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SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE.

VOL. IV.

SEPTEMBER, 1888.

No. 3.

C

SCENES IN CYPRUS.

By W. H. Mallock.

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YPRUS is a country which in my early youth always excited my curiosity and imagination; and several years before the British occupation was thought of, I had, being then an undergraduate at Oxford, entertained a project of spending one of my vacations there. That project, however, eventually came to nothing; and it had long ceased to occupy a place even among my fancies when it was revived last autumn in a very unromantic way. I was given to believe that there was certain property in the island which might possibly prove a profitable investment; and I started at Christmas for the region of my forgotten dreams, with the dull, practical object of ascertaining if this were so. I calculated that a fortnight's visit would be amply sufficient for what I wanted; and as I intended to finish the winter in Italy, was looking forward, during the first part of my journey, less to the visit itself than to the day when I should be able to end it.

Gradually, however, as I drifted southward and eastward, as I left behind me the squalid skies of England, the snows that down to Brindisi made Italy hideous, and the deluge of gray rain that obscured and chilled Alexandria; as the air grew clearer, the breeze warmer, and at last the blue dome opened and ex

panded over me; as the British tourist utterly disappeared-for the time of tourists in Syria was not yet; as the deck of the steamer, which, touching first at Jaffa, was presently from Beyrout to take me across to Larnaka, showed me nothing but veiled or turbaned figures, some crouching in prayer, others babbling unintelligibly; as waking one morning I saw that a mile away from me were the brown sands and the tufted palms of Palestine, and inland the violet lines of the hills about Jerusalem;-as I underwent this gradual change of experience, a corresponding change took place in the color of my own expectations. Something began to stir in me of my former sentiment. and curiosity; and I found myself once more looking forward to my destination as a land of romance and wonder rather than of profitable investments. Nor was this change transient on my arrival it developed and completed itself. With regard to investments, I made all inquiries that were necessary—with what result it is needless here to mention; but having made these, and indeed whilst I was making them, the imaginative interest of the scenes and the life surrounding me threw more and more the material interests into the background, and made me feel, like Saul and like Wilhelm Meister, that having gone out to seek for my father's asses I had found a kingdom.

Many books have been written about Cyprus, historical, archæological, statistical, political, and scientific; and some of

Copyright, 1888, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

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them are full of accurate and valuable information but in no single one is there any adequate tribute to its general charm and fascination, or apart from its specialized interests. A distinguished savant, whom I met there engaged in excavating, and who grubbed for his antiquities as eagerly as a pig for truffles, let fall in my hearing that he was daily longing for the time when the tale of his treasures should be completed, and he might quit the soil which yielded them. There is a specimen of the temper in which Cyprus has been studied and visited! What wonder then that it has never had justice done to it? Countries are like women. Any careful observer may take stock of their ornaments, worm out their history, and even arrive at the amount of their debts and income; but those only can do them justice in some ways who, in addition to observing them, end by falling in love with them. This process, equally delightful and unexpected, I myself underwent with reference to Cyprus; and I gradually began to contemplate a short book about it, in which the wrongs done to its beauty might be atoned for. Meanwhile I am glad to have an opportunity of describing a few of its chief scenes and characteristics, especially as it gives me the privilege of committing some photographs taken by me to the permanent keeping of the unrivalled wood engraving of America.

Cyprus is, in some ways, unique among historical countries, not indeed in the antiquity of its earliest civilization, though even in this point it yields only to Egypt, but in the strange variety of races, of rulers, of religions, and famous

names, which have made or colored its past, which its own name still calls back to us, and whose influences still linger in its aspect and in its life to-day. Egypt and Tyre, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, feudal England, Jerusalem, feudal France, Genoa, Venice, and Stamboulthe mere recital of the empires and powers connected with it comes to the ear like a passage out of Paradise Lost. Other names, too, it claims, which are even more suggestive-Aphrodite and Adonis, who met on its sleeping hillsides, Balaam and Ezekiel who sang of its power and riches, Solomon, Solon, and Alexander, St. Paul, St. George, Richard Coeur de Lion of Englandagain, Othello and Desdemona, the Sultans Selim and Mustapha-time would fail to fill in half the catalogue, or do more than allude to the pageant of images evoked by it. Further it must be added that this land of unnumbered memories has been also a world's proverb for its own unrivalled loveliness, for its groves and fountains, for its plains of fabulous fertility, and the magic of its enchanting air.

So many interests almost confuse the imagination; but the interest which, if not the greatest, is at least the most peculiar is to be found in its history during the Middle Ages. In Cyprus it was that with the most enduring results the armed chivalry of the West wedded the luxury of the East, and gave birth to an entirely strange civilization. The Gothic doorway, native to France and England, and crowned with the very shields peculiar to Western heraldry, there gave access not to the stern courtyard, but to gardens of palms and oranges, and murmuring marble fountains. The

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