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38 Excursion from Larnaca to Nicosia [CH. V an exclusive right to keep pigs : in other places however the prohibition is not strictly observed. Two hours and a half later you reach, in the middle of a broad plain, the village Athene. This too has a Greek church, and its convenient situation on the road from Larnaca to the capital keeps it a populous place, for all muleteers and travellers make it their halting place. The country round grows corn and oats, with clumps of mulberry trees. Leaving Athene you see on the left two villages, one Petrofani which is inhabited and cultivated, the other Pallio-Canuti now ruined. On the same side lies the village of St George, and on the right Margo, where the land is fertile but neglected. The next village, Piroi, is well tilled; its mulberry trees and cotton fields reap the benefit of a neighbouring torrent. You cross this, and along a long stretch of road you find red jasper and agate mixed with common stones. Then on the left follow three villages not far from one another, Aghia Parascevghi, Alagichieri and Aglangià, all inhabited and cultivated. Others, which I need not specify, are seen in the distance. They generally show Greek churches, and the usual clumps of mulberry trees, but the trees are fewer than they were of old. The mulberry trees in Cyprus are planted, as in Syria, in regular order, and at equal distances one from the other, so as to make a square grove composed of two, three and even five thousand trees. The crown is kept at a little more than three braccia from the ground, and the circumference at a braccio and a half. They have no chance of growing taller, because every year when they gather the leaves for their silk worms they cut the branches. Nor do they allow them to get old, and to allow of their being cut down when their leaves begin to fail, they take early care to plant between them other small shoots, to take the place of the trees that grow weak. All the care they need is to be watered daily in summer, and to this end they lead channels between the rows, whence the water flows into hollows dug round each tree.

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