria for the best part of a week. I had taken my ticket a fortnight only in advance, just in time to secure the last berth in the sleeping car which runs to Brindisi every Friday from Calais ; and during that fortnight I found it hard to believe in the reality of the future which I had now definitely prepared for myself.

In fact, as so often happens when once a decisive step has been taken, I began to regret what I had done and listlessly to avoid thinking of it. The date of my departure was to be the last Friday in December. I spent Christmas and the preceding days in Devonshire ; and the season of goodwill was appropriately enlivened in my neighbourhood by the rival meetings of two Parliamentary patriots, both of whom I knew, and one of whom I assisted. On both sides we wielded the usual phrases ; we breathed polite and yet profound distrust of each other, and profound trust in all the rest of the nation. We drew cheers by resounding and reverential allu sions to the Integrity of the Empire, to Truth, to Consistency, and to Justice — indeed, to almost everything not a vice that could be spelt with a capital THE EVE OF STARTING 21 letter.

The whole proceedings were fertile in that unintended humour which is the redeeming feature of modern popular government. By Christmas Eve, however, they had perforce come to an end ; and I felt that I owed to them one of the keenest pleasures of life — the pleasure they caused me by their cessa tion. The day after Christmas Day I came up to London to collect some necessaries I had already ordered for my journey. If it had not been that I found myself thus occupied, I should hardly even yet have realised that I was on the point of starting. I dined out twice, I went to the theatre once. Every thing happened in such a natural and habitual way that it seemed as if it would go on happening so indefinitely ; and I felt as if I were dreaming, rather than as if I were awake, when, on the fourth evening, somewhere about eight o'clock, I found myself muffled on the platform at Charing Cross, with the curves of the huge roof glimmering dimly in the gaslight, and a wind, which seemed like a message from foreign seas, sweeping in through the open arch at the end, along the chimneys of the dark Continental train.

Five minutes later I was drifting out into the night, and my thoughts dwelt regretfully on a room not yet two miles away from me, where a pear half eaten was still perhaps lying on a dessert plate, with a glass half full, as if waiting for me to return to them ; and on another room, where a bed which I should not sleep in was still tumbled with the last disorders of packing.

Chapter III

A VOYAGE TO DREAMLAND London that Christmas had had brighter sunshine than usual, and never before had I seen from Hyde Park Corner the evening skies flush redder over the bare westward trees. My surprise, therefore, was great when, some ten minutes after starting, I saw from the window the first suburban fields gleaming in faint moonlight as if dusted with white sugar. I instantly recollected that that day at a club I had caught in the conversation of some one the words ' snow at Chislehurst.' I had not at the time paid them any attention, but I now appreciated their meaning, and realised that this whiteness was snow. ' A local fall,' I said to myself as I turned away to my paper ; but half an hour later, when I again looked out, and the suburbs had given place to the stretch of the open country, the whiteness was not only present, but was wider and more unbroken, and the hedges and trees were lying on it as if they were A SUDDEN WINTER 23 scrawled in ink.

The farther we went the deeper the snow seemed ; and when I emerged from the carriage on Dover Pier, the peculair smell of it at once came to my nostrils. There was no wind, however ; the air, though keen, was pleasant ; and the tall funnel hardly swayed or trembled as the packet moved with its lanterns out into the cadaverous waters. Still half dreaming, and seeming to be wandering in my sleep, I stood on the deck and looked at the coasts of England. There they lay, an odd glittering vision, which with fantastic perverseness reminded me of a birthday cake, and also completed the strange feeling in my mind that suddenly out of autumn we were plunged into mid-winter. Perhaps, so I thought, things would be better at Calais. But at Calais I saw, as we slowly steamed into the harbour, snow shining on all sides, in the wheeling rays of the lighthouse ; and the moment I landed I felt the ground like iron.

There was, however, no time for shivering. Directly facing me, amongst the customary trucks and carriages, was an object on wheels, dark and of unusual length. This I found to be the Pullman sleeping-car for Brindisi, and I was at once hurried off to it with my bundle of rugs and dressing-bag. The door was already very much like the mouth of a wasp's nest, beset by a swarm of obscure-looking men in ulsters. They were going in, and then again they were issuing, with all the apparent aimlessness that annoys us in winged insects ; they were asking the conductor the same question three times over, and their lamp-lit faces seemed set with a vague anxiety. With some difficulty I at last effected an entrance. The car was a passage with berths upon each side, and my own berth having been shown me, I entrenched myself in it, and watched my fellow travellers.

One by one they were at last settled in their places ; there was an opening of bags, with revelations of socks and handkerchiefs ; white collars were being unbuttoned from flannel shirts, and long overcoats dangled from every hook. Presently the conductor brought me some coffee, which I had asked for on entering ; whilst I was drinking it there was a low rumbling and a tremor. The train was in motion : we were off for the South and Italy. Waking next morning, I turned round to the window, in hopes that we possibly might have left the snow behind us. The glass was opaque and grey ; I brushed it, but made no clearing ; and then I saw that it was coated with thick ice. I took a pen-knife and scraped a small aperture. I looked out on a scene that would have done honour to Siberia. That whole long day we drifted through frozen France, the ice on the windows freezing as fast as one flaked it off.

All my hopes had now been sent on to Italy ; and south of the Alps, at any rate, I dreamed that blue skies would await us. Evenino* fell ; and my spirits began to rise as my penknife laid bare for me a pageant of Swiss mountains, a gloomy lake, the glow of a red sunset, and crags and FROZEN EUROPE 25 peaks piled high in the air like thunder clouds. Early in the night we passed the Mont Cenis tunnel ; and, before going to bed, I wrapped myself up closely and went out at the end of the car on to the balcony, hoping to feel on my cheeks the touch of a suaver air. Never had its bite been sharper, although not a wind was stirring, except that caused by our own motion. But the spectacle before me was almost staggering in its beauty. The naked moonlight falling on peak and precipice dazzled the eyes with an unearthly illumina tion.

Passes and gorges towered to right and left of me ; the snow, like birds' nests, hung in the climbing pine woods ; and the stars, clear as diamonds, rested sparkling on the mountain-tops. And through it all, with its swing and its fierce clanking, feeling its way, the black train was sweeping. Below me were frozen rivers, expanses of silent ice, which now and again flashed with a glare like fire ; and down the middle, a ribbon of curving darkness, hurrying water flowed with a noise that was heard fitfully. I waited and watched, expecting every moment to see the prospect open, revealing the plains of Italy. But I waited in vain, till my ears stung with cold. We passed out of one gorge only to find ourselves in another ; and still in the distance was range after range of whiteness, and walls of dazzling snow that seemed to rise up to heaven.

My feet presently began to grow cold also. I made my retreat into the drowsy, lamp-lit car, and was soon falling asleep in a world of curtains and dressing-bags. By nine next morning we were aheady far into Italy, and I • soon was conscious of a distinct and surprising change. I call it surprising because it was the very opposite of the change I had expected. The sky last night had been clear. I counted on its being blue this morning. But instead of being blue it was livid with leaden grey ; the winter seemed far more savage than that we had left behind us, and we entered Bologna through snow-drifts ten feet high. We hurried on southward ; but no change came, except that the white desolation seemed to grow more desolate. The green shutters of villas built for sunshine, the gaudy paintings on the walls — Madonnas on blue clouds, or vistas of impossible gardens — looked haggard and piteous in this unnatural weather, like rouged cheeks at five o'clock in the morning.

We skirted the Adriatic ; its colour was a cold menacing purple ; and Ancona stood out in it, squalid like unwashed linen. We seemed to be passing through an extinct or forsaken world. That evening we stopped at a wayside station, and dined in a cold restaurant, under a ceiling daubed with flowers, having had previously all our meals in the train. We were to reach Brindisi by an hour or two past midnight ; so we turned to our berths early, and slept without undressing. At length we were roused by the intimation, half welcome, half odious, that we should, as the conductor put it, ' be there in half an hour.' In a minute or two the car was alive with the folding and the strapping of rugs, a search ON THE VERGE OF THE WEST 27 amongst blankets for novels and pocket-handkerchiefs, and a great cramming and dragging about of bags.

My own preparations made, I escaped outside to the balcony. I was presently conscious that our speed began to slacken ; some houses gleamed ahead of us ; we slid by some walls and watch towers ; a moment more and we were out on a frosty platform, surrounded by porters and a babble of quick Italian. After a little confusion, and many illustrations of the belief that English is a universal language if only spoken loudly enough, passengers, porters, all in a straggling crowd, were hurrying over a ringing pave ment down to the moon-lit pier. There, lying close to it, was a tall shadowy mass with masts and towering funnels — our steamer for Alexandria. We ascended its side. Its portholes were eyes of lamplight, which showed the monster wakeful, although it appeared asleep. I was soon pacing the deck, my luggage collected and disposed of, and was thinkingover the journey which had just come to an end — a journey which, though taken weekly by some fifteen or twenty Englishmen, has rarely been taken through a Europe so swathed in one bitter winding-sheet, and which still dwelt in my mind as something spectral and bewildering.

On the steamer, however, there was nothing spectral at all; though certain reminiscences, not entirely commonplace, even now mix in my memory with that smell of the night's keen air. After the three days' rumbling of the train, the sounds which I heard now — detached voices, and the dragging and pushing of boxes — touched the nerves like a pause of solemn expectant silence ; whilst the gleam of the harbour lights, the sway of the still waters, the huddled, mysterious houses of the unfamiliar town, all brought home to me, with a sudden and pleasant sharp ness, the thought that I was now on the verge of the Western world, and was soon to be floating off from it into the hollow darkness beyond. The imagination, with one of its many passing flatteries, was breathing a sense into me of personal loneliness and adventure when, passing a group of men, I heard my own name called out to me ; and I presently recog nised in the speaker a certain well-known Life- Guardsman, whom I had last seen with a gardenia, at supper in a London ball-room.

I then began to put names to his companions — all of them men of much the same stamp, whose talk seemed, when I joined them, to have been of cigars and rifles. This meeting at first I found rather prosaic and disap pointing ; but when we began to compare notes as to where we each were going, and found that one was bound for the Soudan, one for Australia, one for Burmah, and two for the deserts beyond Damascus, a common thought slowly stole over all of us. Here were four or five, lives — four or five out of millions — so often and so closely touching each other in England, united now by chance under the stars in the south of Italy, and soon again to be separated BETWEEN ITALY AND THE EAST 29 for the remotest ends of the earth. My friends' faces, in spite of gossip and laughter, looked wan in the shadow, and seemed to be touched with seriousness ; and as I moved away from them a sense of illimitable distances, stars and sea winds, and the riddle of human destiny, wove itself into the consciousness of the moment, and made all life seem larger.

I descended to the saloon in quest of some sort of supper ; and the first sound that greeted me was a female voice from America — that of a young lady sandwiched between two male admirers — declaring in ringing accents that ' she couldn't stand Jerusalem.' The last thing I heard before I retired to rest — which we all did before we had left the harbour — was the same young lady informing the same gentlemen — she called one ' Bill,' the other she called ' Darling ' — that she had learnt in Paris a new song for the banjo, ' lovely, but so wicked that Mama forbade her sing ing it.' The following days were for the most part suffi ciently weary and monotonous. The Ionian Islands lifted their snowy summits up to the clouds as if modelled from Turner's pictures ; my eye lingered on the jagged outlines of Crete — that country seen by so many, explored or visited by so few.