MR. MALLOCK'S "CYPRUS."*
THIS is a charming book, revealing in Mr. Mallock most unusual power for that kind of description which suggests much more than it actually describes. Mr. Mallock deals in no figures, and exceedingly few "facts ;" he gives only two or three stories, and he adheres strictly to his own adventures, which are of the most ordinary kind; but gradually, as he proceeds, the haze over the island lifts, and the reader sees Cyprus as it is,—a little land, not twice the size of Suffolk, essentially Asiatic and not European in climate and condi- tions; full of mountains 7,000 ft. high, and rich plains, thirsty only for the water they possessed when the hill-forests were uncut; with a small population (185,000), of many creeds, races, and languages ; beautiful beyond compare, though always suggesting beauty in decay, the very plains and mountains languishing for human help in the way of planting and hydraulics; and covered from end to end with the debris of five civilisations, the Greek, the Byzantine, the Arab, the Crusader, and the Turk, all of which have left monu- ments such as, in the first four cases, are the joy and the despair of architects and artists. So good is Mr. Mallock's art, so complete the impression he can convey, that the reader tastes the very flavour of the island,—feels its strange relation to the history of two continents, and realises the existence of a place which at one and the same time sug- gests medimval England and the depths of Western Asia. This feat is accomplished by sheer dint of writing, writing usually simple and straightforward, but of a rare suggestiveness. Mr. Mallock, for example, wishes first of all to bring home to us that the island is so near Asia Minor as to be almost part of it, and this is the way in which he impresses us with that first condition of Cyprus. He is looking across at the snow- clad mountains of the mainland :— " The Asian coast, when I came to reflect longer about it, recalled to me what I believe are facts, almost as strange as dreams. For the country behind, and under those great snow mountains that were opposite to me, is literally to this day a country of unexhausted mysteries. Wonderful cities of the superbest days of Rome still exist there, in the hearts of un- trodden forests, of which some have been visited only by single travellers, some never visited at all, but only seen from a distance. whilst some are known of only by rumour and local legend. Even on routes which, comparatively speaking, are familiar, the un- expected is always lying in wait for one. Obscure Turkish villages stand upon broken palaces ; and passing guests in rude reed-thatched hovels have discovered that the roofs rested on columns of verd antique. On lonely mountain roads detached masses of rock are found cut into towers, with sepulchral chambers on the summit ; and by the road-side in one gorge is a great Roman sarcophagus, with a winged lion in marble, keeping guard over the lid."
Rather imaginative, did you say P We suspect Mr. Malloek oould give written evidence for every sentence, and certainly he could for his chief assertion, for the English official with whom he was living at Kyrcenia, and whom he calls Mr. St. John, having occasion to make some extensive domestic improvements, was asked to buy the ruins of Roman cities on the coast, as the cheapest quarries to be found anywhere !— " He told me that he had taken the advice of several natives as to how stone for building could be procured most easily ; and the advice given him had in every case been as follows—to buy house- property on the Asian coast opposite, to pull down the houses, and ship the stones to Kyrenia. It appeared that what his advisers meant was this—that on the coast opposite there were ancient Roman towns, desolate as Pompeii, but apparently less dilapidated; that the ruins could be bought for a song, and, though fit for nothing else, were the best material in the world for building cheap pig-styes. My informant added, 'I have every reason to believe that such towns do really exist. A year or two ago I had here a Scotch mason and carpenter, and took them to the opposite coast with me for a cruise in a Greek caique. On that occasion I went nowhere on shore myself, but these men did at one place, in the neighbourhood of which there was said to be a ruined city. They came back to the vessel in the evening, telling me that the whole of the day they had been walking
• In as Enchanted Island. By W. H. Mallock. London : Bentley and Bon.
amongst friezes and architraves, columns, and plinths, and capitals—a wilderness of old carved marble."
That is not only valuable information in itself, but it brings home the true relation between Cyprus and the mainland as long pages of argument would fail to do.
Every page of the book teems with that kind of allusive art, to the present writer at least most attractive, and we are puzzled to decide to which part of it to draw our readers' attention. Those reviewers probably understand English taste best who have fixed on the descriptions of medievalism, such as that of the Castle of St. /Marion, hung by some Byzantine, with unlimited command of slave-labour, on a crag which slopes for 2,500 ft. almost sheer down to the sea, and rebuilt by Richard the Lion-Hearted, a true castle in the air, with towers and battlements, and a colossal cistern placed upon a jutting crag, and "Queen Berengaria's Lodging :"—" She took me into the court, and I saw—what I had not before noticed—a wide external staircase, by which this upper story was reached. We ascended the weather-worn stairs, which yet had mouldings on their edge, and reached the broken floor of these broken upper chambers,. Overlooking the precipice there still remained several of the beautiful windows by which they once were lighted. The mullion of one and the tracery above it were entire; the others reared in the air nothing but branching fragments but each retained entire two stone seats in the recess formed by it in the thick- ness of the wall, and in one of these recesses Mrs. St. John and I sat down. Leaning from the window, I examined the face of the rock. So broken and irregular was this that in many places the walls rested on arches flung across rifts and chasms. The masonry seemed like a chamois leaping from crag to crag, and the whole place for a moment or two was like one of those dreams which end with the sleeper falling from some frightful and unimaginable height." To the present writer, however, the interest seems deeper in an account of a cycle through which Cyprus passed when for three hundred years it was ruled by the Lusignans—descendants of Guy de Lusignan, successful adventurer in war and love, who in 1186 married Sybille, Queen of Jerusalem, and when dethroned, purchased Cyprus of Cceur de Lion—and when, as the last stopping- place of the Crusaders, and depot and banking-house of the trade between Asia and Europe, the island was full of wealth and luxury :— "Of all dynasties known to European history, the career and the position of this is incomparably the most romantic. It repre- sented more than a mere vanishing conquest. In it the chivalry of the West was rapidly acclimatised to the East, and took, like some transplanted flower, new and unknown colours from it. Its counts and its barons, of French and of English ancestry, settled down over the length and breadth of the island, and kept their feudal state amongst spice-gardens and silken luxury. The peasantry never were displaced, nor was the Greek religion inter- fered with ; but side by side with the plain Greek basilicas rose Gothic churches with windows of elaborate tracery. Marvellous abbeys like Fountains, Bolton, or Kirkstall, in distant nooks hid themselves amongst oleanders ; and castles like Alnwick or like Bamborongh reared their clustering towers on the mountain-tops. But civilisation there was not merely at home in fOrtresses. The nobles, like those of Italy, inhabited the towns also.; and Nicosia in particular became a city of palaces. Coats of arms familiar to Western heraldry surmounted the street-doors, and covered the monuments in the cathedral. The streets in the fourteenth century were alive with gorgeous retinues—with ladies ou'horses, whose housings glanced with jewels, and knights in velvet bonnets, and mantles clasped with gold. In some of the households were as many as two hundred retainers. In the markets were the finest wines, and the rarest and most delicate provisions._ Jcerin the heats of summer was on sale always; and the monopoly of it yielded a handsome revenue to the State. In the jewellers shrws were treasures unrivalled throughout the world, and the rich bazaars exhaled the perfumes of the farthest East. Outside the gates, where the wide plains extended, gay and gallant parties would daily ride out hawking. Farther off, near the woods where Adonis died, and where the Wild boars still roamed, hounds were kept by the nobles, with huntsmen in brilliant liveries; and the notes of the horn were daily sounding amongst the valleys. And surrounding and penetrating this pageant of Western mediEeval life was the local colour and flavour, not only of an alien, Christianity, but, stranger 'still, of old classical paganism. In, the recesses of the forests were still to be seen gleaming the milk- white columns of many a deserted temple, where the old deities were still believed to linger, metamorphosed into saints or demons. The air was haunted with traditions of Venus. Holy hermits praying high in mountain grottos found that the hills were hollow, and that within was the .Goddess of the Morsel."
And next to this in interest, we should rank the account of the wonderful city of Famagusta, where within the battle- mentecl walls, still perfect, and 50 ft. high by 27 ft. thick,
stands "a flock of churches still almost entire;" or the de- scription of modern Nlkosia, the capital, a medley of churches and mosques, yet the most Oriental of cities, where the bazaar is covered, like that of Cairo, and yields scene after scene like this :--
"At the end of this street was the meeting-place of several others. They were all covered in one way or another, some with tattered awnings of canvas or coarse matting, which made stripes above one of blackness and blinding sky, some with stone vaulting, and some with a trellis-work of vines. One was the street of drapers, and this we entered first. It seemed, as one looked down it, to flutter from end to end with gay-coloured triumphal flags, which were really stuffs for sale—veils, gorgeous handkerchiefs, and beautiful native silks. The shops themselves were for the most part vaulted, and looked like a series of chapels with one wall wanting. The dark interiors of some were piled high with goods; others revealed in operation the processes of primitive manufac- ture. Here would be three men stitching the shaggy capotes of the shepherds ; here another, shaping red fez caps over gleaming copper moulds ; and here on a low platform, jutting a little into the roadway, a Nubian boy lying almost flat on his stomach, and quilting a coverlet of brilliant white and purple. And at the entrance of every shop was—I was going to say the shopkeeper, but the name sounds fax too modern—it is better to say the merchant. Here was an almond-eyed Greek twitching with grimaces and vivacity ; there an old Turk squatting superbly calm, like a wax figure moving to show clockwork, alternately sucking at the amber mouthpiece of his chibouk and stretching a hand with a huge turquoise ring on it over a chafing-dish of live charcoal, looking as if, for him, customers had no existence."
Or this :—
" And through these shadowy ways, from early morning to dusk, the most motley throng kept moving. Greeks and Ar- menians, in dark, tight-fitting clothing, jostled their way amongst turbans and flowing robes, amongst blue and green and orange colour. Old crones, with silvery hair and faces creased like medlars, tottered along with baskets on their feeble heads ; by them went girls, tall and with heads erect, on which were sup- ported jars brimming with water ; and slowly gliding in and out of the crowd were veiled Turkish women, muffled in white like ghosts, showing nothing but the gleam of their dark eyes, and attended sometimes by a negro black as ebony. Occasionally the mass would be pressed together and parted by a patriarch with a beard of snow solemnly enthroned on a donkey between coloured saddle-bags ; and occasionally through the reluctantly formed opening a cart would come, drawn by bullocks, with their huge horns swaying. Then, as one watched and waited, other sights would reveal themselves. Little brown-legged boys would skip by with trays of coffee, which the cafes sent out to the shops ; and bakers' men would appear, going more circumspectly, carrying on their heads long trays like planks, each with its row of loaves smelling fresh from the oven."
It is almost unfair to extract so much, but we have been embarrassed with riches—take, for instance, the account of a prison in Nikosia, filled up, like every other prison in Cyprus, with murderers, for the beautiful island is, of all earth, the chosen home of the demon of bloodthirstiness—and have wished to convey to our readers some idea of the charm of the best book of travels of a kind that we have read for years. It belongs to the category in which EOthen is perhaps supreme, the books of travel which delight the litterateur and not the statist, and which supplement poems rather than blue-books. They are not as useful as the other books, but they may perhaps survive them, just as the story of Nathan has survived the census-tables on which David's officers must have looked so fondly as monuments of accurate official labour. Read the Enchanted Island when you have perfect leisure, carefully skip three or four references to modern democracy, be blind to perhaps two pages of artificial sentiment or real sentiment artificially expressed, and we can promise you, 0 bete noire of Mudie's clerks, one day at least in which you will not count the hours.
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