The Road to Oxiana Read Online Free Page B

camels led by a Turk in baggy trousers. A small depression is occupied by two Turkish women, cooking something beneath a fig tree. Beyond them starts the town, a medley of little houses, some of mud, some of stones ravished from the monuments, some of new white stucco roofed in red. There is no plan, no regard for amenity. Palms stand up among the houses; allotments surround them. And out of this confusion tower the crockets and buttresses of a Gothic cathedral, whose orange-coloured stone cuts across the distant union of sky and sea, turquoise and sapphire. A range of lilac mountains continues the coastline on the left. A ship steams out of harbour towards it. A bullock-cart emerges from the ground at my feet. The camels lie down. And a lady in a pink frock and picture-hat is gazing sentimentally in the direction of Nicosia from the top of the next tower but one.
    Larnaca
,
September 3rd
.—The hotel here is not up tostandard. Elsewhere they are clean, tidy, and above all cheap. The food is not delicious; but even English occupation has been unable to change Greek cooking for the worse. There are some good wines. And the water is sweet.
    I drove out to Kiti, eight miles away, where the priest and sacristan, both wearing baggy trousers and high boots, received the Archbishop’s letter with respect. They took me to the church, whose mosaic is a beautiful work; its technique seems to me of the Xth century, though others ascribe it to the VIth. The Virgin’s robe is smoky mauve, almost charcoal-coloured. The angels beside her wear draperies of white, grey, and buff; and the green of their peacock wings is repeated on the green globes they hold. Faces, hands, and feet are done in smaller cubes than the rest. The whole composition has an extraordinary rhythm. Its dimensions are small, not more than life-size, and the church is so low that the vault containing it can be examined from as near as ten feet.
    S.s. “Martha Washington”
,
September 4th
.—I found Christopher on the pier, adorned with a kempt but reluctant beard five days old. He has heard nothing from the Charcoal-Burners, but welcomes the prospect of Jerusalem.
    There are 900 passengers on board. Christopher took me a tour of the third-class quarters. Had their occupants been animals, a good Englishman would have informed the R.S.P.C.A. But the fares are cheap; and being Jews, one knows they could all pay more if they wanted. The first class is not much better. I share a cabin with a French barrister, whose bottles and fopperies leave no room for another pin. He lectured meon the English cathedrals. Durham was worth seeing. “As for the rest, my dear sir, they are mere plumbing.”
    At dinner, finding myself next an Englishman, I opened conversation by hoping he had had a fine passage.
    He replied: “Indeed we have. Goodness and mercy have followed us throughout”.
    A tired woman struggled by, leading an unruly child. I said: “I always feel so sorry for women travelling with children”.
    â€œI can’t agree with you. To me, little children are as glints of sunshine.”
    I saw the creature later, reading a Bible in a deck-chair. This is what Protestants call a missionary.
    PALESTINE
:
Jerusalem
(2800
ft
.),
September 6th
.—A Nicaraguan leper would have fared better with the port authorities of a British Mandate than we did yesterday. They came on board at 5 A.M. After waiting two hours in a queue, they asked me how I could land without a visa and when my passport was not even endorsed for Palestine. I said I could buy a visa, and explained that the system of endorsement was merely one of the cruder forms of dishonesty practised by our Foreign Office, which had no real bearing on the validity of a passport. Another busybody then discovered I had been to Russia. When? and why? O, for pleasure was it? Was it pleasurable? And where was I going now? To Afghanistan? Why? Pleasure again, indeed. I was on a