View PDF version of this page

LARNACA ONCE MORE 279 Byzantine church, standing in a court, surrounded by white cloisters. Within were the gorgeous screen and the glittering chandeliers to which ray eye had already grown accustomed, and there was a little cellar in the rock, somewhere below the chancel, in which, by the light of a nickering tallow candle, the sexton showed me the second tomb of Lazarus. Out-side, in a'corner of the surrounding enclosure, were other tombs of a less equivocal character—marble slabs, enriched with bodiless cherubs, which looked as if they had strayed from a parish church in Eng-land. This strong resemblance was neither fanciful nor fortuitous, for these were the tombs of such English consuls and merchants as had lived and died at Larnaca during the last and the preceding century. Having seen all this I was next taken through the bazaar, picturesque in its squalid way, but uninteresting after that of Nicosia. Then we ad-journed to the esplanade by the sea, along which I had taken my first walk in Cyprus, when Scotty was guiding me to the scene of my first breakfast in it. The place to me now wore a very different aspect. The mixture of Gothic arches and flat Oriental roofs had come by this time to have a familiar meaning to me ; but the difference I was conscious of did not lie only in that. Larnaca, the first time I saw it, was the threshold of what was remote, and strange, and ancient ; now it was the threshold of everything that was familiar, and modern, and prosaic; and the life that I had so

View PDF version of this page