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A TREELESS LANDSCAPE 45 The men, as we went by them, all glanced back at the carriage, showing bronzed wild faces and dark eyes and moustaches, and were presently lost to sight, like images seen in a dream. After two hours or so of this kind of progress ί gathered from the map that we were approaching a place named Dali—the site of the old Idalium, where a hundred altars once were fragrant to Idalian Aphrodite. Presently the carriage stopped, and Scotty's voice through the curtains explained to me that the horses would rest here for twenty minutes. I descended and looked about me. We were on the summit of a low ridge of hills. Close at hand was a cluster of fiat-roofed mud cottages, and on the opposite side of the road some corresponding outhouses. A few cocks and hens were strutting amongst fragments of broken crockery ; a mule's head protruded through a dark crack in a wall, and from the door of the principal cottage a man came with cups of coffee. Scotty informed me that we were now half-way to Nicosia. ' It over there, sir,' he said. ' We get there in two hours.' I looked, but no town was visible. It was hidden behind intervening ridges. The country now before us had the character of an open plain, littered with low brown hills and bounded by purple mountains. The outline of these last was singularly bold and fantastic, cutting the sky with summits like spires or isolated citadels ; and I presently realised that amongst them was one eminence, curiously splitting itself into five several peaks,

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