HISTORY ETHNOGRAPHY NATURE WINE-MAKING SITE MAP
Selected and rare materials, excerpts and observations from ancient, medieval and contemporary authors, travelers and researchers about Cyprus.
 
 
 
 
uses Google technology and indexes only and selectively internet - libraries having books with free public access
 
  Previous Next  

MALLOCK W.
In an enchanted island
page 253

View PDF version of this page

places where a portcullis once descended. Then the passage widened into an open cavern of masonry, as big as a baronial hall, and at the end of this was the interior of the town like a picture. Facing me in the foreground was. a poverty-stricken café, with a porch in front of it, supported on tottering columns and festooned with onions. To the left a lane, narrow, dirty, and tortuous, lost itself amongst a collection of hovels. To the right, built against the towers that reared their masses over me, was a little house in ruins, with the plaster of its rooms show-ing ; and beyond it I saw beginning the long lines of the ramparts. Between the ramparts and the café was a gap, littered with rubbish, which seemed to give access to some open space beyond. I passed through it. A paved incline led me up to a bastion, and from thence I saw something of what the town, as a whole, was. I saw that about a quarter of it was occupied by a drowsy village, rudely built of stones that had once been parts of palaces ; and above the sea of their miserable mud roofs rose two great churches, one of them evidently a cathedral. As for the rest of what I have called a town, so far as I could see from that spot, it was a desert. In all directions the grass was growing, on soil uneven and mounded with fallen and shapeless buildings ; hillocks of grey stones were scattered about like hay-cocks, and amongst them, here and there, was a palm tree, or group of palm trees, watching by the dead like their brothers in far Palmyra. But what 250 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

View PDF version of this page


  Previous First Next