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mounted higher, all the stony slopes and scarred sides of the gorges were green with the fairy spires of a far-reaching infant pine forest. The ascent was so slow that I got out and walked some way. New aromatic smells seemed to be abroad in the air. I looked back, and below me were the plains of Nicosia like a sea, with Nicosia itself like a vague dim circle in the middle of them. Short as the distance was that I had really travelled, I had all the sensation of approaching a fresh country. The variety of travel is in the inverse proportion to the speed of it. At last I topped the hill. I was there before the carriage, and I stood in the pass surveying the scene on the farther side. Its beauty exceeded every ex-pectation I had formed. Some of its features indeed I had seen before on the ever-remembered day of my first search for the marble. There was the blue sea and the Cilician coasts beyond it ; and nearer at hand was Kyrenia at the water's edge, like a water-lily. But there was another beauty which completely took me by surprise. This was a sudden luxuriance, a sudden exuberance, of vegetation. The pines were no longer saplings. There were strong and stalwart groves of them ; nor was theirs the only foliage that filled and fascinated my vision. To right and left the mountains from their topmost pinnacles fell in a succession of varied and indented slopes to shadowy valleys a thousand feet below them ; and all the steep sides of these silvery amphitheatres were dotted with a multitude of dark-green climbing caroub trees. 180 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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