The Road to Oxiana Read Online Free

him for a letter to the clergy of Kiti. His attendants were disobliging; for the Church leads the opposition to the English, and they could hardly have known I had spoken for their cause in the English press. But the Archbishop, though old and deaf, seemed pleased to have a visitor, and caused the letter to be typewritten by a secretary. When it was done, they brought him a pen ready dipped in red ink, and with this he signed it, in virtue of a privilege granted by the Emperor Zeno in the Vth century: “+Cyril of Cyprus”. The secular Governors of the island have since usurped this privilege. The Turkish ones did so to annoy, the English to be picturesque.
    I went to Bella Paese this morning, to see the abbey. My chauffeur went to see his fiancée, who lives in the adjacent village. She and her aunt gave me coffee and a preserve of sugared walnuts. We sat on a balcony, surrounded as ever by pots of basil and carnations, and looking down across the village roofs to the sea. The aunt’s son, aged two, kept pushing chairs about and yelling “I’m a steamer, I’m a motor-car”. When the real motor-car, with me in it, left, he broke into a howl of disappointment, which followed me down the mountain.
    This afternoon, at the castle, a gentleman wearing a white topee and white beard was pointed out to me as Mr. Jeffery. Since he was responsible for the antiquities of the island, I introduced myself. He recoiled. I tried to make amends by mentioning his book on the sieges of Kyrenia. “I’ve written many things”, he replied. “I can’t possibly remember what. Butsometimes, you know, I read them, and I find them
quite interesting
.”
    We proceeded to the castle, where we found some convicts engaged in desultory excavation. As we appeared, they threw down their spades, threw off their clothes, and ran out of a side door into the sea for their afternoon swim. “A pleasant life”, said Mr. Jeffery. “They only come here when they want a rest.” He produced a plan of the XIIIth-century foundations, as revealed by the convicts’ digging. But exposition made him dry, and we went to the office for a drink of water. “The worst of water is,” he said, “it makes you so thirsty.”
    Kyrenia
,
August 30th
.—Mounted on a chocolate-coloured donkey with ears eighteen inches long, I rode up to St. Hilarion’s Castle. At the walls we tethered the donkey, and also its fellow brute, a grey mule bearing cold water in a massive clay amphora stopped with carob leaves. Precipitous paths and flights of steps led up through chapels, halls, cisterns, dungeons, to the topmost platform and its sentinel tower. Below the gleaming silver crags and stunted green-feathered pines, the mountain fell three thousand feet to the coastal plain, an endless panorama of rusty red speckled with myriads of little trees and their shadows, beyond which, sixty miles away across the blue sea, appeared the line of Asia Minor and the Taurus Mountains. Even sieges must have had their compensations when solaced by such a view.
    Nicosia
(
500 ft
.),
August 31st
.—“Mishap necessitates delay one week so arriving Beyrut fourteenth have informed Christopher stop car not plant at fault.”
    This gives me an extra week. I shall spend it inJerusalem. “Plant”, I suppose, means the charcoal apparatus. Considering the cost of telegraphing, I can only assume this doesn’t work. Otherwise, why bother to deny it?
    Long ago, at the Greek Legation in London, I was introduced to a nervous boy in a long robe, who was holding a glass of lemonade. This was His Beatitude Mar Shimun, Patriarch of the Assyrians; and since he is now an exile in Cyprus, I went to call on him this morning at the Crescent Hotel. A sturdy bearded figure in flannel trousers greeted me in accents peculiar to the English universities (Cambridge in his case). I offered my condolences. He turned to recent