View PDF version of this page

moment I could have expected to hear the notes of some Oriental love song or the guitar strings of some wandering troubadour, and my imagination would have been satisfied rather than surprised had there issued from any door some gorgeous crusading knight, grown effeminate in the East, some veiled Circassian beauty, or a disguised caliph with his vizier. Mrs. Falkland was not an archaeologist, and could not tell me much of the history of the Nicosian houses ; but there was one house she knew of, of very con-siderable size, belonging to a certain Melek Jahn, an Armenian, which had been in his family for three hundred years, and of which—in case I wished it— she said she could show me the interior. To this house we accordingly bent our steps. Though Mrs. Falkland had known Nicosia for years, so intri-cate are its tangled streets that we twice lost our way. At last, however, we came to the junction of three lanes, where a small mosque and a mina-ret formed an unmistakable land-mark. Here we turned sharply round by the tomb of a Turkish warrior, adorned with droppings of candle grease and the ends of votive candles, and went up a narrow passage under the shadow of a Francis-can convent. Presently over the opposite walls rose the open arches of a campanile, which Mrs. Falkland told me belonged to the Armenian church, and pass-ing in through a pair of broken gates we were brought by a weedy path to a mouldering stone doorway. 02 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

View PDF version of this page