e enormous harbor to a black craft, the _Diana_, which had just
arrived from Trieste, and which by way of Port Said and Jaffa brought us
in four days to Beyrout. There, after a day of sightseeing, we had tea
with the English consul, whose house was very like a mosque. Milner and
St. Aubyn were to sleep that night at a hotel and start for Damascus
next morning by diligence. I returned to the ship alone, and I found
myself twelve hours later looking at Cyprus from the open roadstead of
Larnaca.

I remained in the island for something like three months, as the guest
of Sir Henry, Colonel Warren, and other British officials. A year or so
afterward I recorded my experiences in a short book called _In an
Enchanted Island_. It will here be enough to summarize the various
impressions and experiences which are there described in detail.

My impression on landing was one of half-forlorn disappointment. The
winter that year in Europe was the coldest within living memory. Even
the air of Cyprus had something in it not far from frost, and the
treeless hills seemed blighted by the clouded and inhospitable sky. But
a day like this proved to be a rare exception. Cyprus, as I knew it in
the winter, was for the most part a land of what Englishmen mean by a
late spring or an early summer when they dream of it. The evenings were
chilly, but the days were warm and shining. They were sometimes, though
not often, too warm for refreshment. The greens of the trees glittered,
the mountains were scarred with purple, and the midday shadows of
arcades were sharp as chiseled jet. My first host, Colonel Warren, had
his home in Nicosia, a town in the middle of the island, and twenty
miles from the sea. Nicosia lies in a great inland plain, and, as seen
from the hilly road which slopes slowly down to it from the south, it
resembles the pictures of Damascus with which all the world is familiar.
Nicosia, however, has one feature which is in Damascus wanting. Among a
forest of minarets is a great cathedral, used as a mosque since the days
of the Turkish conquest, but built in the Middle Ages by Christian kings
of the house of Guy de Lusignan. The town is a maze of lanes, to which
ancient houses turn unwindowed walls, broken only by doors whose high,
pointed arches often bear above them the relics of crusading heraldry,
and give access to cloistered courts, the splash of secret fountains,
and rockwork gay with violets. In a house thus secluded, and entered