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CLAUDE DELAVAL COBHAM
Exerpta Cypria
page 298

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god whose rites were here performed; in either ease, niches for lamps would have been necessary, yet none of these circumstances appear : and it could be supplied with no other light than that of portable lamps or candles. The other piece of antiquity is laid across what seems to have been a fossee round the city wall ; it is composed of two stones, the upper being thirteen feet long, near eleven feet broad, and above six feet thick; the lower £ could not measure; but they are cut aud joined so as that one has a bed at right angles within the other; and a gate way four feet and three quartera broad, and one foot and an half thick, is cut in the middle, as if the gate had been let down from above, like a portcullis, or the iron gates of a garrison. The use of this contrivance foils my conjecture, unless it has been a sluice to retain the water in the fossee. For the honour of Bekir Pasha I must communicate an instance of the old gentleman's public spirit. While he was Pasha of this island, in the year 1747, he formed the noble design of bringing water from the river at Arpera, and occasional springs on the road about six miles from hence, to supply the people of Lamica, Salines and the shipping. A work worthy of a great and good man, which might have cost hiin above fifty thousand piastres, or six thousand two hundred pounds. Accordingly lie set down suinpts, or pits, and carried drifts from one to another, to lead the water through the high grounds, and conveyed it in aqueducts over the hollows: the first of which from Arpera, is an arcade, of fifty arches; two of these are small, the others nine feet wide, the highest twelve feet in height, while the others diminish as the ground rises: the pillars, or piei-s of the arches, are eight feet broad and three feet thick ; and here he has planted fine silk-gardens, with a vineyard, and built a mill, in which grain is ground by the fall of water. The second arcade has twelve arches, each being twelve feet wide, the pillars being live feet broad, and throe feet thick, and the highest about eighteen feet in height. The third arcade, which is near Inimica, consists of thirty-one arches, four feet and an half wide, the height of the highest being about sixteen feet, each pillar is four feet thick and twelve feet broad. Here the work stood when he was removed from his pashaliq, and though he left a considerable sum of money in the hands of Christof.icco, dragoman of the Seraglio, who was murdered when I was last in Cyprus, the villain did not carry on the work as it ought to have been executed, and the pasha-, his successor in office, who knew nothing but the sordid passions of a ravenous Turk, gave himself no trouble about the matter. So that the whole was at a stand until last July, when he sent a person to set it a going, and by this time I hope it is compieteti. From Chitty, which is beautified with a number of silk-gardens, to Maroni, the roads are very pleasant, the view being bounded on oue side by the hills, aud on the other by the sea, and regaled with a great variety of trees, though the greatest part- of those upon the plain are carobs, or what we call locust-trees: these together with olives, adorn an extensive plain, that the eye commands from the village of Maroni, which is delightfully situated upon a rising ground. We often meet with the channels of rivers which are not mentioned by the antient geographers, with a number of rivulets and brooks that flow plentifully during the rainy season ; but-, as I performed my tour of nine and twenty days in the months of May and June, those in the plains were generally quite dry; and the rest among the hills had little water, having been almost exhausted for the use of the gardens that are near their courses. This to be sure, is the best way of disposing them, though they might be used to much better purpose, if the wretched people had any encouragement to be industrious. 288 EXCERPTA CYPRIA.

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