Accidents of an antiquary's life

[Illustration]

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[Illustration: FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898).

Frontispiece. ]

Accidents Of An Antiquary’S Life

By D. G. Hogarth

Author Of ‘A Wandering Scholar,’ Etc.

WITH FORTY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR AND HIS COMPANIONS

Macmillan And Co., Limited St. Martin’S Street, London 1910

Glasgow: Printed At The University Press By Robert Maclehose And Co. Ltd.

Preface

Among many companions in these accidents who are not named in the text, lest the book should become a string of names, I have to thank five especially because they have allowed me to use photographs taken when we were together. These are Mr. Alison V. Armour, owner of the “Utowana,” Mr. Richard Norton, a comrade during the cruise of that yacht and at Siut and in Syria, Messrs. A. W. Van Buren and C. D. Curtis, members of the yachting party, and Mr. J. A. R. Munro, who endured many things with me in Asia Minor in 1891. Four others, Dr. A. C. Headlam, who was the third of Sir W. M. Ramsay’s party in 1890, Mr. B. Christian, my companion in Thessaly before the Graeco-Turkish war broke out, Mr. J. G. C. Anderson, who cruised with me to Lycia in 1897, and Mr. A. E. Henderson, who did loyal service at Ephesus, I cannot forbear to name. I have also to express thanks to the proprietors and editors of three magazines, the _Monthly_, _Cornhill_, and _Macmillan’s_, for their kind consent to my using, in five chapters of this book, the second to the sixth, parts of articles which appeared in their issues prior to 1905. Finally, my friend and critic, Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher, who read this book in proof, knows how greatly I am beholden to him.

D. G. H.

Oxford, 1909.

Contents

Chapter Page

Introductory

Apology Of An Apprentice 1

I. An Interlude 21

II. Lycia 43

III. Crete 66

IV. Nile Fens 91

V. The Satalian Gulf 108

VI. Cyrene 123

VII. Digging 142

VIII. The Sajur 160

List Of Illustrations

Page

FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898) _Frontispiece_

The White Cliffs Of Hierapolis 6

The Valley Of The Pontic Lycus At Sunrise 18

A Wrecked Moslem Village Of Crete 25

Lycian Tombs 48

The Theatre Of Myra 49

The Reputed Tomb Of St. Nicholas At Myra 52

The Sand-Choked Theatre Of Patara 54

The Despoiled Harpy Tomb 62

Blackened Stumps And Pits 67

Sponge Boats In Zakro Bay 79

A Bridal Bower At Gaif 92

An Old Fen Village 99

The Lone Convent Of Gemiana 100

A Fen Fisherman 102

The Northernmost Hamlet 105

Camels Loading At Baltim 106

Half Buried Palm-Forest, Baltim 107

The Utowana At Cnidus 108

Phaselis And Takhtaly 113

The Theatre Of Aspendus 118

In The Theatre Of Aspendus 119

Turks In The Corridor At Aspendus 120

The Theatre Of Sidé 121

The Rock Road From Apollonia To Cyrene 126

Tombs Of Cyrene 127

The Mudir Of Cyrene 129

The Apollo Fountain 133

Bedawis Of The Beni Haasa 135

Apollonia In Storm 138

Rigging The Great Pump At Ephesus 150

The Treasure Spot And Pumps 151

A Sealed Grave-Door 155

Models Of Servants At Their Work Beside A Coffin 158

Euphrates From The Mound Of Carchemish 160

The Sajur Valley At Sunset From Tell Bashar 164

Tell Ahmar Across Euphrates 171

A Euphratean Ferry 173

Hittite Inscription At Tell Ahmar 174

Fallen Lion Of Shalmaneser II. At Tell Ahmar 175

Introductory.

Apology Of An Apprentice.

And ta’en the--_Antiquarian trade_ I think they call it.

_Burns._

I will not take the name of Antiquary without apology, and hereby, _liberandi animam meam causa_, make it in an Introductory, to be passed over if the reader pleases. Your true Antiquary is born, not made. Sometimes an infirmity or awkwardness of body, which has disposed a boy to shun the pursuits of his fellows, may help to detach the man for the study of forgotten far off things; but it is essential that there be inborn in him the type of mind which is more curious of the past than the present, loves detail for its own sake, and cares less for ends than means.

Nevertheless, accident may make an Antiquary, as good as another, out of anybody whose boyish education has given him, willy nilly, some knowledge of the elder world. Let him be thrown, for example, in early manhood, much into lands whose ancient monuments conspicuously exalt the past at the expense of the present. The necessary curiosity can grow within him, disposing his mind to study antiquarian detail as a duty, and, in time, a pleasure; and through apprenticeship he may learn and love the trade to which he was not born.

I claim to be no better than this Antiquary made, and made none too soon. Nothing disposed me to the trade in early years. If I was taken as a child to minsters and abbeys, I endured their chill aisles in lively hope of a pastrycook to come, and at our oldest Public School had no feeling for the grey Gothic austerities among which live the Foundationers, of whose number I was not. Nor was it until half my Oxford course had been run that I discovered curiosity about any ancient thing, and that curiosity was far from antiquarian. Scholar of my College though I was, I had been better known as a freshman for a gamester in a small way than for anything else; but some study was forced upon me, and in the course of it I happened on Mommsen’s panegyric of Caesar. The charm of guessing ancient motives from the records of ancient deeds fascinated me--there is much in the pursuit to appeal to a gambler--and I resolved to attempt a speculative biography of some great man. Looking about me for another imperial figure, I fixed, greatly daring, on Alexander the Great, foreswore cards and the course, and stepped out of the strict lists of the schools into the field of Macedonian history. The spacious world over which Alexander moved fired my imagination and stirred a lust for discovery. As a child my keenest joy was to announce the finding of an untrodden way in the outskirts of a Lincolnshire townlet, and my best remembered grief was to learn that it was already known and named.

I could write a good deal about Macedonians when I went into the Schools, but barely enough on other matters to win salvation; and if I was made presently a tutor and fellow of my College, it was less for my actual scholarship than for hope of its future. I found academic life not greatly to my liking at that age, and when an endowment for scholarly travel abroad was set for competition, I entered in forlorn hope of escape. To the equal surprise of others, I was chosen among better scholars, and found myself in a quandary. If I was to research abroad as a classical scholar, I wished to explore Alexander’s steps; but to go up alone into Asia was beyond my means. A friend, who knew my difficulty, told me that William Martin Ramsay, the well-known traveller in Asia Minor, needed an apprentice. Asia Minor was not Persia, but it was Asia, and fair field for a pioneer. I offered myself, and was accepted, but on the sole condition, that I made some preliminary study at the newly-founded Archaeological School in Athens. I knew nothing of Greek archaeology, having never during six years entered the Museum of my own Oxford; and thus, at an age when most archaeologists are past masters of some branch of their trade, I had to begin apprenticeship. Perhaps it may interest some to hear by what accidents an antiquary of a sort was made out of a wandering scholar.

* * * * *

I went to Athens early in 1887, as raw a neophyte as ever entered Academe. The British School, then in its first youth, was not yet assured of its place in the local republic of science, and held little converse with other Schools. The famous Antiquary who directed it could have guided better, though not more gladly, a student of Attic architecture than a would-be explorer of Asia, and the library held few books, though, heaven knows, enough that I had not read. My one fellow-student helped me much, and would have helped me more, had I been in the temper to learn. But I had come to Athens as a man should not, if he is to love her--come without trained taste for the ancient art, which is her only wealth, and without instinctive reverence for her soil. I gaped at her monuments like any other tourist, though with less than the common understanding, fled from German lectures on her topography, and took refuge in studying her inscriptions as students of history will who are brought unworthy into the presence of her art. For pastime, beside visiting a few neighbouring spots of which I knew not enough to find them interesting, I roamed mean streets and dusty suburbs, regretting the world I had left, and longing for another in the east, with a prospect of Asiatic travel for my sole comfort.

Two months passed drearily, and I escaped to Macedonia. The rickety vessel broke down for the third time at the second sunrise, and, wakened by the stoppage, I climbed sleepily on deck to find myself in a world of fog. A sudden gleam pierced the mist: I turned to see a patch of heaven, and in it, immeasurably high, one hard rose-red cloud. “_Olympe!_” said a deck hand. The peak stood revealed a moment only; but I had seen the seat of the Gods.

Salonica, _sale unique_, as the skipper punned, received me for ten days, and, with its camel-trains and Jews, black-bearded and cruel-eyed as men that kill prophets offered a foretaste of the East. It was in days before the railway had come down the Vardar valley and before the Great Fire, and the town, packed more close than now into its frame of white wall, was more odorous, less Italianized, less passable. Under the aegis of a Turk-loving Consul I hunted inscriptions in alleys and courts and stone-cutters’ yards and the purlieus of an unreformed _konak_, and, beginning to feel the explorer’s itch, would go up to Vodhena to find what might be left of Aegae; but Consul and Pasha forbade lest another Briton be captured by the bands that had taken Synge and Souttar. I was too innocent then to discount official fears, still believing, indeed, that one should walk, revolver on hip, even in Salonica streets; and in the end I proposed no more than to drive to the site of Pella. I went off with a young consular assistant and a guard, rumbling along, gensdarmes to right and gensdarmes to left, as I should never journey again in Turkey. There were soldiers at the coffee-halts, soldiers at the _khans_, soldiers guarding the bridge which crossed the slow-turning eddies of the Vardar, and soldiers holding Yenije, where astute bugs, who found saucers of water barring their usual access, painfully climbed the leprous walls and dropped from ceiling to pillow. The Yenije gravestones are mostly blocks brought from Pella, and on the site of the ancient city itself lie others, with two fragments of fluted Doric shafts, near a fountain still called Pel. For the rest, Pella has vanished as though it had never been. Out of dusty undulating fields; out of half a dozen barrows; out of a low marshy plain to west and south; out of a glorious horseshoe of hills with the snowy saddle of Olympus at one horn--out of these you must conjure your vision of Philip’s home.

It was the middle of May when I was free of Athens, and, passing over to Smyrna, found Ramsay about to start. A third member of the party arrived two days later, an adventurous fellow who had spent part of his youth in Albania and Montenegro, and, knowing little of ancient things, cared less, so he had a good horse to ride and an unknown track to follow. The apparatus of travel, which we gathered at Smyrna, was of the simplest,--a single tent and a few pots and pans, but no canned stores; and two simple villagers were hired to serve us. The qualifications of the one chosen to cook became manifest on the second night in camp. We had left railhead at Seraikeuy, and ridden up the Lycus valley to the foot of the white cliffs of Hierapolis. Mehmet bought a turkey of the peasants of Pambuk Kalessi, and was bidden to have it ready for the next night’s supper. Early on the morrow we went up to the site, and all that day, under a broiling sun and among some of the best preserved Roman tombs in Asia Minor, I entered on an arduous apprenticeship to the best epigraphist in Europe. Sharpset at nightfall we hurried down expectant of our turkey. Mehmet sat placid, the bird at his feet. It was a corpse, indeed, but no more, not even a plucked one. “What am I to do with this?” said Mehmet.

He learned better as time went on; but throughout that journey we had little except sodden messes to eat, faring worse than any traveller need fare. It was partly because our leader cared little what he ate, but more because, like his followers, he journeyed on a slender purse. Ramsay had made to himself a European reputation as an explorer of Asia Minor at a cost which another man would think scarcely sufficient for the tour of Germany; and it had become his principle, as, for similar reasons it has become Petrie’s, to suffer none but the barest means to his end. If both have pushed their practice to exceeding discomfort, both have taught several young Britons how little is necessity and how much superfluity: and it is not the least of my many debts to Ramsay that I gained in my first tour of exploration the will and the capacity to go farther at less cost than perhaps anyone but my master.

[Illustration: THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS.]

This part of my education had begun at once: for while we were still in Smyrna, Ramsay, wanting information about two sites lying north of the Aidin railway, had suggested that I should visit them alone, all raw as I was, and rejoin him at railhead. Feeling like a boy packed off to his first school, I agreed, and took the train to Nazli. I knew very little Greek, and less Turkish, but the Nazli stationmaster, christened Achilles, was reported to speak my tongue. He so far justified his fame as to greet me, stranded forlorn on the tracks, with “How you do, my boy?” When my Oxford manner had readjusted itself, we conversed sufficiently in French; and he found me a dancing stallion and sent me off astride a deep and angular military saddle with my knees level with my hips, the centre of a curvetting escort of the youth of Nazli. My first site proved to be a large hillock once surrounded by walls, and still bearing ruins of Roman baths, towards which an aqueduct straggled across the valley. It certainly looked like the ancient Mastaura which I had come out to see; and all doubt was soon settled by an inscription of that town which, on my return, I found built into a church wall at Nazli, and copied as best I might. After a sleepless night, stiff, sore, and with less skin than had left Smyrna, I went to the second site, and thence, proud but thankful, took train to railhead.

When our modest caravan had left Hierapolis, it wandered awhile on either bank of the upper Maeander, sometimes dropping a thousand feet to the stream, but for the most part keeping the high ground. The land flowed with milk and honey if not much else, and I learned the grave courtesy of the Anatolian peasant. Twice we were called to shelter from the noonday sun in the portico of a mosque, and whatever the _ayan_, patron of strangers in that ordered village society, could procure of the best, was set before us. Our main purpose was to find inscriptions, and I was taught by precept and example how a villager may be induced to guide an inquisitive _giaur_ into the recesses of his _haremlik_, or grub up the headstone of his forefather, or even saw away the floor of his mosque. But it was not always plain sailing; and how we used the wisdom of the serpent, and what reward was ours at one Maeander village, Badinlar, I have told already in another book.

I soon became interested in the simple arts of antiquarian travel, the seeking, the copying, the noting, the measuring, and the mapping, but it was some time before I could practise them in any comfort. The food or the climate, or both, caused at the first severe saddle-boils, for whose easing there were no long halts. To a rider in such plight it means much if his horse trip on stony tracks, lash out at his fellow, plunge and burst his girths in a bog, incontinently roll on a chance sandpatch, or calmly sit down in a ford to cool his haunches. A sorry steed, bought in my innocence at eight pounds English, and dear at two, introduced me to each and all of these packhorse tricks. But the spacious landscapes, the dry warm airs, the novelty of man, beast, bird and flower, kept me going; and was I not in the land where I would be?

A chance visit to Sandukli brought me into my earliest collision with Ottoman authority. It was in the hungry month of Ramazan, and two of us had ridden in from camp to buy what supplies we might in the early hours of morning. As we were about remounting, the police accosted us, and roughly bade us wait on the governor. Led to the _konak_, we were told his beyship was abed, and we must stay till he had eaten at sundown. To spend a whole day in dusty Sandukli was bad, but worse to spend it waiting on a Bey’s pleasure. We sent word that we gave him half an hour to appear, and, admired by all the loafers of the _bazar_, stalked up and down, watch in hand, in all the insolence of Britain abroad. The governor came not, but on the call of time sent a deputy, nervously offering excuse, and begging us go in peace. Ours is not a gracious race, but it usually gets what it wants.

Passing north-eastward through Afium Kara Hissar in mid June, we went up to our goal in the Phrygian Monument country, and for all the rest of the month were busied in exploring its pleasant shaggy valleys and carven cliffs. I have seen since no region so thickly set with strange memorials of the past, and none to which I would more joyfully return. Some day when diggers uncover the relics of that Midaean monarchy which seemed to the early Greeks of Asia the eldest and most god-like of powers, may I be there to see! The haunted valley of Ayazin, where we grubbed mole-like under the face of a fallen tomb, and, prone in the shallow pit we had made, sketched the most curious of Phrygian reliefs: the sheer acropolis of Kumbet, where we planned a mysterious rock-house which may be of any antiquity; the gorges of Bakshish and Yapuldak, whose sculptured tombs, fashioned like houses of the living, are seen suddenly through the pines: that stupendous curtain of carved and written stone hung before the gate of death by which Midas the King passed to the Great Mother; all his desolate, impregnable city above it, with inscribed altars and rock-reliefs--of these is woven my “_féerie du premier voyage_.” I was the photographer of the expedition, equipped with a camera which I had borrowed of an amateur in Smyrna and manipulated for the space of one afternoon under his patient eye--so unready was I for my trade; and I was an assistant surveyor, who having plotted painfully and with many lapses my half of the fortifications of the Midas City, was well enough satisfied with my botched work to question my master’s survey of the other half. He has long forgiven me.

A strenuous and somewhat nervous week we spent there under the Midaean crags. Unwarned of modern tenants, we found a new settlement of Circassians, who in those days had a bad name all over Asia Minor for a certain lawless truculence, born of pride of race, and fostered by the official perfidy with which they were often treated. But Mehmet Bey, the chief, received us cordially with _samovar_ and smooth words. On the morrow he followed our operations among the monuments with very lively interest, and at evening came down to the camp and roundly proposed to share profits. We told him once and again there was no gold in our hopes; but we talked to deaf ears, and at last, to be rid of him, said we would halve such treasure as we might find. This, we well knew, was to sow trouble for early reaping, in a land where all believe that the Frank spirits bullion out of earth and rocks, though one see it ever so little; and we were not comforted by our muleteers’ tales of a recent killing, for which the Ottoman government was holding Mehmet Bey to account. But the local police, who had kept track of us, summoned the Bey to Karahissar on the third day, and thus nothing worse befell than a cooling of cordiality between camp and village as the days went by without our doing anything but draw lines on paper and squint through sights.

When, at last, we had done what we came to do, we thought it well to ride fast and far, almost to Karahissar again. Thereafter we became two bands, Ramsay making for home, and his two scholars setting forth for the Cilician shore with no more baggage than might be carried on their saddle-horses and a third bestridden by a single servant. How first one of us and then the other fell ill, but neither so ill as he thought; what in our ignorance and inexperience we did and saw; how we came over Taurus in a waggon and took ship, I have already told elsewhere.

I did not return to Asia for three years, though within a twelvemonth I was wandering within sight of her snows. I had gone to Cyprus as one of four to dig, and I stayed alone to travel during the torrid summer of 1888, visiting almost every village of the island, and trying to do, with not half his science, what I had seen my master do on my prentice journey. What indeed I did do I wrote in a book, little known and less read, whose title, _Devia Cypria_, has deceived more than once, I am told, sanguine buyers of Erotica. Of the part I bore in the excavation of Paphos I will say little. I knew nothing of the digger’s art at the beginning, and very little at the end. Our leader had studied in the Egyptian school of Petrie, but the rest of us were so raw as not to know if there were any science of the spade at all. We had for mentor Gregori of Larnaca, who has become more famous since, and I doubt if we did much harm. But I doubt too if we found nearly all we ought to have found on that immemorial site. Some experience in handling unskilled Greeks, a fluent use of their rustic tongue, an inkling of how much I had to learn--this, however, I took away from Paphos.

Less than two years later I was with Ramsay in Asia again. The railhead of the Aidin line had been pushed in the meantime to Dineir, and we could make our start from far inland. It is often disputed which of two courses be best, to buy transport or to hire. The hirer must wrangle morning and night with muleteers, who use every trick of their trade to shorten and ease the day’s work. The buyer will be cheated when he buys, cheated when he feeds, cheated when he sells again, and he takes all risk of horse thieves. Our lot on this journey was rare and happy. The animals we had were none of ours; but their owner, unwilling to take the road, sent a Greek hireling in his stead. A month later, after many bickerings and a final fight with his Moslem fellows, the Christian took to his heels, leaving his master’s horses on our hands. Quit of responsibility we rode them another three months from one end of Asia Minor to the other, and though the two best were lifted by Circassians at a late stage of the journey, the owner, advised long ago of his hireling’s flight, was so amazed to see any beasts of his again, that, as we told their hire into his hand, he refrained himself from cursing and blessed us for honest men.

We rode off into the hills of Pisidia to pick up inscriptions here and there, but more often to revise texts that Ramsay had seen in earlier years. There were few or no adventures to vary the daily round of a copyist, cynosure of an adhesive crowd in graveyards, or desired of raging dogs in the houses and courts. One noon the sun was eclipsed, and, at the moment of deepest shadow, we rode nervously into a remote village to find ourselves neither incensed for gods nor stoned for devils, but wholly neglected for the heavenly phenomenon, which was being calmly observed through smoked glass.

By the lovely lake of Egerdir came a fever-fiend to try the first of many bouts with me. It was a malign freak of fortune. Our waggon, with all baggage and medical comforts, had been sent by ferry across the lake to a point where, by riding round the southern bight, we might meet it on the second day; but failing to pass a rocky ridge, it fetched a wide compass to the north and made for another goal beyond the mountains. My fever began on the first afternoon, and sitting like a sack on a tired horse, with a sense of dull blows falling on the nape of my neck, I followed the pack-train till dusk up a wild valley where was said to be a hamlet. It proved ruinous and void, and almost supperless we had to pass the chill night in the open, lying on the soil with saddles under our heads. It sounds a romantic bivouac; but in sober fact a saddle that has clung to a hot and ill-groomed horse for a summer’s day makes a very sorry pillow: and lift stones as you may from the bosom of mother earth, she will privily thrust up as many more against your salient parts all the uneasy night.

Next morning we were away betimes, but doomed to wander for many hours behind ignorant or knavish guides in tangles of the Pisidian hills, I slaking an insatiate thirst at every torrent and spring. It was nightfall when we reached the bourne of our journey, the site of Adada at Kara Baulo, whose modern name must survive from some church of Paul the Apostle, built perhaps in commemoration of a halt made by the first mission to the Gentiles on its way from Perga of Pamphylia to Pisidian Antioch. There I slept once more on mother earth under the stars, having supped, loathing, on broth in which floated shell-less unborn eggs. On the morrow I could do little but lie in the shade, while the rest explored the forest-girt ruins: but by noon their work was done, and I had to mount and follow to a hamlet in a low pass above the Eurymedon gorge. We lodged in a shed, and I read in my diary “cold and very lumpy lying.” The fourth stage, over nine hours long, took us across Eurymedon and up towards the snow-streaked crest of Anamás Dagh; for on we had to press for fear our waggoners should give us up for lost and trundle back to Dineir. Night found us lying on naked rock within a low circle of rough stones near an Alpine _yaila_ or summer camp. We had been fed by the hospitable shepherds and given screens of felt against the bitter wind; but fever and its ague pains shooting through loins and legs banished sleep, and I sat up or paced till dawn.

At sunrise a peasant offered to show a painted cave, and hearing it was but a step along the hillside I offered to visit it. On we trudged; farther fled the cave; and not until the best part of an hour had passed were we halted before the mouth of a mean little Byzantine shrine. The sun was already high, and the morning windless. Bathed in sweat I scarcely dragged myself back over the rough path, and reached camp with a livid face. My companions lifted me into the saddle and hurried me across the pass, doubting, as they told me later, if I should live to taste quinine again. But as the day wore on, the fever began to abate. The sweat under the early sun had broken it, and I was in a fair way to be cured, not killed, when we found the waggon awaiting us at the edge of the eastern plain.

I remained weak, however, and altogether indifferent to the work I had to do. Two years before, while alone in Cyprus, I had thought myself an antiquary, who explored ancient things for the love of science. Now I found them infinitely tedious, and moodily confessed I was no antiquary yet, not even a wandering scholar, but just a hunter at hazard. I did what my master wished of me: but my interest was in matters outside his work, in the incidents of the camp, in the means of travel, in the wildness of nature and man about us, in the beauty of the Beysheher lake seen through mist from a hill-top one morning, in the old boar, whom I flushed, as I was scrambling down again, and blessed that he did not charge. We went down from Konia into Cilicia, and in the hot valley of the Calycadnus and hotter coastlands near the Corycian Cave, where we were fain to sit in the pungent smoke of dung to escape worse torture of mosquitoes, my ill humour grew and I hated life until we doubled back to the heights, and the last memory of fever left me on the table-land of Kaisariyeh.

One of the party tarried with the American missionaries at Talas to recover of a worse Job’s plague than had vexed me three years before, while Ramsay took me over Anti-Taurus to copy the Hittite inscriptions of Gurun. Some of the incidents of this journey I have told already, especially the buying of the Bor Stone and its sequel; and other incidents must remain untold here if I am to make an end of these early wanderings. Sufficient to say that after we had recrossed Anti-Taurus, where boars came grunting one night almost to the camp-fires, which shone on their watering-place, and after we had discovered the Hittite relief of Fraktin, I left Ramsay to go home with the waggon, and, joined by the sick man from Kaisariyeh half cured but wholly undeterred, passed beneath the mighty wall of Ala Dagh to the foothills of Taurus. With the Hittite inscription of Bulgar Maden (how ill I copied it!) and the lower half of the Bor Stone to our credit, we set our faces homeward over the great Plains. On Dindymus I took a second fever of the kind that swells the limbs, and was brought by my comrade very sick to the railway and Dineir again.

This was to be the end of my apprenticeship in archaeological travel to the man who has made it a science. I was to have met Ramsay again in Cilicia the following year; but it was late in June before, scarcely recovered from another fever caught in Salonica, I landed at Mersina to find he had fled the coming heat. So I had to organize my own train and go up across the steaming Aleian plain to the Taurus with one companion, a traveller of infinite patience, as he had need to be that year. For little but mishap and delay was in store for us.

The first fortnight went well enough. We passed the mountains by way of the robber town of Hajin, where we spent a pleasant evening with two American mission ladies, who were to be caught by Kurds a week later, robbed, stripped, and lashed to trees: and near Comana we set ourselves to our first serious task, the tracing of the great military road which Severus made under the northward face of Taurus from Caesarea Mazaca to the standing camp of the “Thundering” Legion at Melitene. By the ruin of its embankment lie milestones of some ten Emperors, in groups of five or six, which Gregori, whom I had picked up in Cyprus, taught the peasants to lever over so we might read their inscriptions. Missing at every mile Ramsay’s skill in decipherment and his knowledge of things Roman, we did what we could to unravel the tangled epigraphs--a rude week’s work which left us little to learn about Roman milestones, and able to write a report which would win the heart of Mommsen.

The task was done at last at Arabissus, and we could turn off to Albistan to see a Hittite obelisk, and thence strike southward through Taurus, by way of stubborn Zeitun, to Marash in Commagene, where misfortune lay in wait. The Hittite stones which we had come down to see had been spirited away (I was not to see them till many years later in New York), and before we could fly the July heat of Syria, I was badly hurt by a fall, and laid on my back in a kindly missionary’s house for two long weeks--a martyrdom of idleness for my luckless comrade. Then came cholera, raiding north from Aleppo, and thinking we might yet escape the quarantine cordon on the northern frontier of the province, we bolted through Taurus again, though I was still unable to walk. I had a nightmare ride up and down the rock ladders of the Pyramus gorge, my throbbing ankle supported on an improvised crutch; nor did time pass more gratefully for the companionship of an ill-looking Armenian doctor, whom we had been begged to take under our wing. Accused (falsely, we were told) of illicit commerce with a patient, he went in fear of his life from two Circassian bravos set by her brothers on his track, and we could not refuse to shield him; but I have heard since that he deserved whatever fate he escaped. And after all the cordon caught us and bade us camp on a bare hillside a few miles south of Derendeh for six torrid days till our captors’ eyes could be opened (or closed) by practical but gentle methods of suasion. Not that the delay was time all lost; we passed on with my ankle almost sound, and another Hittite inscription added to our bag.

In Sivas it was my companion’s turn to fall sick, and summer was far gone before we could enter on the last stage. We rode up the Halys valley to Zara and the scene of Pompey’s victory at Nicopolis, and having turned thence down the course of the Pontic Lycus, through a pleasant Swiss region of pine forests and pine huts, inhabited by Shiahs, kindly to the _giaur_ because despised by Sunnis for “red-head” heretics, came to the Black Sea by way of Neocaesarea and Comana Pontica and the Iris valley and Amasia and the baths of Phazemon. By the way we picked up some unconsidered trifles of Roman milestones and landmarks of Imperial Estates and the like, which we put on record long ago in a publication of the Royal Geographical Society; and from first to last, when not on the track of Hittites, we seemed to be following the footsteps of Rome. What has happened to the records of Persian and Greek dominion in Cappadocia? The Hittite and the Roman alone have set their marks on the rocks.

[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE.]

When I went back to Oxford I had some claim to be a wandering scholar, but less to be an archaeological digger than was credited by those who asked me two years later to take charge of excavations promoted by the Egypt Exploration Fund. I ought not to have agreed, but, having so agreed, because the call of the East compelled me, I should have begun humbly at the bottom of the long ladder of Egyptology. But I was a young man in a great hurry, unwilling to enter fresh indentures, and finding myself not needed on the confused site of Hatshepsut’s temple at Der el-Bahri, I evaded the obligation by making work among such Greek things as are in Egypt. I had no great success, and it was the best result of my Egyptian years that two Oxford scholars, who searched with me for papyrus scraps in the Fayûm desert one winter, were encouraged thereafter by my patrons to embark on a course which has led them to European fame. Clinging still to my old love Asia, I diverted my interest from Nile to Euphrates by making between seasons a journey which I have related in my _Wandering Scholar_; and, sure at last that my heart would never be in Egyptian work, I broke with my patrons after three years.

If, however, I had done little for them, I had done much for myself. In those three seasons, largely through becoming known to Petrie, and living with men who had served apprenticeship to him, I had learned to dig. When I set foot first in Egypt, I had no method in such search, nor any understanding that the common labourer’s eyes and hands and purpose must be extensions of one’s own. If an excavator, deaf to the first and greatest commandment of his calling, take no care to make his labourers better than unskilled navvies, what should he find except the things that a navvy could not miss in the dark? No strengthening of his European staff, no unwearied watching of native fools and knaves, will secure to the excavator the half of the precious things which lie in his soil. If the labourer, who is a fool, cannot see what is being turned over under his eyes, you at his side will see it no better, because you are not turning it over. The labourer who is a knave will see, but take good care you do not. Unless your men be seeking consciously and with intelligence in an interest which is theirs as well as yours, better leave the hiding places of ancient things alone. For every digger, who turns over a site without finding what is in it, destroys great part of what he should have found.

Moreover, in handling remains of imperishable antiquity in the Nile land, I learned to observe as an antiquary must. And some of his spirit was breathed into me; for when I went back to Egypt for a few weeks in 1897, I found myself regarding her ancient life more than her modern. But I was not to be won to Egyptian studies at the eleventh hour. Already designated Director, where I had been an unworthy student ten years before, I sailed for Athens, intending to take stock of the duties which were to be mine in the coming autumn, and to follow my proper trade by exploring a coast of Greek Asia. But temptation met me, and turned me out of the Antiquary’s path.

Chapter I.

An Interlude.

I found the representative of a great British journal in a difficulty. It was his hard task to gather news of several Balkan states, which one and all seemed determined to set about making history at the same moment. Crete was already ablaze; a Macedonian war was promised by Greece, and Bulgaria moved restlessly behind her frontier. Who knew what the others would hazard on flank and rear? I could speak fair Greek. Would I help him by undertaking Crete? It need not be for long. The Powers would soon make its peace, and deport the Greek soldiers who had just landed under the very guns of our ships. His actual correspondent, a Greek, was colouring his despatches to London white and blue. Would I replace him awhile? My temptation was brief. I had never been in Crete, and a scholar may rarely watch war.

I had not long to wait for it. As we drew to our anchorage inside the warships off Canea there were houses to be seen afire two miles inshore and rifles spitting up and down the slopes behind the town. The Turks had thought to revictual their threatened lines in peace during the hour of the Sunday office; but priests and people came out of church to fight. It was a small and desultory affair, from which less than a score of killed and wounded men were borne back at evening to the gates--patient Anatolian peasants for the most part, who had long served out their due time and fought without heat or reasoning why. Along with them came the corpses of two or three _bashibazuk_ Cretans, Greek in feature and Greek in speech, Moslems by chance and all but ignorant of the faith which they had died to uphold. They were the first men slain in anger that I had seen.

I was to know Canea well in coming years; but that morning it looked very strange, with its mediaeval ways darkly shuttered and patrolled by smart marines of half a dozen nations and by slouching, thick-set Turks. The day might have been the morrow of a sack, so silent and desolate were the shops and houses about the quays, and so ruinous the inner streets. The great incendiary fires in the Christian quarter had been subdued only a day or two before, and the oil vats in the basements still smoked and stank. To this day, when I smell burning oil, I see Canea as I saw it first. As we ran up the harbour, the blackened shell of the Ottoman _Konak_ on the heights to the left prepared us for what we were to see in the town. Our bluejackets and marines, we were told, had saved a part of the block, less with than despite the help of the frenzied Turks, among whom a certain grey-bearded Pasha had showed such erratic energy with a leaky hose, that it became necessary for our drenched marines to stay his zeal. Their commander called up his most respectable sergeant, and, pointing out the old gentleman as a person of consequence, bade his man wait a chance to withdraw the hose without offence. The sergeant saluted, wheeled, marched straight on the offender, and tapping him on the shoulder, remarked, with a genial but unprintable term of endearment and an even less printable counsel, that none of his sort was wanted there, and left him agape with empty dripping hands.

Canea was no pleasant abode at that moment. All inns, cookshops and coffee-houses, except the meanest, were burned or barred, and no cook or body-servant was for hire. The consuls, smoked out of Halépa a few days before, had broken into a deserted inn on the quayside, where their wives were setting before them such victuals as could be begged from the fleet. The journalists, who landed from every passing boat, lodged where and how men might in a ravished town, and a famous limner of battles kept life in him for the first few days with little but cauliflowers, oranges, and Greek brandy. Mine was a better fate. An old acquaintance of Cyprus days was commanding the Albanian police, and I found lodgment with him in the only tenanted house outside the walls, except one. In this last Chermside was living, who, like my host, sustained the British name for cool courage and quiet discharge of duty in those unquiet weeks. He showed me the lie of the land, talking of things Turkish as few men may talk, and franked me through the inner lines, where we found shoeless gunners with rags bound on feet and legs, stedfastly serving antique field-pieces with the slouch of woodmen who handle ox-carts on Anatolian hills.

The outposts lay fiercely beleaguered on a ridge further south, under the Sphakian summits--that dazzling background to the Venetian quadrilateral of Canea, which one sees from the sea like an embastioned city in a mediaeval illumination. Hapless outposts! They were the cause of all the bickerings between admirals and insurgents which it was to be my lot for three weeks to record. The Turks, too few to hold the outer lines in force, were not suffered by the Admirals to withdraw their pickets, lest the rebels, once on the crests, should shell the ships and the town. Yet no admiral would land his own men to support the defence and so lessen his fighting strength in the face of a faithful ally anchored alongside. So together and singly the leaders of the Powers held endless converse with bearded giants in broidered coats, and black-hatted men in sponge-bag suitings, who dubbed themselves captains and chiefs, and answered in halting French for the respect of the line; and Admirals vowed, in even less intelligible French, to shoot if the promises were broken. And broken they ever were, and once and again the Admirals shot, and Attic journals with inflammatory headlines, “Anti-Navarino,” or “England massacres Christendom,” egged on mobs to hoot the nameboard on the Grande Bretagne Hotel, and demand that the sanctuary of Hellenism on the Acropolis be closed for ever to the Barbarians of the West. Nor was Athens less than right according to her lights. True enough, it was we who led the shooting, and we who did almost all the blockading in Crete, for no other reason than that our gunners could shoot the best and our coal bunkers were kept full, and our crews did not mutiny for shore-leave where it could not be granted, and we alone had on the spot many war-craft of light draught and high speed.

[Illustration: A WRECKED MOSLEM VILLAGE OF CRETE.]

But those bombardments ought never to have been necessary. With a few European bluejackets on guard at each blockhouse, the lines would never have been molested at all. The Admirals should have known Greeks better than to trust them on such vicarious parole as was given by caps and black hats, whether on the heads of chiefs or no. No Greek may answer surely for any other Greek, since individualism and intolerance of discipline are in the blood of the race. In the stormy history of Levantine religious warfare you may note one unvaried law of consequence. Where the Moslem has prevailed, the votaries of the two creeds have resumed peaceful life as of old, the Christian knowing that Moslems act under orders as one man, and that when Islam is triumphant its Gibeonites are secure of their lives. But if Christians gain their freedom, the Moslem leaves the land of his birth. For whatever pledges the new authorities may give, he knows for his part that, since Eastern Christianity supplies no social discipline, each Christian will act on occasion as seems best in his own eyes.

I had been in Canea three days when trouble arose in the town itself. Bairam was near, and the hundred and a half armed Albanian policemen, who were commanded for the nonce by my messmate and an Arnaut colonel, had been begging during some days, as their yearly custom was, an instalment of ready money for the feast. But the Turkish Treasury was empty, and the Powers supplied no funds. Put off, therefore, with vague answers to a demand which was no worse than fair, seeing they had touched no pay for months, some of the Albanians left their duty, and, rifles in hand, beset their commander with ever louder clamour for arrears. It is no British way to yield to threats. Weapons, they were told, must first be laid down, and then that should be done which could be. But Albanians part hardly with their arms, and these had often been deceived. Force must be used.

With another journalist I was warned privily that at a certain hour the Albanians would be surrounded in their barrack by European marines, who, however, were not to shoot. Should the Albanians still refuse to be disarmed, they would be charged with the bayonet. So to the barracks a little before the appointed time we two went, and posted ourselves on the stairway at the end of the large entrance hall behind the squatting Albanians, who watched curiously one squad of marines after another deploy into the courtyard, as for some review. Presently all was ready. The officers appeared from the guardroom, and once more bade the Albanians give up their arms. The men jumped to their feet, and a voice shouted in Turkish, _Verma!_--“Give not!” A squad of marines with fixed bayonets advanced to the door--nervous Italians, to whom the seniority of their Admiral secured pride of place. Two or three Albanians fired at sight, and hit an Italian with two balls. Instantly, its orders to charge forgotten, the whole Italian squad blazed point blank into the hall. We were standing two or three steps above the mass of the mutineers, and the rifles threw high. I was conscious all in a moment of jets of puffed flame, of shimmering blue blades, of a bullet humming by my ear, of a long scar ripped suddenly in the wall plaster at my side, of a big Albanian writhing at the stairfoot; and then we two non-combatants were skipping up the steps, taking three at a stride.

On the upper floor, where the temporary offices of government were, we found Armenian clerks frantically upsetting tables and bureaus, and thrusting them against doors. The rifles still barked below, and we thought for an instant of dropping from a window; but suddenly all firing ceased. Forcing a way back to the stairhead through a distracted crowd, which prayed us to say what was coming, we listened a moment, and then gingerly stepped down, I for one sore afraid of seeming afraid. In the hall all was very still. The cowed Albanians were flattening themselves against the walls, as though they would pass through the solid stones; a sound of groaning came from a barrack-room on the left, and two figures lay motionless in the middle of the floor. The Italians still fidgetted outside, with rifles levelled through windows and doorways, ready to fire. I walked out as slowly as I thought decent, and turning the flank of the Italian squad, went across to our own Marines, who were in fighting formation, the front rank on the knee. “Better out o’ that, old man,” called out a private. “What’s their bag?” said a boy with a sword. I told him as well as I knew. “Pretty poor!” he grumbled. “Those fellows can’t shoot for nuts!”

The leading squad got the word, entered at the charge, and met no resistance. I followed, and found that the loyal Albanian colonel had been shot twice, and, it was said, by his own men. He held out only a few minutes more. The Albanians’ arms were passed outside; the mutineers, if mutineers they should be called, were marshalled into one room, and, as all seemed over except the caring for the wounded, the laying out of dead, and the arresting of ringleaders, I went off to the telegraph office, meeting belated and raging colleagues at every few yards, and wrote a despatch for London with not too firm a hand.

A wrangle ensued over the disposal of the prisoners. My messmate, who held his temporary commission from the Sultan, stood out long for a word from Constantinople before he would hand them over to the Powers; but the Admirals overruled him. I went to see the men tied up and marched to the boats. Some of them, who knew me by sight as one who understood a little of their speech, appealed to me, asking what their crime had been. Indeed, I could not exactly say. They had asked, after their customary manner, for the bread due to them, and been given lead. I liked the business little, and I knew my messmate, who held by his men as they held by him, liked it less. He had stipulated there should be no shooting by the marines (nor would there have been had the leading squad been men of our own corps), and the death of a friend, the Albanian colonel, lay heavy on his soul.

The Turkish soldiery and the _bashibazuk_ Cretans were reported enraged by the killing of the Sultan’s men, and a vendetta was feared from the Albanian remnant. My messmate thought it better to stay at his post in the town, and I had to pass the night of the mutiny without him in the lonely house without the walls. A howling storm dashed rain on the windows. The Greek cook, forecasting a dismal fate for himself and all his kind on the morrow, lifted up his voice and wept. I lay in my clothes, listening for shots, and hearing them now and then, probably in the hills. Once and again I braved the rain and looked out from the roof to the dark town, and the wheeling beams of searchlights darting from Suda Bay to the crests of the hills; and the dismal dawn came none too soon.

Little else would break the monotony of life in Canea. The rescue of the beleagured Moslems of Kandanos by a landing party of all tongues had been worth seeing, if one could have got there. But the ships slipped away round the island by night, leaving journalists in the lurch and nothing in the harbour that steamed, except a little Greek tug. We all bargained for her; but one rose in the night, while his colleagues slept, and embarked on her alone. Savage was the joy on the quay when some hours later she was espied steaming back, having failed to make headway against a south-west gale, and succeeded in making her passenger sorely sick. Only one consul saw the affair. Like all the rest Biliotti was given at dead of night two hours’ warning of the sailing of the ships. His colleagues went sleepily to the telegraph office and blocked the wires with demands for instruction from ambassadors, who were snug abed in Pera; but Biliotti, asking no man’s leave, stepped into his consular boat, and had the conduct of all negotiations at Kandanos. The action was of a piece with everything he did. No more fearless or self-reliant servant of Britain has ever lived than this son of the Levant, who has no drop of British blood in his veins.

For the rest the daily round was full of rather common tasks--of eternal _quid nunc?_ of lobbying, of begging crumbs from official tables. The fame of the great newspaper which I served gained me the best consideration that consuls and commanders afloat and ashore will show to a journalist, and I was also so fortunate as to be known privately to more than one of those in power. But they grew almost as weary of my constant calls as I, and if they were often irritable and always reticent, who can blame them? Least of all would I blame the commanders at sea, who had to rock at anchor month in and month out, with nothing to do ashore, and crews cramped, confined, and murmuring for lack of leave. The Cretan Moslems were too jealous of their women for bluejackets to be let loose, and more than one French crew went to the verge of mutiny. Later on, when Latin troops came to be quartered in Canea, things reached such a pass that it was thought well to send oversea for a bunch of less forbidden fruit. It came in charge of a portly dame. But the Turk, who was still in nominal command of the port, refused in the name of Islam to admit these earthy houris; and the Great Christian Powers, by their representatives assembled, invoked the Concert of Europe to secure the landing of four Levantine light o’ loves.

My fellow-journalists were for the most part a genial crew, which looked on the wine when it was red, or indeed of any other hue, and took life as it came. A few were tiros like myself; the others had seen many campaigns and much of the habitable world, where they had learned a little of most men and tongues by the way. But I found that almost all had tried other callings, and taken at the last to their actual trade, less in love of it than in disgust of all others. Our common talk was of warriors and war, when it was not of our despatches and their effect on the civilised world. In this company one was taken at the value one set upon oneself, and all was held fair that might serve the interest of a master at the other end of a wire.

When all the Moslems were collected under the guns of the ships, and the Christians held willy nilly to truce, there was less than ever for us all to do. The eyes of Europe had already turned from Crete to Thessaly, and before March was half spent almost all my colleagues were gone to Greece. I followed them late in the month, and, halting at Athens again, was over-persuaded to resume my service on the Greek frontier. But it could not be for long. I had laid plans with a fellow antiquary to go to Lycia, and the fair season for a southerly coast would soon be on the wane.

I took to myself, therefore, a helper, whom I had met at Athens eager for the front, and we went up together to Thessaly with all speed. At Volo we found good cheer and great clamour for war, and in every open space Reservists marshalled, who, if ever they had known soldier craft, had forgotten it. At Velestino, too, all was fair, and men gathered thick about us with cheers for England, who, as report said, had just checkmated a German plan to block Piraeus. But before we sighted the minarets of Larissa (it is the one Greek town whose mean outline is still ennobled by their slender dignity), a northerly gale swept down, and rain began. Chilled to the bone and spattered with filth of unpaved streets, we came to the only hotel to find no lying room, even in a passage way. Our servant went out to seek some decent lodging, but in vain; and just at dark we took refuge in a wretched peasants’ inn, where two soldiers were bribed to set free a single room for the three of us. Bugs were making their laboured but hopeful way over the floor towards the beds, and, lifting the coverlets, we found myriads already gathered in clusters on the mattresses. But if they waited there, they were cheated: for we spread sheets of rubber, knowing their distaste of its smell, and veiling our faces and hands, lay on the floor in our clothes. In the morning a Larissean, fearful who might be billeted on him, was glad to offer us a house far from soldiers’ quarters, and we made ourselves comfortable enough in two empty but wholesome rooms.

There were some sixteen thousand soldiers in Larissa at that time, and during a fortnight I saw no man drunk and no common woman ply for hire. It was the Greek warrior’s simple joy to stroll the streets, his little finger locked in a comrade’s, and to sing in not unmusical harmony. Yet if he was a peaceable soldier, he was a lawless one. Once I heard a colonel reprove a strolling group which would have passed him without any gesture of salute. “Who are we that we are bidden to do such things?” said one, as the group moved on. When a battalion was being inspected before marching to the front, I watched man after man break rank to chat at ease with the bystanders, while the general was passing down the lines, and heard them laugh at his reproof. _Peitharcheia_, discipline,--what is that to a free-born Greek, whose birthright is to think for himself, and for you? It is said that the officer who, some weeks later, was ordered to blow up the Peneius bridge behind the retreating army exclaimed, “Am I a Vandal?” and the Turks found the bridge unhurt.

All here cried, “To Constantinople!” and mingled mutiny with their prayers. The King, they said, would not declare war because his Russian Queen had been forbidden by the Tsar. But if he would not, the voluntaries would. All southern Macedonia was waiting a sign to fall on the Turks, and in the space of a night the way would be clear to Salonica and beyond. If we went up to the outposts we should see in what heart were the Greeks and in what fear the Turks.

So on the second day we set out for the Malúna pass above Elassóna. At Tirnovo the carriage seemed already to have passed out of Greece, so Turkish looked the little town with its shaded bazar and mosques and baths. At Ligária, where some two hundred kilted men were dancing before their tents in the morning sun and chanting war-songs, we were set on Hungarian cavalry horses, and escorted up the pass, with Olympus swelling grandly on the right. Two blockhouses and two batteries faced each other on the summit, and far below lay Turkish Elassóna, a dark patch within a white ring of tents. The officers (one red bearded, unlike a Greek), who had been watching this ring grow wider day by day, held more sober talk than we had heard in Larissa. “They are many more than we,” said they, “and our beginning will perhaps be hard.” “But,” added the younger of the two, who was sweeping the Haliacmon valley with his glass, “all there wait to join us, and the end will be easy.”

I asked safe conduct to the Turkish blockhouse, and was passed over the line. Two colleagues, or rivals, of whom we had heard nothing since their better-horsed carriage had overtaken us before Tírnovo, proved to be already seated in the little room, and plying the Albanian major with questions through a Greek interpreter. The latest come is ever most honoured by Turkish courtesy, and at sight of me the major made room on the divan at his side. I seated myself, and greeted him in my sorry Turkish. Overjoyed to be done with the Greek, the Albanian lapsed into his proper military speech, and sent for coffee. But the others took it ill, growled that we were now too many, swung out of the hut, and, when my visit was over, took me to task for having come between them and their news. Meanwhile the major had fenced with my inquiries about the Elassóna troops, and I had parried his about the muzzling of Moslems in Crete, and we parted as good friends as we had met, and about as wise. The officers of the kilted men at Ligária invited us to their midday meal, where was not overmuch to eat, but plenty of rough wine and the cheerful company of some French journalists, halting on their way to the crest. King George’s health was drunk “if he allows us to make war,” and then that of “all Powers who love Greece.” Great Britain was the favourite of the hour, and the proposer of the toast breathed a fervent hope that “English guns were hungering for Russian meat.” As a Briton who spoke Greek I was put up to reply, and I trust I bore the French love of Russia in mind; but I cannot say now what exactly may have passed, and have only a confused memory of driving away amid cheers, and becoming very drowsy on the Larissa road.

It remained to see how the case stood at the western end of the Cambunian lines; and on the following day we were trundling over the road to Tríkkala, with blockhouses, now Greek, now Turkish, always in sight on the crests to north. Except for a tedious ferry over Peneius and a noontide halt at the khan of Zarkos, near the scene of the only stout stand the Greeks would make on the frontier in the weeks to come, there was nothing to vary the monotony of a long drive between low hills and marshy plain. But the prospect of Pindus, one unbroken wall of snow, relieved the last hours. Tríkkala, with its spacious square and imposing houses, promised better quarters than eventually we found in a tiny, dubious chamber, and we chose to pass much of our night in talking to one Greek officer or another. The five thousand men who were waiting here showed less rawness in their mien than the army of Larissa, and seemed better equipped for a coming war: but an officer anticipated all criticism by saying that Greece had no use for regulars. She was freed by guerilla fighters of the hills, and would conquer by the same. Forbearing to object that the campaign might take place chiefly in the open Thessalian plain, I asked an artilleryman if there were many of his service who could speak Turkish? “Not I, for one,” he answered scornfully, “but our guns there can say what a Turk will understand.” I hope they could, for probably they are in Turkey now.

From Kalabaka five kilted men were sent next day to escort us on a long march to the outposts above Diskáta. They were true soldiers of the hillman kind, lean, long-stepping, untiring, to whom the admirable Greek schools had given intelligence and interests little like those of our Highlanders. We talked, for example, as we strode together, about the Emperor Hadrian. The way lay under the Metéora rocks, and halting below the chief monastery, we summoned with loud shouts the “fishers of men.” But their windlass remained still, and the kilted men, growing impatient, began to fire upwards. One or two bullets skimmed the prior’s tiles, and a monk appeared at an opening to ask our pleasure. We called to him to let down the net, but pleading that his fellows were all at meat, he offered us no more than the cranky ladders of a perilous chain, which swayed in the wind against the overhanging cliff. We had neither stomach nor head for such escalade; but two of the soldiers dared it, and, once aloft, soon had the windlass manned and the net lowered. The rope had plainly seen many and better days, but up we must go. We lay down together in the meshes, which were gathered and hooked above; the rope strained, the net tightened, and we slowly rose, locked in an inextricable embrace, like a pair of bagged ferrets, spun, bumped the cliff, spun again for an eternity, till gaffed and drawn into the entry, we realised that we yet breathed.

The monks bade us coldly welcome, though we gave them time to finish meat while we looked at the dark church, whose only interest lies in its age, and climbed to the rounded summit of the rock, where fed eleven snow-white sheep and one coal-black, in memory, I suppose, of the apostolic Twelve. The keys of the Treasury were said to be with the Bishop elsewhere; but I suspect we might have been shown the precious things had it not been for the presence of our kilted guards, who treated the fathers with scant respect, and were evidently feared. The Prior bemoaned the coming war, complaining that no one would turn _kaloyer_ now; he had but five monks all told. But the Bursar was a better patriot, who would breathe fire and slaughter, if the men of Athens did not make war. Where was Constantine tarrying who should lead the Greeks? Ah! who knew? he asked darkly.

The day was far spent when we saw the blockhouses at last, Greek to right, and Turk to left, on a low ridge. The way had lain through a wild and ill-tracked country, where were a few Vlach villages, of evil fame for past raiding and present brigandage; and from the frontier we looked north over a yet more savage prospect. Diskáta lay hidden by a shoulder of the hill, and nothing but a rough mule path came up from it. There were no such proofs of Turkish assembly visible from this point, as we had seen from Malúna, and the half dozen infantrymen who squatted on the Turkish side of the line were tatterdemalions. The Haliacmon basin lay in deep purple shadow, and beyond it a tumbled sea of mountain waves, swelling to west and north, broke here and there in snows: on the other hand the bastions of Pindus rose against the sunset out of a blue-grey mist, which hid their roots and all the plain. But such beauties had lost any charm they may ever have had for our hosts, the two Greek officers in charge of the blockhouse. It was very lonely, they said, and how long would they be left there? One who had been on the hills fourteen months showed himself a more doubtful prophet even than the men of Malúna. Would Macedonia indeed rise? If not, could the thin Greek line hold the Malakás pass, and how should he alone stem the unknown flood which might well up from Diskáta? Small blame to him for his doubts, with that five hour march over rough paths and unbridged streams to his nearest support!

The two were as lavish of good cheer as glad of our coming, and one kept the caraffe of _raki_ replenished and the wine flowing free, while the other took his turn to patrol. After which surfeit, fevered already by our long tramp, we had broken sleep in a clean, cold soldier’s room, and were up and about in good time to watch the first blush of day on the Pindus snows, and begin the tramp to Kalabáka again. We went back to Larissa by railway, and at the junction of Velestino I spied, to my surprise, a banker of my former acquaintance in Alexandria. I asked him what he did in this far province? “Business,” he said, “in Kalabáka--some men to see there.” The men, though I knew it not, were those voluntaries who would raid over the frontier some weeks later and compel war; and it was this banker, as kindly and brave a man as I have known, who financed that fatal venture of fanatic Hellenism. The following evils broke his heart, it was said, and he died not many months later.

In Larissa once more I had news both of the purpose of the Powers to prevent war, and of the exceeding unwillingness of the Greek court to yield to the desire of the mob. Prince Constantine was to come in a few days, but I was warned his mission was to hinder, not hasten outbreak. I resolved to await at least his coming, and busied myself with one more visit to the outposts, this time at the eastern end, by Rapsáni near Tempe; but we got little thereby except a sight of the Vale, and a deeper sense of the unfitness of the trailing conscripts met upon the road. It was strange to see Thessalian Turks peaceably tilling their fields, as the soldiers passed; and, maybe, they looked for war as little as I. The Prince came at last, to be met with salvoes of artillery and a solemn assurance “in the name of the Church of Larissa and the great martyrs of Crete” that all the hope of Greece was in him; but when he paraded the garrison, it was said he liked it ill. In any event weeks must yet pass before war would be declared (if ever), and my time was up. I yielded my place to my companion, and shipped at Volo with a heady pack of Greek patriots, each of whom, finding at dinner a Briton who understood his speech, exhorted the rest to be calm, and forthwith fell into frenzy. Let all Europe come on! Greece in her turn would blockade Europe. “Ah! what you really fear is Hellenism, the Great Power to be! England covets Crete--that is the secret cause of all!” I had heard more than enough by coffee time, and sought peace on deck watching the hills darken behind Thermopylae, where once upon a time Greeks died in silence.

* * * * *

I was to play the journalist once more about a month later, when returned from Lycia to find the war begun and, indeed, all but over. Faithful news was wanted from Crete concerning both the plans of the rebels in that day of Greek despair and the state of the Moslem islanders, now almost all gathered into Candia within a fence of British and Italian tents. I was bound for home, but agreed to take Crete on the way; and landing at Canea, I was allowed to go out to the rebel outposts on Akrotíri, with an Italian bugler and a stalwart Highlander of our Seaforths, whose native brae was Wapping. The rebels swarmed out of their shelters at the bugle’s note, and, after brief parley, let me pass in. Except for black Cretan kerchiefs bound about their heads, they were all in serge clothing of sailor fashion, got I know not how or whence, and all had Belgian arms. They led me to a shady spot, set chairs, and began to talk in Greek. But presently the chief, a man of consequence who had been in the Island Council under the Pact of Halépa, came up in haste, and finding all speaking at once, proposed French. Thus question and answer passed in quiet, and babel arose only when my words were summarised in the common speech from time to time with more rhetoric than I had used. The sum of an hour’s converse was this. The rebels were more set than ever on rebellion. If one army of the Greeks had run, another would stand, and the fleet was undefeated still. Had the Cretans ships, they would send fifteen thousand men to defend their Mother; for how could they desert her in her sorrow? They did not wish to stand alone in insular freedom, for there was none in Crete fit to govern, and they feared treachery of one to another. If the Powers occupied the island, the British would fall out presently with the Russians and call the Turks back. “Vassos and his Greeks may stay or go--we care not. We shall fight on. We have food enough here, though little corn, but in the western parts there is some dearth. Still the blockade can be cheated. What have we to lose now by holding out or to gain by giving in? Most of us have lost long ago all we had. The Moslem Cretans must leave the island, for their hate is too fierce for peace.” It came to this--they defied us, well knowing that no one Power would be suffered by the rest to land enough men to sweep their hills: and I rose convinced that union with the Hellenic kingdom is the inborn hope of a Cretan. He sucks it in with his mother’s milk, and breathes it at her knee; reason is powerless against his sentiment, and to use it worse than vain. We parted in peace, and my Wapping Scot, though apparently he had kept his eyes front all the hour with the wooden rigour of a snuff-seller’s ensign, remarked on every detail of each rebel’s dress and arms as we trudged back over the rocks.

I went on to Candia, and could find no clean lodging. The Christian houses were shut and barred, and, as the whole town was unquiet and every native Moslem a _bashibazuk_ armed to his teeth, it seemed wise to live near the harbour. I applied to our vice-consul, a Cretan Greek, who was to perish in the massacre of the following year. He had a house, he replied, of his own, hard by the quay, and very clean. It was let to a Corfiote, who was not very well; but he and his wife kept to one room, and doubtless would gladly hire me the others. I asked nothing better, and went off to view. The house seemed both clean and convenient and I passed from room to room, till I reached a closed door in the upper storey. A woman, who answered my knock, said her husband would be glad to arrange the matter. He was in bed, and not very well; but would I be pleased to enter and talk to him? I stepped in, and sat some minutes by his bed-head in the close air. He looked wasted, and at last I asked if it were fever of the country he had? “No,” said he. “Smallpox. This is the twelfth day.” I fled, and expecting the deadly rash to break out any day, found another house, wherein I tried to make shift. But the windows looked on the Cathedral yard, in which an Italian regiment of very young soldiers bivouacked each night, drinking, singing, and fighting from dusk to dawn: and in the end I pitched a tent on the ramparts, near the camp of a Mountain Battery of ours. The days were spent in watching the route-marching of our troops, listening to all that commandants would tell me, and riding out towards the rebel lines. On these excursions I visited Cnossus for the first time, and dreamed of digging in the Palace of Minos, some of whose lettered stones already stood revealed. Indeed I was offered a squad of sappers, who might begin the search there and then; but I refused it for lack of time and in distrust of soldier diggers, whom I had known in Alexandria for the best navvies but the worst finders of antiques in the world. The lesser Bairam, the feast of Abraham’s sacrifice, was at hand, and I waited only for it. If ever the town was to rise and hurl itself on the exultant cordon of rebels, it would be then. But in the end the feast passed without any worse incident than the firing of many bullets from the town over our camp, perhaps at hazard, but, perhaps, also in our despite; and by the middle of May I could bid farewell for ever, as I thought, to the island of Crete.

Chapter II.

Lycia.

The war, for which I had waited in vain, broke out when I was far from its alarms. It had long been arranged that I should report on ancient sites in Lycia, for whose excavation certain scholars, jealous for the fame of Fellows, proposed to found a fund. Three cities offered the best hope of success, Xanthus, Pátara, and Myra, and to survey these I left Athens with one companion as soon as I was free of Thessaly. We reembarked at Smyrna on a Greek coaster, hoping to find a small sailing vessel for hire in the first Lycian port of call; but deceived in this, we had to keep on with the Greek, and try our luck in the busier harbour of Castellórizo.

Of all the Greek isles Castellórizo lies most apart, outside the Archipelago, and nearly a hundred miles east of Rhodes, its motherland. The main coast over against it is the wildest of Anatolia, piled ridge on ridge from surf to snow-line, and inhabited by few except wandering shepherds. Descendants of sturdy Rhodians, who would not abide under the Hospitallers, hold the barren rock, and live by exploiting the sea. The Turk is overlord; but we found his representatives, a _mudir_ and half dozen excisemen, who were dependent on Greek keels for all their communication with the mainland, chastened in demeanour and quick to defer to quayside opinion. This set strongly in our favour; and forbearing to demand our papers, they offered weak propitiatory coffee, and withdrew to inactivity. Heavily sparred brigs and two-masted caiques were packed that morning so close into the basin that a man might cross it dryshod; but the magazines and counting-houses round the port bore witness that these ships plied a gentler trade than that which once made a Castellóriziote sail a terror in the Levant. In fact, they traffic between the smaller Anatolian ports and Alexandria, where you may often see their antique high-pooped hulls lying under the Breakwater, and what they carry is chiefly firewood and charcoal, cut and burned on the Lycian hills. “The mainland, then, is yours?” we asked. “Ours, as much as anyone’s,” replied sons of corsairs. “We take what we want. Whom should we pay?”

Just ten years before I had had a passing vision of the isle from the deck of a rusty tramp steamer, which called in vain for freight, and sheered off again ere I was well awake; and one thing especially I had not forgotten, the beauty of the fisher-folk whom we had passed drifting on a windless bay under the sunrise, “dark faces pale against a rosy flame.” The type in Castellórizo is the finest among latter-day Hellenes. There you will find Praxitelean heads in the flesh--find the oval face, with brows spread broad and low beneath clustering hazel hair. Grey-brown almond eyes lie wide, deep, long and liquid; noses stand forth straight and faultless; upper lips and chins are short, and mouths mobile and fine. But the straight fall of the skull behind should warn you that the race is old, if a certain meagreness of tissue and over-refinement of feature have not already betrayed its age. Women, who had three-year babes at their knees, showed too much bone, and little softness of outline in their faces; but none the less we thought them very beautiful, gazing about us with as little discretion as may be used in an Eastern society, and marvelling that painters and sculptors had not happened on this dream of fair women. The men, when they had shown us their pretentious marble church, garish with gilt carvings and Russian icons, led on to the schools, and first to that of the girls. It should have been holiday; but I suspect the classes were warned as soon as we were seen to land, for no Greek can deny himself the pleasure of showing his scholars to a western stranger. As we came within the door the serried ranks arose, and the eyes of fifty maidens, each fit to bear Athena’s _peplus_, looked into our own. Miserably we heard a hymn, miserably stammered incoherent thanks, and miserably fled. Who were we that we should patronise a choir of goddesses?

The town, more regularly laid out than most of its kind, rises in a horseshoe, tier on tier, from the port, whence radiate steep stone ladders dividing the wedges of habitation, as in the _cavea_ of an ancient theatre. We strolled from one horn of the bay to the other, admiring such nice cleanliness of streets and houses as you may see in the richer Cyclad isles, in Santorin, for example, and here and there on the Turkish coast, but seldom or never on the Greek mainland. In Castellórizo to be dirty is to confess social failure. The housewife of the most speckless floor holds her head highest, and her husband’s prodigality in whitewash and paint would delight a London landlord. Blue balconies overhanging the roadway, and shutters and doors of startling hue seemed fewer than in other Greek towns of like pretension; and glimpses of interiors assured us that more than the outside is here made clean. The windows look for the most part not on the street, but on high-walled courts, in the secretive Moslem manner, having been set thus perhaps in darker days, when the island was still a pirate’s nest. But many a heavy street door was thrown wide that morning to reveal the garden-fringes of orange and lemon and almond trees which framed geometric patterns of many-coloured pebbles; and we had to parry laughing invitations from women-folk, standing in holiday velvet and lace by their entrance-ways.

At length we climbed out on to the saddle of the twin-peaked rock, which is all the island. The southward slopes looked too naked for even a goat’s subsistence, and our self-appointed guides said they had but one precious spring of running water. To northward the Lycian seaboard, rising to points and bars of snow, filled the distance. In the nearer view lay the burnished strait of Antiphellus, with a fishing fleet becalmed, and at our feet the white crescent of the town. Pointing to the mainland, we asked what concern the islanders had there? They pastured their few flocks, was the reply, cut wood, burned charcoal, and owned orange and olive gardens or small farms. There were, indeed, several little colonies of Castellóriziote squatters, and one large village of their folk, Dembré, on the coast eastwards; but no one went there “since the measuring.” The last words were said quickly and low, and when we sought an interpretation of them, each man looked at his neighbour, as the habit is on Ottoman soil when talk has chanced on some public sore. Even we might be spies. We asked no more, knowing we should learn presently whatever was to be learned; for Dembré lies near ancient Myra, whither we were bound.

We found a fishing boat waiting approval at the quay, and the bargain was soon struck. One-eyed Antóni, his son, and his nephew bound themselves to do our pleasure for ten days at least, if they might bring back a load of Fíneka oranges, should they chance to meet with it. It sounded a pleasant cargo, and we agreed. In the early afternoon we pushed off, the light breeze being reported fair; but in the open the deceitful airs died away, and we fell to rocking on a sullen oily swell, which was rolling up from south-west to hurl itself on the iron coast, with a distant murmur of surf. There was nothing to do for hours but to follow the shadow of the sail. Our Greek cook (the same who had shared my vigil on the night of the mutiny at Canea) dived under the half-deck, and was presently very sick. He had been engaged on his word that he had served the Messageries Maritimes of France; but he now explained between paroxysms that his service had been done in an engineer’s house ashore. I doubt if even so much was true, for later on I was to hear him through the thin wall of a hut brag to gaping peasants that he was the bastard of a French general, and had known me from my childhood! The one thing sure in his past was that he had sung in cafés on the Galata quay, and the one thing certain in his future that, except in the near neighbourhood of quays, he would prove useless throughout the cruise.

In the waning day the sails filled, and the boat began to slip fast and faster eastward before a whistling breeze, which had caught up the swell. Cliffs loomed near, and in the last of the light a surf-washed wall sheered up right ahead. Antóni smiled at my doubts, and held on his course till it seemed we must crash ashore. Then the rock parted this way and that: we twisted to left, to right, and to left again, and lo! a great water and the long unruffled track of the moon on the land-locked bosom of Kékova. We ran to a berth under a shaggy hillock crowned with dim fantastic outlines of Lycian rock-tombs--the forgotten cemetery of Aperlae--and spying a single light ashore, landed to try the house for supplies. The Greek fishermen who inhabited it, Castellóriziote colonists known to Antóni, sold us eggs and a fowl; but they were strangely disturbed at sight of us, and dumbfoundered when told we were bound for Dembré. I bethought me they might be smugglers on occasion, and asked no questions, but feeling that something was not well with Dembré, planned to avoid the village on the morrow by running to the mouth of the Myra river and walking thence to the ruins. But next morning the south-wester, which sped us merrily on an even keel down the Kékova strait, was beating up so rough a sea in the open that Antóni would not risk the longer run, and beaching us on the nearest sand, sent his boat back to shelter.

[Illustration: LYCIAN TOMBS.]

[Illustration: THE THEATRE OF MYRA.]

We had to make our way, therefore, towards the village by an unfrequented path through the gardens, and we met no man. The streets were very silent, and reaching a coffee-house we turned into it to seek a guide. A group of Greeks stared at us open-mouthed, and scarcely replying to our salutations, slunk one by one away; nor was the obsequious host less perturbed. In less than a minute a heavy footfall sounded without, and first one police-trooper and then another strode in. Who were we? We told our nationality. Had we papers? Yes, and in order for the coast so far as Adalia. What might be our business here? To see the ruins of Myra. How had we come? By boat, we said. Where was that boat? It had run to Kékova. Then back you go to it at once, said they. I replied that we were come to see Myra, would certainly see it, and must, moreover, sleep the night here, for it would be too long a tramp back to the boat, which was lying we knew not exactly where. _Olmáz? Yasák!_ they said in one breath. Impossible! It is forbidden! Where, then, was their superior officer? Up country, they answered. Well, I said, rising, you will send our papers up to him, and meanwhile we walk on to Myra. And so we did, none hindering us, but none agreeing to guide; and unmobbed for once, we roamed about the vaults and horseshoe of the great Theatre, and climbed unwatched the rock-cut stairway which leads to the great carved cliff of tombs. Thus some hours passed pleasantly before we saw a trooper and an unmounted man coming across the fields. The trooper brought word that since we were here and said we would not go away, we might stay the night, and his companion, a Greek, would house us. Whereafter both settled down to stay beside us; but the trooper, tired by his gallop inland, soon fell asleep in the shade, and the Greek, following me out of earshot, unfolded at last the mystery of the Measuring of Myra.

Dembré, it appeared, has two titles to fame, over and above the fact that it once was Myra. It is the nearest considerable village to the great Kékova harbour, and it possesses, in the half-buried church of the martyr Nicholas, a shrine to which the Orthodox communities of the world pay no small reverence. Now, from time to time European warships find their way into the Kékova pool, and more than one has chanced to make some stay. Their visits have passed not unremarked by the Ottoman government. If Russia, or Austria, or England should seek a Levantine harbour, what better than Kékova? When Russia holds out the Gospel in front, Turks look for a sword at her back, and therefore uneasiness became panic when it was reported that a Russian consul had bought of a Greek farmer the shell of the church of Saint Nicholas and the land about it. It was said he was proceeding to excavate the shrine, to set it in order, and to arrange for the resumption of the holy office, and already was in treaty for the sites of two other churches which stand amid the ruins of Andráki, close to the eastern mouth of Kékova. The Porte resolved to act. A commission of three officials appeared in Dembré, proclaiming a mandate to “measure” the village, its houses and its lands, with a view to readjusting its contribution to the Imperial Exchequer; and measure they did with admirable deliberation, living the while at the charges of the farmers. Here be it observed that the Ottoman Law, as it was then, warned all men to leave buildings, lands, or other real estate untouched during such interval, usually short enough, as must elapse between the making of a survey and the final notification of assessment. Neither might any kind of property be bought or sold, nor could a barn, a house, a fence be built or even repaired. Two years ago the measurers had vanished from Dembré, and from that day to the hour of our arrival the village had heard no word of its assessment.

Imagine those years. The village was frozen as by a spell. A special police-post was established landwards, and all neighbours were searched as they approached or left the suspect community. The weekly market ceased, and all commerce of men whatsoever. Houses gaped to wind and rain, but they might not be made good; and lands went out of cultivation for lack of seed. This state of things endured weeks, months, a year, till, sick with hope deferred, some householders, abandoning all they had, slipped away of dark nights aboard Castellóriziote caiques, and passed on to free Greek soil, fearful of being retrieved from their mother-isle. Round the remainder in Dembré the cordon was drawn closer; but a few others managed to flee as time went on, leaving their houses tenantless and their gardens to the riot of weeds. Outsiders, even kinsmen, shunned the banned village, and were shunned in turn, if bold enough to enter, lest suspicion attach of trafficking or plotting escape. No formal taxes were levied, but the police had to live, which came to the same thing, or to more, in the end; and currency grew rarer and rarer in the village, little or none coming from without. It was the survivors of a lately prosperous community that we had seen hanging about the streets, fearful to act or speak, watching for a release that never came. My informant supposed nothing could be done to help them. He himself would suffer, of course, as soon as we were gone, for his entertainment of us to-night, forced though it was. His plaint was uttered less in anger than with a certain air of apology, as a man, conscious of futility, might complain of the weather or any other act of God. The idea that the Common Law had been shamefully abused to his undoing, had probably never occurred to him, his view of Law being that of most poor folk, that it is wholly external, the voice of an irresponsible will to be endured or evaded like any other tyranny. And his Padishah had only acted as Kings have ever acted in the East, from the Great King, the King of Assyria, to the latest Sultan or Shah.

Afterwards we visited that fatal church. It is claimed for it (perhaps extravagantly) that it is the same in which the great Bishop of Myra, who is become the patron saint of fishermen, and inspires the Christmas dreams of children over half the world, ministered and was buried. St. Nicholas lies at Bari now; but the violated place of his first rest is shown at Dembré in a recess fenced from the northern aisle of the basilica by a low screen of varied marbles somewhat more recent in date than the saint’s day. The apse retains the form of the original Tribunal, with the stone throne set in a semicircle of seats, moss-grown and stained with green slime; and taken for all in all, this church is the most interesting memorial of the early days of Christianity, in the land where Paul conducted the first Christian mission.

[Illustration: THE REPUTED TOMB OF ST. NICHOLAS AT MYRA.]

Our host entertained us as well as his poor means allowed, and spread long rugs on his low divans. In the morning light I was struck with the beauty of their hues, and asked their age, which seemed to be some seventy years. The owner whispered to my servant, Would I buy? He wished to sell all he had, gather a little privy cash, and make his escape, and he asked no more than a fair price. He was willing to carry the load five or six rugged miles, and I have those rugs still. We found the boat in a sheltered cove of Kékova, and tacking down the strait, brought up under the shore of deserted Dóliché, where we fished and ate our catch under the moon, and cradled on the gentle swell, slept careless of cockroaches and fleas.

On the morrow Antóni set sail westward, but we made slow way, for the wind was contrary, and it was not till three days later that, after revisiting Castellórizo, we stood in to Kalamáki bay about the third hour. With difficulty horses were hired for the road to Pátara and Xanthus, and we stumbled out of the little _scala_ early in the afternoon; but ill mounted on a rough road, we did not sight the vale of Pátara till the sun was low. Patches of stagnant water, catching the level rays, glistened here and there like gold foil on the poisonous greenness of the hollow; while other patches, grey in shadow and golden-brown in light, gradually resolved themselves into ruins standing in deep marsh. A tethered horse grazing on the rim of the slough, a faint tinkling of goat bells, and three black tents near a pine-log shelter alone betrayed the presence of man on the holiest site of Lycia.

Certain of swampy ground ahead, we dismounted; for most Anatolian horses, whether from heredity or from early experience of bogland, will fall into a paroxysm of terror at the sight of water in the path, and I have known the most battered pack-jade rear and prance like Job’s war-horse rather than pass a gutter. So afoot we went down to see Pátara. These cumbered sites of dead cities may refresh the soul, but surely they vex the body. The curse of Lost Paradise seems to brood over them, bidding the longest thorns and the stoutest thistles grow and multiply between their stones. Snakes and scorpions wait for the unwary hand in every cranny, and all blocks seem to have fallen edge uppermost or to be ready to turn under a hasty foot.

The ruins of Pátara lie round its silted harbour, which is become a reedy morass. A fortress of the Byzantine age has been the last permanent habitation; and along the broken crenellations of its walls we followed clumsily the soft-shod feet of an agile Yuruk boy. It was no holiday ramble. The wall was a mere _arête_ between inky depths to left and a slimy jungle to right; it was often broken and always unsafe, and over its rottenest parts passage had to be forced through clumps of rank vegetation. We made slow progress, marked by the splashing of loose stones into the pool and the scurrying of its myriad gruesome tenants, and when we had struggled to dry land, near the sand-choked ruin of the Theatre, it was high time to seek some lodging for the night.

[Illustration: THE SAND-CHOKED THEATRE OF PATARA.]

Far up the marsh the cry of a goatherd driving his flock to higher ground sounded faintly amid a responsive jangle of gathering bells; and loud in our ears sang the first mosquitoes of sundown. What pests must rise from that rotting slough of a summer night, making a camp intolerable, even on the heights above! But in chill April weather one might hope to pass the dark hours well enough. We made for the pine-log shelter and the three black booths, and finding the first full of dung, wherein fleas and ticks unnumbered lay in wait, sent our Greek ahead to parley with the Yuruks. This was a tactical mistake. Hospitality, even in the East, is more often enforced by public opinion than offered out of the fulness of the heart. Therefore, you should meet your possible host half-way without the hesitancy which the polite code of the West prescribes: appeal boldly to his tribal conscience; identify yourself with his dwelling or his kin; touch his beard, his knees, his head, his salt, his tent-rope. All nomads are encased in tribal selfishness, and among the most exclusive are the Yuruks, who wander under the shadow of a government wholly external to them, that takes all it can and gives nothing in exchange. What do they want with the apparatus of official Ottoman civilisation, with police, only seen at the heels of the publican, with the local _mairie_, only entered at the heels of the police, with new roads and spidery bridges which their sagacious asses avoid? All these things they curse in one breath with the provinces of Yemen and Hasa, to which their sons are spirited as conscripts. Such men offer no spontaneous welcome to the casual stranger--a tax-gatherer as likely as not, or a spy of the local assessor--who knows?; and a party like ours, not strange enough in gait or guise to rouse that curiosity which overmasters suspicion, will fare ill if it waits an invitation.

The Greek came back to say we were among bad men, and had best go back to Kalamáki, night though it was. But we had no mind to remount our jaded beasts and stumble for four hours over that execrable path, and the Yuruks looked honest folk enough. So doing last what we should have done first, we walked straightway into the largest tent and sat down by the ashes of its hearth. No one showed surprise. We were within our social right by the code, and the owner had no choice but to follow and speak the customary words of welcome. But suspicion clouded his simple mind, and we had to go through that exasperating Ollendorfian dialogue, which, in one language or another, must be held on arrival wherever men have been taught by long experience to conceal their wealth.

“Have you barley for our beasts?”

“We have no barley.”

“But we give money.” (_Chins jerked and tongues clicked to imply incredulity and denial._)

“Well--have you chopped straw?”

“There is none, Wallah!”

“Good--nor eggs?”

“_We_ have no eggs.” (_Abundance in the next camp._)

“Nor milk?”

“To-day, none.” (_Yesterday and to-morrow, never to-day._)

“Nor butter, nor bread, nor anything?”

“Not anything, by the head of God!”

“But these fowls, they are barren?”

“Ai-i! they lay eggs, God be praised!”

“And those nanny-goats, they are all dry?”

“Wallah! They make milk.”

“Then, by God’s will, we stay. Quick! barley, milk, eggs! We stay.”

And in nine cases out of ten your simple wants will be supplied; and although sooner or later you must parry the inevitable prayer for those rejuvenating philtres, of which all Franks are understood to hold the secret, you will part best of friends at dawn from unwilling hosts of the evening before.

Should an Eastern depart from his indifferent reserve and greet you cordially at first sight, beware of him. He meditates some particular motive of self-interest. A few years ago certain official assessors of land-tax on their way up the left bank of the Nile suddenly found the obstruction, which had embittered their earlier progress, yield to a spirit of frank hospitality. Sheikhs and notables came forth to greet them. The best of the village was at their service, and the fullest revelation was made at once of the wealth of each community, and especially the high value of its lands. Meanwhile another Commission, advancing _pari passu_ up the contrary bank, was equally surprised by a like change in the peasants’ demeanour. Its business was to purchase ground for the track of a State Railway, and lo! field after field along the proposed line was hardly worth an old song. Thus for awhile were both Commissions in clover. Then weeping and wailing broke out behind them, and obstruction became more dogged than ever in front. The assessors had been mistaken for the railway surveyors, the surveyors for the assessors.

With us, however, all would now go well. Neither our clothes nor, truth to tell, our halting Turkish reminded the old Yuruk of any publican he had ever known. Pine-logs were heaped on the embers, tobacco-boxes offered and accepted, buttermilk and unleavened dampers brought in by the wrinkled dame. The patriarch, readily unbosoming his griefs after the manner of his kind, told how he had broken up and sowed a bit of Noman’s land, and promptly found it assessed as a field under irrigation; how his last plough-ox had been taken to discharge a debt not half its value, and his son, the support of his age, was gone to the Yemen--never, God be witness, to return. Wallah! _he_ knew the Government! The tale sounded pathetic to our ears, and we tried awkwardly to sympathise with the teller; but we got no help from our Greek, reassured by this time, and well aware how light such woes lie on the bird-like souls of wanderers who are here to-day, dispersed to-morrow, and fatalist above the settled folk. He chimed in with ribald pleasantries, reminiscent of his Gálata days, to the delight of the patriarch and his son, little used to urban wit.

His indecencies, but half understood, seemed no affair of mine, and thankful to be discharged from the talk, I ceased to listen. The night had fallen luminous, with a rising moon, and profoundly still. Not a needle stirred in the pine fronds. Only the flat note of a bell sounded now and again from the fold as a beast turned in his lair; and in the pauses of talk one might hear even the faint intermittent crepitation of stones, trees, and earth, respiring the heat of the past day. But whenever, to the relief of unaccustomed eyes, the smoky fire died down, a strident column of mosquitoes would sail in by the door to dispute our persons with the fleas.

Such tent-dwellers seem lighter of heart than the men of Turkish towns and villages, merrier perhaps for having less between them and the sky. There is this to be said for tent-life in a warm clime--it exhilarates, like the casting off of clothing; and perhaps for this reason civilised men of other climes have so much hankering for it, despite its insecurity and its plague of blowing dust, and the noonday heat and the cold in the dawn. But the canvas booth is not meant for house-dwellers who carry with them much furniture and many scattered possessions, and would sit high and stand upright. It should be low to cheat the wind, and empty of all that may gather dust--a mere canvas burrow, such a shelter from draught and sun and dew as suits the simplicity and the poverty of minds in which want of occupation and variety in life leaves no void to be filled by the morbid introspection dear to civilised solitaries.

The woman took no part in the discourse, nor did she share the meal with her husband after his guests were satisfied. But having tendered him the bowl with the gentlest motion of one palm towards her breast, in obedience to an immemorial instinct of reverence for the male, she sank on her heels to coax the fire and croon over the ashes, throwing now and again a question at us, till some pastoral duty called her outside the tent. It was perfect domestic accord. Man and woman without friction, question or strife, evidently sufficed together for all the necessary functions of existence. She, in her constant performance of physical labours, had probably never known the woes of either her toiling or her idle Western sisters: for her no sexual cravings unappeased, no assumption of the manly part, no fear of loneliness in middle life or age. If she must be obedient in all things, even to stripes, the inexorable opinion of a simple society would protect her from physical tyranny. For in the nomad’s tent the rod is held a fool’s weapon, and shame is on him who can rule his household with no other, or fails to pay in a multitude of punctilious ways due honour to his wife.

* * * * *

I must have fallen into uneasy sleep, for, when roused by the cold, as much as by insect legions, I found the talk ceased and the talkers slumbering, feet to fire. A sea-wind, rising gustily, fanned an intermittent glow in the heart of the embers, and their dusky gleam revealed the old Yuruk a moment, lying supine, with his head on the lap of his dame, who sat stark asleep against the tent-pole. Seen thus, the two looked less like human beings than gnomes, or survivors of some primaeval race which worshipped other gods. And so, in a sense, they were. Though the Yuruks profess Islam, Allah has not the best of their private allegiance; and under his name they revere, without ritual or articulate creed, some private tribal god, with whom they feel the possibility of more intimate communion. The All-Father of the Arabs has no more chased the petty gods of place and tribe out of the Nearer East than He of the Hebrews. He has been accepted, indeed, as a strictly constitutional monarch, or rather, perhaps, as a Judge of Appeal who may resolve now and then those age-long feuds in which tribal gods involve their human kin; but, for the rest, accepted only in so far as he prescribes no duty but towards himself. He is an immaterial Allah, without parts or earthly semblance, not because he is a spirit, but because he is a shadow. Nothing of that real sense of the omnipresence and omnipotence of a Divine Being, which seems to possess the most stolid of settled Moslems and elevates their creed at its best into one of the purest forms of monotheism conceivable, is present to the wanderers. They are as careless of Allah as, they take it, he is careless of them. When he first made the world, say Bedawis, he ordered Creation during six days, and, very weary on the seventh, was composing himself to sleep, when a man stood before him and said: “Thou hast apportioned the world, but to us given nothing. Behold us still in the desert!” And the Creator looked and saw the Bedawis indeed forgotten in the Waste; but he would not disturb what he had done. “This I give you,” he replied; “since ye dwell in what is no man’s, ye may take what is any man’s. Go your way.” And his way from that hour has the Bedawi gone, careless of Creation and Creator.

It was deep night still, and the moon, sinking to the sea-rim, threw an image of the tent-door across the fire, bleaching the glow of the wood embers. Little by little the pale light crept up the old dame’s face. She opened her eyes suddenly as a waking animal, shuffled her knees sideways from under the man’s shoulders, gently lowered his head to a saddlebag, and yawning, left the tent. I heard her gathering fuel without, with which presently she made up the fire. Then she went down towards the fold, where a continuous jangle told of uneasy udders and prescience of coming day.

The fresh warmth to my feet made me drowsy again, and when I woke once more, the dusk of dawn was in the tent, but the dame had not returned. Still milking and tending the herd, she at least showed little enough of that indolent habit with which we credit the East.

I scrambled to my feet, stiff with cramp and cold, and stood in the tent-door. The great wolf-dogs, who had bayed me over night, recognised a temporary adoption into the family by sidling silently out of range, and settling watchful again on the gossamers. During the chill hours a false impalpable sea had streamed inland, and, filling the hollow where Pátara lay, had submerged all but the higher dunes; but above its smoky limit, the true sea could be seen swelling to the horizon in palest tints of mauve and green. The profile of a shaggy range, beyond the Xanthus river, grew harder and harder against the brightening sky, rib after rib detaching itself on the ample slopes; and led upwards along its crest towards the parent chain of Taurus, my eyes caught the first flush of day on a pinnacle of snow. The old Yuruk stretched himself once or twice, rose, spat, pushed through the door, and, leaving his dame to set milk and cheese before us, strode off without a word of farewell.

* * * * *

The Yuruk guide of yesterday led us out northward through a triple Roman archway, and along a street of tombs. The Xanthus river rushed a mile or two to our left, red with the melted snows of Ak Dagh, and the rudely paved path wound over spongy swards and across soft reedy channels towards the neck of the plain. One would have known it for a poisonous place, even had it not earned ill-fame by killing two of Fellows’ men. After an hour or two we reached a bridge, and beyond the outlet of the eastern swamp, entered a region of scattered fields, gnarled olives, and solitary farms, holdings of the “Turks” of Gunuk, who are sons of the old Lycians, county gentlemen in a small way, sportsmen always, and brigands now and then. Every man we met went armed, and the Bey, at whose house we dismounted under the steep of Xanthus, kept a guard of three.

[Illustration: THE DESPOILED HARPY TOMB.]

The ruins, far seen on a sunlit slope since the first hour of our ride, lie on the first shelf of the mountains, high above the river at the point where it issues into the plain. Little seemed changed since Fellows’ day, and the stakes, with which he propped the roof of the “Harpy Tomb” after stripping the frieze, still uphold it. If you feel a momentary pang of shame before the mutilated pillar, look round at the poisonous marsh and the wild hills and wilder men and you will not blame Fellows. How many artists of two generations would have seen the Harpy reliefs in their place? The Theatre, whose curve is so oddly broken to avoid a pillar-tomb, is one tangle of brushwood; but the great four-square stela, inscribed in the strange Lycian character, on all its marble faces, stands yet clear and unhurt; and you may walk eastwards from it all the length of the main street to a wide paved area, from which lesser flagged ways run right and left. The whole ground-plan of the city is there, and more of it evidently survives from the earliest days than on any other Anatolian site. Some day a digger will get a rich booty at Xanthus, and gather his first-fruits, I dare wager, on that jutting shelf shored up by cyclopean walling behind the Theatre, where a temple of the Xanthian Apollo or of Sarpedon stood as an outpost towards the sea, and struggling barley reveals, by the variety of its growth, the outline of a great oblong building. But the day of digging Xanthus seems no nearer. First Crete, and then Sparta have drawn off our explorers, and Lycia must still wait.

The ride round the eastern side of the swamp to Kalamáki I have endured twice since that day, and I know it for one of the most painful in Anatolia, so rough and broken is the paved path, and so dank the air. I shall not revive its memory. No sumptuous yacht was ever a more welcome sight than Antóni’s little craft rocking in the evening light under the cliffs of Kalamáki. The south-wester had lulled at last, and we ran out before a light land breeze. We had no mind to go back to Castellórizo, unless we could do no better; for what with blockade-running in Crete, and waiting on the chance of a Turkish war, the Greek coasters could no longer be trusted to call. A week or so even in that fortunate isle would hang too heavy on our hands. So we lay to off the western point, Antóni promising to run to Rhodes, for the first time in his little boat’s history, should a fair wind spring up by the next noon. As luck would have it, a north-easter began to blow at dawn, and he kept his word, as always. We woke to find the boat heeling over at racing pace with the mouth of the Xanthus astern and the bluffs of the Seven Capes sliding forward one behind another. As we hissed through the white-caps of the open gulf, I liked Antóni better than ever. He cuddled the tiller of his little boat like a lover, talking of the fame which should be hers in Castellórizo if she could run the eighty miles to Rhodes before sundown. And she did her best. The harbour was well in sight when the wind died away, leaving a light night-air to waft us, after some hours of calm, to the windmills, which have stood on the mole of Rhodes since the Hospitallers came.

In the first of the morning we heard the news--the Greeks had crossed the Thessalian border, and it was war. Some Jewish loafer on the quay must have reported that we were speaking Greek aboard; for the port authority roundly refused to accept our British passports, and set a watch over us at our inn. At the same time Antóni and his boat found themselves under arrest. It mattered little, however; for our acting consul knew me, and the Governor General of the Isles, who when _vali_ of Adana had furthered my party some years before, was then in Rhodes, and had not forgotten. The embargo was lifted with a genial counsel to us not to run about the sea with Greeks till better times; and Antóni, paid as we loved him, which was well, picked up a cargo, and spread his sail for Castellórizo to tell the tale of the cruise.

Chapter III.

Crete.

I returned to Athens towards the end of the same year to take up the direction of the British School of Archaeology, but that task can hardly be counted among the accidents of an antiquary’s life. Nor will I describe the uneventful excavation, which it fell to me to conduct in Melos, while waiting the day to put spade into a richer Aegean soil, the soil of Crete. The day came with the year 1900. The massacre of Candia forced a Great Power to rid the island for ever of the Turk; and in the spring of 1899 I accompanied the future explorer of Cnossus on my fourth visit to Crete. Arthur Evans had long laid his plans, and, with the forethought of genius, cast his bread on troubled waters by buying a Bey’s part share of the site of the Palace of Minos. He seemed to waste labour and money; for under the Ottoman law his title could not be made secure, and in the end his ownership lapsed to a partner. But when others, who coveted Cnossus, put forward moral rights, he alone could urge the convincing claim of sacrifice, and the Cretans, for whom he had done much in their hour of danger, upheld his cause in the hour of freedom. We journeyed, that spring, all round the eastern half of the island, pegging out claims for future digging. Known to the islanders as we both were (though I the less), we were made welcome everywhere. The land still showed ghastly wounds of its late long fight. Many villages lay gaunt skeletons of ruin; and where olive groves had been, blackened stumps and pits bore witness to the ethnicidal fury of religious war in the Near East, which ever uproots the staple of a foeman’s life, after it has killed the mother and her babe.

[Illustration: BLACKENED STUMPS AND PITS.]

In the East of the island the French were still guiding the new rulers with the ready sympathy of Latin for Latin, and nearer to Candia the government had been committed for the moment to the honest but ruder hands of British subalterns. I spent a day or so with one of these. He knew no word of Greek, and it was told of him that when he arrived on a polo pony to be a father to some twenty villages, the local Bishop called in state, bringing, as the ingratiating custom is, a turkey or two and a clutch of eggs. Our young law-giver, nosing a bribe, put him into the street, eggs, turkey, and all. I sat one morning in his court-house to hear justice done to the people. The judge presided in knickerbockers and a cricket shirt--for the day was warm--and smoked his best loved briar. A peasant, whose sheep had been driven off, had heard, after many days, a tinkling by night on a distant hillside, and claimed he knew his bells again. Did then one sheep-bell so differ from another? Solomon put it to the test. He sent his soldier servant to collect bells from the village shepherds, and on his return locked him in an inner room, while they waited in court. After a jangle behind the door, the judge asked whose bell had tinkled, and, on the witness of the servant, the shepherds were right every time. The peasant got back his sheep. Then a woman stood forth to accuse a man of trying her door by night with foul intent; but since he had neither prevailed nor spoken with her, and it was black dark, how had she known what man he was? It came out in evidence that this had not been his first visit, nor had he been used to find the door barred and the lady all unkind. Promptly he was fined a few piastres for disturbing the village peace, while the coy accuser was sent to hoe the Bishop’s potato-field for a fortnight of working days. “Ah! this is Justice,” said the delighted Headman to me. “We have not known it before in Crete!”

For us, then, and no others, in the following year Minos was waiting when we rode out from Candia. Over the very site of his buried Throne a desolate donkey drooped, the one living thing in view. He was driven off, and the digging of Cnossus began. All men who care for these things know by now what was revealed in the next few weeks; and it is another’s right to retell the tale. I did something to help my colleague to start, for in digging, as in most ventures, the first steps are most difficult: and I did more in the following months to define the limits of his vast field, of which much still waits the spade. But it grew clearer every day that the central hillock, which in all reason was his peculiar preserve, held the key of the town’s early history, and almost all its riches, and that exploration were better left undone in the outskirts until the centre had all been laid bare. Therefore I quitted Cnossus in early May, and with Gregóri of Cyprus, who was still following my fortunes after a dozen years, set out eastwards for the second of our claims, a Cave which was suspected to be the mythic birthplace of the Father God of Crete.

In our theology He, who shall be to all time, from all time has been; but the Greek, conceiving Immortality more easily than Eternity, branded the Cretans the liars of antiquity for showing on one hill the tomb of Zeus, while he believed devoutly in the divine birthplace, which was pointed out on another. Other lands, indeed, claimed the honour; but the beautiful peaks, which rose in pale mornings and opalescent evenings out of the southern sea, prevailed with the Faithful. If, however, the Greek was sure of the island to which he owed his God, he was not, in his latter days at least, so sure which precise spot had been hallowed by the divine birth. The God was certainly cradled in a cave; but there were two caves, the one in the central peak of Ida, the other in the lower but still majestic easterly mountain group of Dicte. Some, like the Sicilian Diodorus, who knew these rival claims, tried to reconcile them by telling that the babe, born on Dicte, was reared on Ida. But more voted for one or the other hill, and those of the best authority for Dicte. There the birth was placed by Hesiod, the eldest poet who relates the story; there, too, by the great Romans, Lucretius and Virgil, to say nothing of lesser lights.

This Greek tale, become more familiar to the West than many myths of its own primitive creeds, varies little in the authorities. Cronus, King of Heaven, warned that a son shall cast him from his realm, determines to devour his male issue as soon as born. But Queen Rhea, wrathful and feeling her hour nigh, flees to Crete, and on Dicte is delivered of a boy, whom she hides in a cave, while the blind old god swallows a stone in place of his child (and ever since stones have been mansions of godhead in the Near East). The baby’s whimpering is drowned by the clashing shields of faithful servants or, as one story has it, by the grunting of a fostering sow. In Hesiod’s narrative all this story concerns the city of Lyttus. Thither the pregnant queen was sent by the kindly Earth Mother to wait her time, and thence she set forth by night to bear in a cave of the neighbouring mountain a babe who would find the same cave convenient in later days. For thither, as Lucian tells us in his best manner, he led the maiden Europa, flushed and half suspecting; and there too the son, whom she conceived that day, would seek his Father when, another Moses, he wished to be the Lawgiver of his people. While the Cretans waited above (so runs the story), Minos descended into this Holy Grot, and when he reappeared with the Code, gave out he had it of Zeus himself.

A primitive sanctuary was to be looked for, therefore, in some grot on Dicte, and by preference near Lyttus, whose scattered ruin lies on a spur of the north-western Lasithi peak, which is still climbed by a yearly pilgrimage and called the Lord’s Mountain. In so well defined an area such a cave, if any there were, must have been identified long ago, had the upland fastnesses of Crete been any place for the scholarly explorer these many centuries past. But the Lasithi region, which excluded the Venetians and only once admitted the Turks in arms, long remained less known than even the rest of the island, and nothing was heard by the outer world of any cavern in Dicte till less than thirty years ago.

At last reports reached Candia touching a large double grot which is seen as a black spot on the hillside above Psychró, a village of the inner Lasithi plain. It was said that shepherds, folding their flocks in it at night or in storm, had grubbed up strange objects of bronze and terra-cotta from the black bottom mould. Their finding continued, and three years later the first archaeologists came to Psychró and recovered divers antiques from peasant hands--figurines of men and beasts, miniature battle axes, knives and other weapons. They climbed, moreover, to the Cave itself, and scraped away the earth from its mouth in vain hope of uncovering such an altar as had existed without the Zeus grot on Ida; but inside they found little to do, so heavy was the cumber of fallen rocks in the upper hall. What they had recovered, however, was plainly part of a votive deposit, and the cave was marked holy and a prize for explorers to come.

To Psychró, therefore, I betook myself with a few trained men, some stone-hammers, mining-bars, blasting powder, and the rest of a cave-digger’s plant. The villagers proved willing, nay eager, belying my fear that a cold reception awaited anyone who came to poach this preserve of illicit searchers. Just then Lasithi, like all Crete, was anxious before all things to justify its new won freedom in European eyes, and Psychró was not less alive than any other Greek village would have been, to the glory to be shed on its little self by notable discoveries in its Cave. Furthermore, from week to week the Prince High Commissioner was expected in Lasithi. He had announced he would visit the Cave, and here in the nick of time was an Englishman offering to make, at his own charges, the needful path for the royal mules. Therefore, on a stormy morning, while the hillside was swept by clammy mists and half-frozen showers, I found no lack of hands to make me a zig-zag mule-track up five hundred feet of rock. Knowing that the path would serve them thereafter to bring down the black cave mould, which the farmers of the plain prize above all top-dressings, the Psychró men finished it in less than a day; and while a camping ground was being levelled and embanked before the yawning mouth, we began to blast a way into the cave itself.

Let it be understood that this great cavern is double, having a shallow hall to right, and an abysmal chasm to left, which is not unworthy to rank among the famous limestone grottoes of the world. The rock falls sheer at first, but, as the light grows dim, you find your feet on an easier slope, and can clamber down safely into deeper darkness. Having groped thus far, stand and burn a flare. In front an icy pool spreads from your feet far into the hill about the bases of fantastic stalactite columns, and hall opens out of hall, each with fretted roof and black unruffled floor, while behind and far above a spot of luminous haze shows the way you have come from the upper world. It is a fit scene for Minos’ colloquy with his father Zeus, and for the cult of a chthonian God. To-day the hill-girt plain of Lasithi, laid level as a sand beach, drains to a stream which is sucked into darkness below an overhanging cliff, and reappears, perhaps, in certain large springs which rise among the northern roots of the hills; but its floor, which is seen now from above as a huge chequerboard, has not always been dry. A lake, lapping the mountain flanks five hundred feet above, once poured its overflow into the hill through the Cave of Psychró, and made it such a natural marvel as would appeal to the superstition of primitive peasants.

Blasting powder made short work of the boulders in the upper hall, whose threatening roof held good to the end, and crowbars and stone-hammers finished the work. In four strenuous days we had not only hewn a path into the upper hall, but cleared a large area of black mould, and the real search could begin. But preparations for further blasts had still to go on, with an incessant ringing of mining bars; and what with their metallic din, reverberating from roof to walls, what with the heavy hanging fumes of powder and the mingled reek of hot, unwashed men and chill, newly turned earth, we had not too pleasant a task in that dim, dripping cave. All soil was carried out of the dark up the steep incline, and to sifting it and washing the blackened potsherds it contained was set a gang of women, who are always more patient in minute search than men, and less apt to steal. It is always well to have a few women among your diggers. The men labour better in their company, and with a vivacity which is of no small value where boredom spells failure. The day, which else might drag its slow length along, goes merrily in chatter and laughter, and the task is sought cheerfully at dawn, and not willingly left at eve. As a master of labour, I have met with least reluctance from women in Moslem lands. The Bedawi wives of the northern half tribe of Walad Ali, which has settled about the mounds of Gaif in the Nile Delta during the last fifty years, came without the least demur to help their husbands and brothers dig Naukratis. They even brought their sucklings; and on the first day more than one mother tried to carry her basket of earth on one shoulder, while a brown babe nestled at her breast. As the poor mite received a deluge of sand in mouth and eyes whenever the load was tipped unhandily, I forbade babies in arms for the morrow; but no one seemed to understand why. In Cyprus, too, Turkish mothers flocked to our work, and their little girls, enlisted more for the pleasure of the sight of them than anything else, used to turn the Paphian Temple into a riotous playground. But Eastern Christians are usually more prudish or more fearful, and I had expected that no Lasithi woman would work. Sure enough they proved coy, and at first would only watch from afar two trained girls brought up from Cnossus as lures; but on the third morning a cosmopolitan villager, who had fought--or looted--in France in 1870, sent up his wife and a daughter to help his son, and the ice was broken. A laughing mob ran up the hill tossing sieves and clamouring to be listed, and with their sisters, cousins and aunts, who brought up the midday meals, made the terrace before our cave the gayest spot in Lasithi.

Above a thick bed of yellow clay, laid long ago by water, and productive only of bones and scraps of very primitive pottery, lay black earth five to seven feet deep at the back of the Upper Hall. It proved to hold countless burned things, and, also, many unburned offerings, which had been laid or dropped at all periods, from about the early classical age back to a dim antiquity, roughly coeval with the Twelfth Dynasty of Pharaohs. Bronzes from many moulds were hidden there, a little chariot, for example, drawn by an ox and a ram, unequally yoked; many miniature effigies of bulls and sheep; knives, pins, lance-heads, needles, and little necessaries of the toilet; and also hundreds of clay cups, and some finely painted potter’s work, and rough libation tables of stone. These lay thickest about a rude structure, bedded on the yellow clay, which was doubtless an altar of burnt sacrifice. The dark innermost recess, shut off by a rough and ruinous wall, was long shunned; for the rock-roof was unsound above it, and great fragments overhung perilously. But when we ventured into it at the last, nothing worse happened than sudden thunderous slides of rock and earth, which at first sent the scared diggers scampering for their lives, but soon came to be held harmless. This sacrosanct area was soil untouched by the modern searcher, and it proved extraordinarily prolific in broken vases, mostly of painted ware, but less rich in metal things. To clear the whole Upper Hall took no more than a fortnight; and I was well enough pleased on the whole when I gave it back to its fluttered bats and owls. The altar and temenos wall had proved the place holy, and nothing less, in all likelihood, than the Birth Cave itself.

It remained, however, to search the Lower Hall for objects that might have slipped down during the secret digging of the past fifteen years; but I did not expect much spoil, since I was told that no native had ever found anything among these dim stalactite pillars except a few scraps of water-borne pottery. Unwilling and not hopeful, the men clambered down into the abyss, and the women especially, who had been working hitherto in sunshine at the Cave’s mouth, moaned at sight of the clammy mud in which they must now stand and search by the smoky light of petroleum flares. But complaints soon ceased, as first one and then another picked a bronze out of the soil which had lodged on the upper rock slopes. Two objects among the handfuls which I was called to collect from time to time were especially welcome, one a little statuette of the god of Egyptian Thebes, Amen Ra (how came he there? in the hand of an Egyptian or a Cretan devotee?); the other a miniature battle-axe, earnest of more to come.

There was not room, however, for all hands on the steep slope, and I bade a few of the best workers rake out the little pockets of lime-encrusted mud, which had been laid in cups and hollows on the lower stalagmitic floors. There, too, blades and pins were found; and, working down and down into the darkness, till their distant lights shone no brighter than glow-worm lamps to the men above, the pioneers reached the margin of the subterranean pool, and began to scrape the mud-slides left by the water as it shrinks in summer time into the hill. So much did this slime yield that some went on unbidden to dredge the shallows of the chill pool itself, and find there many rude bronze statuettes, male and female, nude and draped, vicarious deputies of worshippers who had wished to be specially remembered of the God, and also signet gems and rings, pins, needles by the score.

By this time more than half the workfolk were splashing in the nether pool, eager for the special rewards promised to lucky finders; and the tale of bronzes had already been doubled. But Chance had reserved her crowning grace. A zealous groper, wishful to put both hands to his work, happened to wedge his guttering candle in the fluting of a stalactite column, and by its light espied in the slit the green edge of a bronze blade. I passed the word to leave mud-larking in the pool and search the colonnades. Men and girls dispersed themselves along the dark aisles, and perching above the black waters on natural crockets of the pillars, peered into the flutings. They found at once--found blades, pins, tweezers, brooches, and here and there a votive axe, and in some niches as many as ten votive things together. Most were picked out easily enough by the slim fingers of the girls; but to possess ourselves of others, which the lights revealed, it was necessary to smash stalactite lips that had almost closed in long ages. For about four hours we discovered at least an object a minute, chiefly on the columns at the head of the pool: but above the stature of a man nothing was anywhere found.

When nothing more could be seen in the crevices, which had been scrutinised twice and thrice, and we had dredged the pool’s bed as far as wading men could reach, I called off the workers, who were falling sick of the damp and chill; and two days later we left silent and solitary the violated shrine of the God of Dicte. The digger’s life is a surfeit of surprises, but his imagination has seldom been provoked so sharply as in that dim chasm. One seemed to come very near indeed to men who lived before history. As we saw those pillared isles, so with little change had the last worshipper, who offered a token to Zeus, seen them three thousand years ago. No later life had obliterated his tracks; and we could follow them back into the primaeval world with such stirring of fancy as one feels in the Desert, which is the same to-day as it was yesterday, and has been since the beginning of things.

I have never struck tents with sharper regret, for there could be no pleasanter abode than a camp on that rocky shelf of Dicte. All day handsome folk went and came, who dealt as honourably with the stranger as he wished to deal with them, showing neither distrust nor presumption, but a frank highland gentility; and as evening fell, they would turn merrily down the hill, only lingering to exchange a word or to load a mule with soil for the gardens below. By night we were alone, free and irresponsible as Bedawis, and far safer; for in that distressful isle of Crete, where every peasant had his tale of rapine and murder in his own or his father’s time, there was no suspicion of fear. Sometimes the scourge of the Cretan spring, a hot Libyan gust, would swoop unheralded from the higher gullies, and set the cook’s coals scurrying towards the big powder canister and himself in frantic chase, calling on the Virgin Mother; and half a dozen times it seemed our tents must go by the sheer way to the village, whose lights twinkled five hundred feet below. But poles and ropes held out against the worst of the wind, and soon the moon rode in cloudless heaven once more, and the flags drooped motionless on their standards. So the night would pass, and with the dawn the chatter be heard again, coming round the shoulder of the hill.

* * * * *

[Illustration: SPONGE BOATS IN ZAKRO BAY.]

A year later I was camped still further east on the uttermost Cretan coast which looks towards the Levant sea. Broken pieces of painted vases had been found some time before about the mouth of a large pit near a little natural harbour, now known as the Bay of Zakro; and the vineyards of a little hamlet on the lower slopes were embanked with walls of primaeval masonry. The bay was much frequented. Often one waked to find a dozen or so of small craft at anchor, whose sailors would land in the morning to draw water, seek the blessing of a priest, and be gone after noon. Some came to talk with me, and declared themselves strangers, sponge-divers, gathered from many coasts, but chiefly from the Isle of Symi. They were men of swarthy skin, somewhat boisterous and given to drinking and dicing,--bent on a merry life, because in their trade it is short. Zakro, said they, was their last customary port of call before they adventured over the broad strait to the Libyan fishing grounds. As they do now, so Cretans must have done in the days of Minos; and by trade Zakro grew so rich nearly four thousand years ago that it possessed some of the finest vases in the Aegean, and became cosmopolitan enough to use the products of Syria and inner Asia.

I began to search my ground and reached the fourteenth of May by our reckoning, the second in the older style. The weather had been boisterous for a fortnight past, and under some unseasonable influence shifting gales, lowering skies, and frequent rains had succeeded the serenity of April. A heavier fall than usual began in the afternoon, and during the windless early hours of night grew to a tropical deluge. I was encamped in front of a large magazine, the only building upon the beach, about a quarter of a mile from the mouth of a river which comes down from the upland shelves of Sitía. The noble gorge of its middle course, cleft sheer as a Pacific cañon, was set so thick with old trees and tangled undergrowth, when I saw it first, that a man could scarcely pass along its floor; in the broad upper valley above high-water mark, complots, orchards, and terraced gardens flourished abundantly, and the deltaic plain about the mouth was even more fertile still.

Presently I had to abandon the tent, though it had been proof against former rains, and seek sleep in the rat-ridden magazine. Its mud roof was leaking apace, and the four dripping walls dismally reflected the lamplight; but, thankful for even such shelter, I fell asleep. I woke to hear fierce hissing of wind and rain driven on the sea-front of the building, and by the roaring of breakers knew that an onshore gale had risen during the night. It was grey-dark, and, striking a light to see how long it might still be to sunrise, I wondered to find the hour past already, and day dismally come.

For lack of anything better to do, I tried to sleep again; but my Greek servants, moving restlessly about the building, infected me with their uneasiness. Though the magazine was built on shingle and sand, it lay so far out of the course in which the river had flowed for centuries, that there could hardly be danger where we were, however damp our discomfort. But that untimely gloom, riven by the fitful shimmer of lightning, that steady splash of rain, reinforced by cascades of driven sea-spray, and that intermittent thunder, which could be heard even above the ceaseless roar of breakers rolling to my threshold, were not heartening. Water stood deep on the plain behind; but it was finding its own outlets to the sea, and I took more heed of the deluge overhead, which so thoroughly penetrated the mud roof, that there was nothing for it but to disturb the careful order of stores and baggage, and the results of my digging, and collect all under waterproof sheets in the middle of the magazine.

I was making a cold and sodden breakfast, when I heard suddenly a shout, “The river! The river!” I splashed outside, and, wading to the south end of the long windowless building, saw that the flooded surface of the plain behind had begun to flow as one stream. Torrents, growing momentarily stronger and deeper, swept round each end of the magazine, under-cutting its shallow foundations; and even as I looked, a crack ran like a lightning fork down the masonry of the north end. It opened ever so little, and I watched my kitchen slide into the flood noiselessly; for nothing was to be heard above the roaring of sky and sea. It was high time to be gone. In the farther chamber of the magazine a mare was standing, but mad with terror of the lightning and the water, she would not budge, even when one wall of her stable followed the kitchen, and after a frantic struggle she had to be left to her fate. I plunged with the stable boy into the northern mill-race and staggered through; but the overseer and the cook, who lingered a moment to search for a much-loved pinfire gun under the ruins of the kitchen, found the water already too deep and strong, and had to wait for a life-line; whereof the cook lost his hold, and was all but swept to the sea. Fortunately, the higher ground was not far distant, and to it we all fled.

For the next two hours, wet to the skin--and feeling, too, as if wet from skin to skin--we had to crouch in what shelter we might, and watch the ruin of the valley. The deluge from the skies never abated a moment, and the solid earth seemed to melt. Where yesterday a foot-fall had rung on the flinty hillside, one now sank ankle-deep. The very heart of the storm was hanging over us. Lightnings forked ceaselessly on one hand or the other, and each thunder-peal confused the echo of the last. The gale, a full-bodied “Levanter,” was still freshening; and under its awful lash the seas, stained red with the ruin of the fields, reared higher and higher against the boiling race which the land was pouring in. The river now filled the whole valley from hill to hill, here sliding with swift, malignant smoothness, there, broken by some obstacle or penned in a sunken gully, heaving, shouldering, writhing and tossing turbid waves one across the other. Gnarled planes and centenarian holm-oaks from the river gorge, with olives and charubs, which told the fate of the higher gardens and orchards, rode past us in an endless tumult--all horribly tangled with horned carcasses, which were sucked spinning below, to be spewed up again and swept to the sea. It was a Homeric combat between two floods. Great trees, hurled into the jaws of the breakers, reared, plunged, and broke back like hunted monsters of the deep; till at last, where the forces of propulsion and resistance neutralised each other offshore, they gathered in an ever-broadening vortex and still found no peace.

During the last hour of the storm the gale seemed to master all the other cataclysmal forces. The southern point of the bay, where a reef sheers up in jagged iron cliffs, provoked the most horrid turmoil; and, above all rival sounds of land and sky, came down wind a ceaseless roar of riotous seas, leaping to the summit of the rocks. Two misty trails streamed far inland like smoke from chimney stacks on the summit of the cliff. They were, of course, two storm-cataracts caught in their leap and whirled to spray; but the Cretans, who watched with me, finding any wonder credible in that convulsion of all nature, would have it the central fires of earth had broken out, and I doubt not they still add that crowning portent to their tales of an unforgotten day.

While the tremendous spectacle continued, none of us gave much thought to his own miserable state. We cowered watching how primaeval earth was carved. When the veil of rain was withdrawn at last, I saw the whole face of the landscape changed. The old estuary of the river existed no more; and a broad and shallow mouth had been opened far to the north. The bay, which since Spratt’s visit in the ’fifties had afforded deep anchorage close inshore, now shoaled gradually for a mile, and was studded with the toppling crests of grounded trees; and the mile-long strand of pebbles and grassy dunes had been replaced by a stretch of mud at a level some six feet lower. Over two-thirds of the plain, where fertile fields and olive gardens had been, lay sand and stones; and such trees as had held their ground were buried to mid-trunk. Looking up the river gorge, I saw nothing but naked rock, where terraced vineyards had clothed the cliff face; while all the ancient tangle of forest below had vanished to the last shrub, and the sinuous valley-floor, as far as the eye could follow it, glistened clean as a city pavement after rain.

When the flood had subsided, a part of the shell of my magazine was found standing, saved by the yielding of the beach to right and left; and the mare, quite unhurt, shivered still in the only remaining corner of her roofless stable. My personal loss was not so very great. I had to find new quarters, repair much that was broken, and put up with the loss of many stores and utensils, but of nothing absolutely indispensable to the camp. But if I had come off lightly on the whole, not so had the natives of the valley. Its single village, when the Headman came to make his official report, was found to have lost thousands of fruit-trees, many score head of live stock, and a number of houses and farm buildings. Communication with the rest of the island was cut by the washing out of paths, made with the labour of years; and the best springs of drinking water were smothered under a landslip. Since all irrigated fields and gardens whatsoever, which had been terraced along the stream, had been swept away, the villagers had lost not only the crops of the year, nor only the fruit of their trees for several years to come, nor only the trees themselves, but also the precious, irretrievable soil on which there could be growth again. The sum of their disaster came to this. Almost all members of a community of poor husbandmen, who had nothing but their lands to look to, had lost in a few hours all that they possessed over and above the barest means of subsistence. For many years to come they would have no more than the scanty produce of their higher and thinner fields to live upon. If none would starve, thanks to the communism of Eastern society, none would be able to grow for himself, or have the means to procure, a seasoning of his daily bread. The slow increase of many generations past was lost to a generation to come. The village, as it seemed to me, was ruined.

Cut off all that day by the river, we could only guess what had happened in the upper valley; but on the morrow two or three of the villagers, who had held lands in the lower plain, forded the falling stream at their peril, and came down to us. Their tale set one’s imagination playing over the dull hopelessness of their outlook, over this state of men, yesterday prosperous to-day face to face with the prospect of a bitter, inevitable struggle for mere bread, their hope of joy in life abandoned, and their local pride, so keenly felt in Greek village society, for ever abased. To my Western thinking such a fate seemed worse than death. Could nothing be done? I was the single individual in the valley with any superfluity, and I represented a foreign Society, whose duty and right it was to help. If I could not recover their trees or put back their soil, I could still do what the Briton always does in such emergencies--write a cheque. So word was sent up to the Headman that I proposed to offer a certain sum to the village, if he would tell me how it would be spent.

Next day the lower ford was just passable, and I rode across country--for the path was gone--to see what I might. Every glimpse into the gorge from above showed how completely vanished was its ancient forest, the most valuable and rare possession of a Cretan village. As the valley opened out and our way lay through the wrecked olive gardens, now dreary stretches of drying mud, on whose caked surface sand was beginning to swirl in the breeze, I saw that the tree-stumps were banked up on their higher side with a matted scum of broken boughs, of corn uprooted in the green ear and of other ruin of the valley lands; while stranded boulders and stones were strewn so thick on once fertile fields as to make all seem one broad riverbed.

In the village I found several houses destroyed, and men still labouring to clear others of the mud left by the collapse of their roofs. I was invited to go on to the Mill and see what evil work the flood had done there. The coffee-house emptied itself behind me of some twenty men, to whom were added presently half the women and children of the village, all surprisingly cheerful, and vying with one another to be first in pointing out this or that result of the disaster. God had willed it! So each murmured piously at the end of a tale, which lost nothing in the manner of its telling. The principal sufferers were brought forward, and were plainly proud to be so distinguished. They, too, said modestly that God had willed it. The mill proved to be no more; and the miller pointed out its situation with so manifest a pleasure that I almost suspected, absurdly enough, that the blessing of excessive insurance was not unknown in remote Cretan villages.

Returned to the coffee-house, I found still less to feed a pitiful mood. Seven men in ten of the company were there, because they had no longer any lands to till; but the outward demeanour of each and all was not that which one looked for in despairing men. Nor, if I am any judge of behaviour (and these were very simple folk), was the heart of the Zakriotes heavy within them, while they talked so cheerfully. The story of the day before yesterday was told again and again, with fresh effects added to taste, and always with that pious refrain about the will of God--a story of something past and done with, no longer taken into account for the present or the future.

I rose with emotion not a little chastened, and went to the Headman. He was writing out his report to the local prefecture, and laid down his pen to relate with sparkling eyes the narrow escape of his own family from a torrent which had come right through a house higher up the hillside. But when I referred to my proposed gift, he showed less interest. If I had looked to play Lord Bountiful in Zakro, I had missed my mark. The man was evidently as much embarrassed as grateful. It was not easy, he said, to spend such a sum on the village as a whole. None was worse off than another. All were poor men. What did I wish to do myself? The church would be the better for a b