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Selected and rare materials, excerpts and observations from ancient, medieval and contemporary authors, travelers and researchers about Cyprus.
 
 
 
 
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MALLOCK W.
In an enchanted island
page 69

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first rise in the ground, walls, houses, and minarets were completely hidden from our view. Meanwhile the sky, which had been cloudless all the morning, had grown dim, as it does in an ill-tempered May in Eng-land, and in half an hour or so, on a bleak open moor, rain spat in our faces, and thickened into a driving shower. This naturally did not increase my complaisance. All the same, however, I could not help being conscious of the wild purple colours that were settling down over everything, and the mobile way in which level and rocky ridge all about me took the complexion of storm. At last the prospect was relieved by a definite feature, a grove of trees near the road, with some cottages crouching under them. I asked what the place was, and I was told it was the settlement of the lepers. I felt that at all events there was some consolation in that ; a foreign feeling at once stole into the rain. A little beyond this we turned off the road, and followed a faint footpath over a series of stony ridges. This brought us to a sloping mud-built village, with a huge public rubbish heap, and a little Greek church beside it. The walls of the cottages and their precincts were oddly like those in Devonshire, only a glimpse into a farm-yard showed arched colonnades and orange trees. By-and-by we descended over a dip in the hill on a luxuriant palm garden, surrounding and hiding a house, in which lived a mysterious Turkish lady ; and farther on, beyond a stretch of level ground, we saw before us one of those isolated eminences which had GO IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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