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CHAPTER IV. THE MESSARIA. I HAVIN G passed a week with our kind hosts, Sir Garnet and Lady Wolseley, at Government House, which formed a most agreeable contrast to "the friendless [life that we had been leading, the vans once more started en route for Kythrea, Famagousta, and the Carpas district. I had hired a good, sure-footed pony ifor my wife and a powerful mule for myself, and, I having given the vans a start of several hours, we 'followed in the afternoon. The treeless expanse of the Messaria produces nothing but cereals and cotton ; teams of oxen were at work in all directions ploughing, and otherwise preparing the thistle-covered surface, and the atmosphère was so delusively clear that Kythrea, twelve miles distant, appeared close to us. Upon these boundless fiats an object may be seen as distinctly as though upon the water, and we soon descried in the far distance a dark spot, which the binocular glass, if at sea, would have pronounced to be the stern of a 'vessel that had lost her masts, keeping the same course as ourselves ; this was the gipsy-van, which should have already arrived at Kythrea, where I had expected 'to have found the camp arranged, dinner cooked, and

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