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AN ESCAPE FROM HELL 177 often of the magic of this marvellous air, and it is tiresome to be speaking of the same thing continually ; but, though the air may be the same thing, the effects of it were never the same. Every landscape in the island it made like a live chameleon, always iridescent with melting and changing colour ; and what it did to the mind was every bit as various. To those who despair of ever being really happy in life—by which, I suppose, I mean two classes of men, those who are familiar with thought, and those who are familiar with pleasure—when at any time thought or pleasure has taught its lesson to them anew, to such men I would say : ' Try breathing the air of Cyprus.' As for myself, what I felt when I submitted to its charm that morning was a buoyant calm, on which complaisant meditation floated, and in which the immediate future cast pleasant reflections. The road, it is true, was at first not interesting, as for many miles it lay over a perfectly dead level, with hardly a cottage or a palm tree to break the monotony of the prospect. For a mile or two outside Nicosia it was in very tolerable order, but after that it rapidly got worse. In several places it was little more than a track only too well indicated by ruts in the hardened mud, and then from hardened mud it would change to shelving sand. The movements of the carriage changed their character accordingly. The commonplace briskness and smoothness with which we started now became a Ν

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