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the sunshine. Here in the grass lay a basket half filled with wild flowers ; there a bevy of children was playing round the silvery olive trunks. A feeling gradually stole over my mind that during the last ten minutes we had passed into another epoch —from the days of the patriarchs to the days of Hellenic Sicily—from Genesis to the idyls of Theocritus. This change, as day after day taught me, was one of the things most characteristic of Cyprus. Like the fruit of the durian, which has flavours of all foods, Cyprus has flavours of all epochs and literatures, and has every mood in its sky, its air, and its scenery. We at last reached a path by the brink of a small canal, which both went curving to-gether between walls of towering reeds, the very same reeds that whispered, ' Midas has no ears ; ' and this brought us to the upper part of the village, which climbed from the plain over a low spur of the mountains. Everything now underwent another change. We left the green behind, and great brown hills came sloping down on us with the bare sky on their ridges. Our road was no longer doubtful—if, in-deed, it could be called a road, for what lay before us was simply a track of mud running along one of the hill-sides, and sloping like the roof of a house. Such, however, was here the main thoroughfare of Kythrea, and along it, at irregular elevations and intervals, were mud houses, each with a small loggia, 88 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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