In an Enchanted Island; or a Winter Retreat in Cyprus ... Third edition

Front matter

■ I m I i m I ■ ■ s ■ m ■ A WINTER'S RETREAT IN CYPRUS Frontispiece. AMONG THK Rl*IN*** OF FAMAGUSTA IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND OR Jt fiSinter's fletaat in Copras 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, of heavier suns in mightier skies ' THIRD EDITION LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON ST publishers in ©rtitnarg to ?.cr jIHajestg tfjc dHuten i 892 A II rights reserved NOTE On the day of publication of this book the Publishers and the Author received an intimation of a fact before unknown to them, that Mr. Wyke Bayliss had previously published a book with a title which, tlwugh not identical, was unfortunately similar, ft is hardly necessary to say that, had this been known earlier, the title of the present volume would have been altered, and that both the Publishers and the Author regret the accidental coincidence. ft is hoped, however, that, as the subject of the two books is wholly different, and as that of Mr. Mallock's is unmistakably indicated by the second portion of its title, no confusion in the public mind is likely to arise from the circumstance.

November 1889. . CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. The True Traveller . . . . i II. A Hint of the East . . . .17 III. A Voyage to Dreamland ... 30 IV. The Threshold of a New Life . . 48 V. In a Forgotten Capital . ■ ■ 73 VI. A Purple Evening .... 89 VII. A City of the Crusaders ... 97 VIII. A Day of Views and Visions . .111 IX. A Charmed Life . . . . .138 X. A Glimpse of Cyprian History . .169 XI. The Eternal Comedy . . . .190 XII. The Eternal Tragedy . . .219 XIII. A Villa amongst the Mountains . CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XIV. The Castle in the Air . . -255 XV. An Old-World Fortress . . . 274 XVI. The Abbey of Happy Peace . . 288 XVII. Behind Plate- Glass Windows . . 306 XVIII. The Glories of Famagusta. . . 326 XIX. "Velut Umbra" 357 XX. The Beginning of the End . 372 XXI. The Charm Broken ....

Chapter 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 luxuri ous charm of an interlude from an opera heard between the acts of a farce. I tell the reader this by way of a timely 6-H 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 — 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 ? If he would, let him throw this book in the fire. It is not written for him — it would certainly not appeal to him. If it appeals to any one, it will appeal to a class of men who take to travel in a different spirit altogether, and who frankly admit that what they seek under other skies is neither profit able, nor useful, nor edifying information of any kind, but merely this — the stimulant of a new mental experience. No doubt their taste in this respect is for nothing but a more refined form of dram-drinking ; and that perhaps may be thought sufficiently immoral and frivolous.

And yet such men after all are the only true travellers, for it is they alone who really love change for the sake of change, taking it into their system as a smoker inhales smoke, and finding it exhilarate them like a kind of spiritual haschish. All other travellers are travellers merely by accident. They go to distant places for some definite object, which it so happens is to be had at a distance only — a picture gallery, a gaming-table, or a good climate in January — but they would like it as well or better if they could find it nearer home, whilst as for the excursionist, who in the course of a single holiday is " personally conducted " through India, Japan, and America, it can hardly be said that he has ever left home at all. He has virtually sat still and looked at a moving peep-show.

The globe has gone round before him, he has not gone round the globe. But the true traveller seeks precisely what the excursionist dreads, and what those who travel with a definite object are indifferent to. It is a sense of escape from all that is homely and habitual — from an earth and a heaven grown sor did with the dust of vain associations. It is the refreshment like that felt by a fevered cheek when a pillow is turned and the touch of the linen is cool again, produced in the mind by new colours on the mountains, new scents in the atmosphere, forests with unknown borders, roads that lead into mystery, castles that rise from the mists of an en chanted past, and men whose aims and characters one cannot despise, not knowing them. Amongst influences such as these there steals upon the true traveller a delightful sense of being born again to youth.

Once more, for the time, he is buoyant with bright illusions ; the world is once more fresh to him as it was to the eyes of twenty ; life is once more a bubble iridescent with all the colours of hope. Is the reader a person who can understand this ? Do his own sympathies in any way make it intelligible to him ? If so, it may prove that he is the very reader I wish for ; but, before he de cides as to how far he really agrees with me, there is an important part of my meaning which it still remains for me to explain to him. It perhaps may have struck him that what I have said about the charm of newness is capable of being applied to the newness of a new country — to a clearing with its log houses in some colonial forest, or to the white stores and the printing office of an infant Higgsville or Briggsville, appearing like pustules on the face of an expressionless prairie.

I must therefore tell him that in my mind it has no such application whatever ; that the newness which I speak of is a very limited thing ; that it is essentially connected with the past, and essen tially opposed to the present ; in fact, that for me the only new world is the old. Nor is this limita tion arbitrary. There is a very excellent reason for it. The present, with all its mortal coil of weariness — that is to say, our natural and habitual surroundings — is the very thing which a traveller, as I have tried to describe him, travels on purpose to shuffle off. Now the present, for us in England, what is it ? It is a modern order of things, gradually effacing and defacing a traditional : still the traditional order is not yet quite obliterated. But in a new country there is no traditional order at all ; and life there for the traveller, instead of being any escape from the present, would be simply the present itself in a balder and more unmitigated form.

The only real change for him, the only travelling which is travelling for his spirit as well as for his body, he must find in countries which have an historical past behind them — amongst valleys and mountains which retain the echoes of chivalry, in cities where the painted ceilings have looked down on powder and periwigs, in scenes where the past fills the air with a sense of it, like the smell of pine forests ; or where it actually survives, as it does in the tents of the immemorial East. Here, however, I confess that if we try to be seriously logical, we find ourselves in a certain difficulty. The charm, the fascination, of the past — of the plunge into the deep waters ! How well some of us know it ! But not only is it impossible to describe it to others : it cannot logically be even justified to ourselves.

Let us fix our sentimental preference on whatever period we will, letting the imagination escape to it as a happy refuge ; and we cannot avoid thinking, if only we think too closely, that all the littleness, all the vulgarity, all the rawness of life, had we really lived then, would have been plain to us then as now. The Pyramids, as they rose under the hands of the Egyptian bricklayers, smelt from top to bottom of chewed garlic and onions. The Athens of Pericles was as modern as South Ken sington. The farther a man, with an imposing pedigree, dives into what he fancies to have been the statelier times of his ancestors, the nearer he gets to the time when those ancestors were parvenus. Fortunately, however, we have an answer to these reflections ; and the answer is, that logically they are quite unanswerable, but that our nature, with a delightful obstinacy, refuses to be in any degree influenced by them.

It behaves, in fact, just as it does in another case, which is analogous, and is familiar to all of us. Let us stand on a stony hill-side — colourless, herbless, waterless ; let us realise how forbidding and bare it is, and then let us look at the distant mountains. We may know as a fact that they are quite bare also, and that their slopes, if we stood on them, would be even more forbidding. But in spite of that knowledge, to our eyes they have all the colours of heaven on them. We cannot tell why nor wherefore, they trouble the soul like music ; they lift our longings above the life that fetters us, and they carry them beyond the regions of care. And with distance in time it is the same as it is with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has ; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound.

It also transfigures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one ; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing ; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature — literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice. And this reminds me that I may as well explain the allusion, which I made at starting, and which may perhaps have sounded con temptuous, to ancient art, and the temper of the professional student. I meant by it nothing disrespectful to literature generally ; indeed, how could the traveller whose pleasure is in contem plating the past be indifferent to that through which the past is mainly apprehended ? Such a traveller values literature quite as much as the student does.

I only mean that he values it in a different way. The professional student, no matter how distinguished, is, after all, merely a maker of roads for the minds of others to travel on as far and as luxuriously as possible : but the student himself, with his spectacles, cannot realise this or see that his work means nothing but the convenience of post-chaises ; and the difference between him and the traveller may be bluntly expressed as follows : that he cares only for making the roads, and the traveller cares only for using them. The traveller is sensible of the importance of exact history ; the traveller is sensitive to all the magic of poetry : but facts and dates, as he moves from one historical place to another, are for him merely so many sticks on which to train the tendrils of his imagination ; and poetry appeals to him only in so far as it melts into the moonlight, as it peoples again old cities and gardens, and fills the air with echoes of lutes that have long been silent.

He values literature for these reasons only ; but could any reasons be stronger ? Where, without it, would be the charm that lurks in the iron grilles of mediæval Italian palaces, in the twisted ciphers and coronets forlornly rusting on their gates, in the shadows of the grimy archway, or the discoloured marble fountain ? Except for literature it probably would be almost impercept ible ; and the more literature the traveller has been able to apply to quickening and expanding his own emotions and prejudices, the more potent and enthralling does this charm become for him. It is thus that, as he wanders amongst scenes of the kind I have alluded to, he moves in a world of sights and sounds and associations undreamed of by the tourists who flourish at tables d'hote, and eye with interest each other's luggage and labels, and unvalued by the student — that odd intellectual Methodist — who has his life in his books, instead of having books in his life.

Such is the sort of person whom I call the true traveller. Such is the sort of person I should now desire for a reader. What the frou frou of petticoats and the odour of poudre de riz is for the devotee of the modern Vie Parisienne, that for him is the odour of antique life which still clings to so many existing walls, and the murmur of which in certain places is still alive in the air. For him the present is masculine, and he deals with it as he would deal with a man ; but the past is feminine, and he loves it as he would love a woman, of whom he never could weary, because he could never entirely win her. Or to treat the matter to a simile which is perhaps LN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND 12 more respectable, and certainly equally true, we may say that the past is to him what an opera or an oratorio is to others.

The present may strike his ears as a medley of objectionable discords ; but as it drifts away from him, and becomes part of the past, its sound changes to the sound of a distant orchestra or of the sea, by turns august and plaintive with the burden of human destiny ; and each ruined marble temple, each desolate baronial banquet-hall, is a shell which murmurs with a fragment of the illimitable music. And now I think I must bring myself to make a certain confession. I have said that the pleasure in the past is not logically defensible. I doubt, however, if such is wholly the case. I suspect that most of those who feel it have one logical reason for it ; only it is a reason which the modern thinker would consider far worse than none. I arrive at this conclusion by reflecting that for myself individually the past in England begins before the first Reform Bill, and on the Continent before the French Revolution.

I am also certain that if we discovered a new Pompeii, of which all the inhabitants had been radicals, no matter how perfect the remains might be — even if they comprised a complete file of a Latin Pall Mall Gazette — the principal satisfaction the discovery would afford myself would consist in the feeling that all these people were dead. If then I may imagine myself speaking to those excellent leaders of men, and guides of popular aspiration, who make serious faces about a race which, according to their philosophy, began in a gas and will soon end in a glacier, who spell the People with a capital P, and think that we one day shall have a better religion than the Catholic — I would ask them to run over all the things that they are proudest of in the modern world ; and I will venture to say that a part of our pleasure in the past is due to the fact that in the past every one of these things was wanting.

In other words, to make a long matter short, the true traveller is mentally the emigre" of con temporary Revolution ; and he exiles himself from his country in order that he may escape at intervals, if not from himself, at all events from his generation. In one way, however, he differs from those other imigrh, his prototypes. He is a far more practical man ; and for all practical purposes no one is better able to recognise and accept the inevitable. His many enemies will of course call him a sentimentalist ; but his sentiment is generally kept sweet by the brine of some cynical humour ; and though it renders him contemptuous of modern life in general, it leaves him none the less equal to dealing with, and making the best of, it. The optimists will pro bably ask him, Why, if that best is bad, he does not give his fine sentiment to the future instead of to the past, and so throw himself hopefully into the ranks of progressive Humanity.

The pessimists will ask him, Why give any sentiment to either ? The past died yesterday ; the future will be dead to-morrow. But such remonstrances will have very little effect on him. The hopes of the optimists he will leave to the brutal refutation of events ; whilst as for the pessimists, he will content himself with saying this to them : that if the present is really nothing but a path between two cemeteries, he finds more to interest him in the full graves than in the empty ones. And now, if the reader is a traveller in my sense of the word, or if he has anything of such a traveller's interests, or sympathies, or tempera ment, he may perhaps be amused and pleased in acquainting himself with the following experi ences of my own : and though the best descriptions of the writer " are but shadows," yet they may perhaps, if the reader's " imagination mend them," bring to him a breath from a land of remote mountains, rarely looked upon, except officially, by European eyes — a breath that has touched the weeds on Phœnician tombs, the marble columns of shattered Grecian temples, and Gothic towers on which once the flags of crusaders fluttered, which has borne on its breast the hoarse notes of the muezzin, and the wings of the crows that wheel round rustling palm-fronds and round minarets, which has whiffs in it of Byzantine incense, the freshness of summer seas, and the soul of the plain and of the mountain-side in a perfume of thyme and wild flowers.

IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND And in case such a reader, with the pudicity of common sense, should, in spite of a lurking sympathy with me, fear that I may lead him too far into the regions of the sentimental, he will perhaps be reassured when he hears, as he shall hear directly, how eminently unsentimental and sordid were the motives which prompted me to visit a country where I certainly soon forgot them.

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 poisoned 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 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND 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 cup boards 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 specimen." And he produced and handed me a small triangular 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 ; A HINT OF THE EAST 19 " 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 those 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 specula tion in the train of ideas it had suggested to me, which kept constantly 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 un expected interest — for instance, several of Pola, and of Diocletian's palace at Spalatro ; but there was one above all that at once arrested and fascinated me.

It represented a castle, lying some where south-east of Trieste, of the most singular aspect, and in the most singular situation imagin able. 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. A HLNT OF THE EAST 21 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 reflected 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 transformation 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 background. This was the idea of Cyprus, with its quarries of virgin marble. I had a general impression 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. LN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND 22 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 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, within 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 wall 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 ap plication 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 me an answer exceedingly like that which natural science, if it were only honest, would give in connection 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 sound ness 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 discouragement, 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 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 impatience to be off somewhere with a semblance of sense and meaning which might else have been wanting.