The last year of the war I had left Crete on a leave of absence of two months, which was extended indefinitely by Mr. Washburn, then Secretary of State, on account of the health of my family; but in April my wife, broken by the hardships of our Cretan life and sick-bed watching; and dejected greatly by the loss of a cause in which she had the most passionate sympathy, and by the misery of the unhappy Cretans around us, became insane and ended her life.

Simultaneously, Mr. Fish, now become Secretary of State, removed me from the consulate at the request of the Turkish Government, and in June I went to Crete to hand over the consular effects to my successor, and, on the petition of the Cretan chiefs still remaining in Athens, to obtain, if possible, some mitigation of the measures which prevented them from repatriating themselves. I found the island as I had left it, in peace indeed, but the peace of destruction and paralysis. Roads were being made, and block-houses being constructed, but no houses being rebuilt, and the roads were all military. The new Governor-General seemed amiable, just, and good-willed, but in Turkish disorganization the best will does not go far. The subordinates of the local administration were the spies, the traitors, and "loyal" people of the war, with rancors to vent and revenges to take. There was nothing to rob the people of, but there remained prisons and persecutions.

I found, naturally enough, all my efforts with the Governor useless, and that the condition of things made return unsafe for any one who had taken a prominent part in the war; and so, despairing of finding any opening, I was about to return to Athens without awaiting my successor, but before going decided to make that visit to Omalos and Samaria which the insurrection had stopped and the state of hostilities ever since had rendered impracticable from the Turkish posts.

Even when peace had been restored and not a recusant fugitive remained in the mountain hiding-places, the local authorities could with difficulty reconcile themselves to the idea of my going there; and it was only after the failure of several petty intrigues to prevent my getting away, that they determined to pass to the other extreme and do handsomely what they could not avoid doing. I set out in the dawn of a July day with an officer of the mounted police, a chosen and trusty man, with one private of the same force and my own cavass. The private rode a hundred yards ahead en vidette against any attack on the official dignity by unknowing peasant or unheeding patrol or straggler of the faithful, and discharged his duty on the road to my complete satisfaction, no countermarching troops daring to hold the narrow way to the detriment of the consular dignity. The lawlessness of the Turkish administration in Crete has kept alive, more than in most of the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the power of and respect for foreign officials. Just as much as the unjust Governor dreads the inspecting eye and the exposing blue-book, so much the Rayah hopes from them, and honors the Effendi as the Turk curses the Ghiaour; and so in Crete the extreme of official deference is kept up, corresponding to the degree of official oppression hitherto obtaining.

So, when my avant-courrier announced to the awkward squad of Anatolian infantry, ragged, sullen, that the "Consolos Bey" demanded the road, a savage frown of unwelcome gleamed through the disciplinary respect; while the shouting, chattering groups of Christian peasants ambling along on the mules and donkeys, with their little loads of fowls or oil for the market at CanÉa, were generally arrested by the summons of the guard, and drew up respectfully at the roadside, the most respectful dismounting until I had passed.

The road for ten or twelve miles runs westward over a level plain, the ancient bed of the Iardanos, by whose banks we know, from Homer, that the Cydonians dwelt. The fact that the Iardanos (now called Platanos, from the immense plane-trees growing on its banks) now empties into the sea ten miles from CanÉa, has puzzled geographers to reconcile Cydonia with CanÉa; but, on arriving at the point where the river debouches into and cuts across the plain, it will be seen that the new channel to the sea has been cut through the hills by the action of the river, and that the ancient course was evidently eastward through the still marshy plain into the bay of Suda, passing close to the position of CanÉa.

The roads in Crete are marked with historical associations of all ages, as the Appian Way with recollections of the great dead. The town that we pass, near the mouth of the Platanos, was the ancient Pergamos, whither Lycurgus, to evade the possibility of his laws being revoked, banished himself, where he died, and was buried. The town which we enter as we cross the Platanos at the ford is Alikianu, the scene of that atrocious and perfidious massacre of which I have told the story. It is a town of half ruinedd villas—some, of the Venetian days—buried in orange-trees, and so surrounded with olive groves that but little of it can be seen from the river. The road we must follow only skirts it, following the river, until it rises on a ridge of mountains, zigzag and undulating, up to Lakus. The Lakiotes are accounted among the bravest of the Cretans; and though military science, flank movements, and artillery made their town untenable in the late insurrection, it is still a formidable position. The village itself lies along under the summit ridge of the chain of hills which form a buttress to the Asprovouna, stretching north, with steep approaches from every side. It used to be a prosperous village, one of the largest in the island, but now its straggling houses were in ruins, two or three only having the roofs replaced, others having only a canopy of boughs laid over one end of the space enclosed by the blackened walls, enough to keep the dews off while the inhabitants slept, for rain never falls here through the summer months. All bespoke utter exhaustion and extreme poverty. The jaded, listless look of the people, the demoralization of war and exile, most of them having been of the refugees in Greece, the ravage and misery of all surroundings, made a picture which never has passed from my memory.

In the first capture by Mustapha Pasha, Lakus was taken by surprise and a flank movement of the Turkish irregulars, the Lakiotes having only time to secure their most valuable and portable goods and bury the church-bell, retiring up the mountain slopes beyond, firing a few shots of defiance as they went. When A'ali Pasha arrived in Crete, he ordered the reconstruction of the church of Lakus, demolished by the Turks at the capture of the village, and the primates were ordered to find the bell. Declining to know its whereabouts, they were thrown into prison, to lie until they did, a few days of which treatment produced the desired effect, and the bell was hung over the reconstructed church. That afternoon notes of compulsory joy sounded from the belfry, and the insurgents from the ridge of Zourba opposite came down to the brink of the ravine to ask who had betrayed the bell. Their submitted townsmen replied by an avowal of the modus operandi of getting at the required knowledge; and the "patriots" replied, "Ring away. We will come and ring it to-night." And agreeably to promise, a band of insurgents came across the ravine at midnight, carried off the bell, and, hanging it on a tree near Zourba, rang the night out. The Turkish guard, which occupied the block-house in the village, scarcely thought it worth while to risk the defence of the bell, if indeed they knew of its danger.

At Lakus I had made my plans to breakfast and pass the noon-heat, but I had reckoned without my hosts, for, on "pitching my tent" and sending out my cavass to find a lamb to roast, I found evidence of the inroads of civilization—I could not get one for less than three pounds sterling—about fifteen times the usual price, and a sure attempt at swindle based on my supposed necessities. Fortunately my escort had amply provided themselves, and we had bread and cheese, caviar and coffee, to stay our appetites until we should reach Omalos, where were a garrison and an army butcher. So I ate my modicum of what they gave me, smoked my cigarette, and tried to doze, while the chattering villagers, holding themselves aloof in reminiscent dread of the Moslem, mingled their hum with that of the bees from the hives near us. My "tent" was an ancient mulberry-tree above, and a Persian carpet beneath; and, though I tried to sleep away the time, I did nothing but listen to the story my cavass, Hadji Houssein, was telling his companions of the adventure we had had the year before in the valley below, and which, lest he have not given the true version, I will tell as it happened.

In the bottom of the valley at our feet lies the village of Meskla, built along the banks of the Platanos, where it is a pure, cold, rushing mountain brook, of which, in any other part of the world, the eddies would have been alive with trout, but in which now there are only, as in all other Cretan rivers, eels. A party of official personages in CanÉa, including her Britannic Majesty's consul, myself, the American ditto, with the captain and officers of the English and French gunboats on the station, and an English colonel in the Turkish army, had made a picnic party to Meskla, in August of the last year of the war. The Turkish troops held Lakus and Omalos and the western bank of the Platanos down to the plain; but the insurgents still remained in possession of all the northern spurs of the Asprovouna, from Lakus east for twenty miles, including Zourba; and, while we drank toasts and ate our roast-lamb under the plane-trees by the river, a perpetual peppering of rifles was going on from the hill-tops on each side of the valley above. Was it fighting, or was it fun? I began to climb one of the nearest spurs on the Turkish side of the ravine to see, and, not to be suspected of both sides, took my way to the picket of Turkish irregulars, which, sheltered by a group of trees on the summit, was firing across the valley in a desultory way. As I showed myself in one of the windings of the path to the patriots at Zourba, I saw the smoke-puff of a rifle on the edge of a ravine, and the ball glanced along the rocks within three feet, spattering the lead over me in a most convincing way. I naturally made a flank movement, which shortly degenerated into the retrograde of a satisfied curiosity.

The incident had a side interest to the whole party, for it showed us that the road we proposed to take might be dangerous, the more as we had a Turkish officer and his two attendants in uniform in our company. We had purposed following the river up still higher, and then crossing the ridge to Theriso.

Consulting one of the submitted Meskliotes, who waited his chance for the dÉbris of the picnic, we were informed that it would be very far from safe to follow our proposed route, which was exposed in its whole line to the chance of shots from the main mountain ridge; but he offered to guide us by a road running along the side of the ridge furthest from the insurgents, and where he could warn any outposts of them that we were coming. This road was a fair sample of those which existed in Crete before the war, a mere bridle-path scratched in the slope of a huge landslide, which rose above us two or three hundred feet, and descended three or four times that distance into the bed of the Platanos. Part of it was too dizzy and dangerous to ride, and we led our beasts hesitating and hobbling along. We were soon amongst the outposts of the insurgents, as we had unmistakable evidence on arriving at Theriso, where we found a detachment of a dozen or more rough, motley-looking fellows, armed with all kinds of guns, and clad in all ways except well. They looked askance at our fez-wearing colonel and his two cavalrymen, but from respect for the consular presences respected their persons. We drank with them at the spring, exchanged identifications, and pursued our way down the celebrated ravine, the scene of two terrible disasters to the Turkish army during different insurrections. Nothing can be more uncomfortable, in a military point of view, than one of these Cretan ravines. Cut in the limestone rock by the glacier torrents of ages, zigzag in their courses, and shut between abrupt ridges, with no road but an unsatisfactory bridle-path, the troop which is incautious enough to enter without crowning the heights on each side as it advances is certain to be hemmed in, and to be severely treated by a comparatively small foe or exterminated by a large one.

We had delayed too long, and, as we entered the most precipitous portion of the ravine, the red sunlight on the eastern cliffs told us that the sun, long shut from direct view, was sinking; and in our haste we missed the way, and fell into a vineyard-path, out of any line of travel. Immediately we heard voices hailing us from the hill-tops, to which we paid no attention, thinking them the cries of shepherd-boys, and continued until we found ourselves in a maze of vineyards, and the path and sun gone at the same instant. Now the hailing began with bullets. The uniforms of our Turkish escort demanded explanation, and as our guides had left us at Theriso we were helpless. To go back and explain was to be a better mark, and to march ahead, anywhere, was our only chance. Unfortunately, Hadji, who carried my hunting rifle, considered it his military duty to return the fire, and in a few moments, other pickets coming in, we had about forty sharpshooters popping away at us in the twilight. Our further passage was shut by an abrupt hillside, along which we must make a movement by the flank toward the road we had lost, and directly across the line of fire. The sound of the bullets suggested getting to cover, and as all path had now disappeared we dismounted and led our beasts at random, no one knowing where we were going or should go, and only aiming to turn the point of the ridge above us, to get out of the fire, which was increasing, and the pinging of Enfield bullets over our heads was a wonderful inducer of celerity. It was a veritable sauve qui peut. I saw men of war ducking and dodging at every flash and whistle in a way that indicated small faith in the doctrine of chances, according to which a thousand shots must be fired for one to hit. We found, at length, where the ridge broke down, a maze of huge rocks, affording shelter, but beyond was a deep declivity, down which in the dark we could see nothing; further on again was the river, along which the road led. We could hear the shouts and occasional shots of a detachment running down the road to intercept us, and another coming along the ridge above us. My mule was dead-beat, and could scarcely put one leg before another, and few others were better off. A short council showed two minds in the party—one to lie still to be taken, with the chance of a shot first; the other to push on for the road before the insurgents reached it. The only danger of any moment was to Colonel Borthwick and his Turks, who would be prizes of war, and to me the chance of a fever from lying out all night. The majority, nine, voted with me to go on, and, abandoning mules and horses, we plunged, without measuring our steps, down the slope, falling, slipping, tripping over rocks, in bogs, through overtopping swamp-grass, bushes (for the hillside was a bed of springs), pushing to strike the road before the insurgents should head us off, so as to be able to choose our moment for parleying. I knew if I could get there first, saving the chance, that all would be well; if a rash boy of fourteen saw me first, I might be stopped by a bullet before any explanation would avail.

Tired, muddy, reeking with perspiration, bruised on the stones, exhausted with haste and trepidation, we won the race, and halted behind a little roadside chapel to gather the state of things. Above, we heard voices of a colloquy, and knew that the remainder of the party were in safe custody, and our road was quiet. A short walk brought us to the outpost of the Turkish army, a village garrisoned by a couple of companies of regulars and a few Albanians. The commandant, a major, was outranked by Borthwick, who ordered him at once to send out a detachment to rescue Consul Dickson and his companions. The poor major protested and remonstrated, but in vain. "It was dangerous," he said; but the colonel insisted, he ordered out a detachment, and then called for pipes and coffee, after which, under a heavy escort, we started for CanÉa. Borthwick obtained a battalion of the regulars in garrison, and started next morning at early dawn to rescue our friends; but no persuasion could induce the Turkish commander to enter the ravines. He posted his troops along the overlooking ridge and waited in ambush. I have it on Borthwick's word that, while the troops were lying concealed, under orders to keep the most profound silence, a hare started up at the end of the line, and the Turkish commander instantly ordered the first company to their feet, and to make ready, and was about to give the order to fire when a hound of the battalion anticipated the volley by catching the poor beast and despatching him on the spot.

Meanwhile, Dickson and his companions were in the hospitable hands of a party of Hadji Michali's men, and at about eight A.M. came down the road into view of the ambush, escorted by a guard of honor of insurgents, none the worse for their adventure, and bringing back our beasts and baggage; but nothing would induce the Turkish officer to go the mile separating him from the insurgent outpost which had fired on us.

While Hadji told his story to his admiring companions (he was an excellent raconteur, and put the whole of his barbaric soul into the narration, though his respect for the Effendi kept his voice low and quieted a little his camp manner), one or the other of the three made my cigarettes and brought me fire, and only when the sun began to sink from the meridian did we move on.

As we passed the blockhouse, I found that the General-in-Chief had preceded me, and given orders that the honors due to a consular personage—the same as those paid to a superior officer in their own army—should be carefully observed, and so we had the whole garrison of each blockhouse on the way out at the "Present arms!" The road not only zigzags going from Lakus to the plain of Omalos, but makes such ascents and descents as well accounted for the fruitlessness of so many attempts to enter the plain, which is a sort of portico to Samaria. But now a fair artillery road followed the ridges up to the very plain, and blockhouses covered with their fire every point where an ambush could be made, and those little glens, famous in Cretan tradition for extermination of Turkish detachments, will never again help native heroism against organized conquest. We passed, in one of the wildest gorges through which the road passes, a blockhouse perched high on a hill-top like an eyrie, a peripatetic atom on the parapet of which caught my eye, as a wild goat might have done amongst the cliffs around. As we came into sight, looking again, I saw the garrison swarming down the hillside amongst the rocks like ants, wondered what they were at, and rode on, when at another turn the officer said, "They salute, Effendi!" I looked around, and, only on his indication, saw drawn up in rank, hundreds of feet above me, a line of animalcules, which, by good eyesight, I could perceive was the whole garrison presenting arms, and they so continued presenting until, after turn upon turn of the road, they disappeared from view definitively, when I suppose they swarmed back to their fastness.

We passed through the ravine of Phokes, where Hadji Michali once caught a small detachment which incautiously attempted to penetrate to Omalos. I had heard the story of the fight, told at the time by an Albanian who was in it, in a brief but graphic way. The Christians waited invisible, he said, till the troops were in the bottom of the ravine, and then began to fire from many directions. The troops stopped, made a show of resistance, and then broke and made for the blockhouse at Lakus; "and those who couldn't run well never got there," he interjected laconically. He frankly admitted that he was so far in advance that he saw very little actual fighting, and made no halt, nor did any others, Mussulman or Christian, till they arrived at the door of the blockhouse, which he was surprised at their shutting in time to keep out the Christians.

It was well into the afternoon when we entered the plain of Omalos, evidently a filled-up crater, its level about five thousand feet above the sea. The snows and rains of winter and spring flood it, and as no stream runs from it the waters disappear by a Katavothron—a gloomy Acherontic recess—into whose crooked recesses the eye cannot pierce, and down whose depths is heard a perpetual cavernous roaring of water.

In the plain was no vestige of human habitation visible, except the tents of a battalion of regulars, and a two-story blockhouse on a spur of hill which projected into the plain. We rode into the camp, and were received with emphasis by the Pasha, who, with true Eastern diplomacy, expressed unbounded, surprise at my visit, "so entirely unexpected;" and, learning the result of my attempts at feeding in Lakus, called to the mess-boy to bring me the remains of the breakfast, apologizing abundantly, and informing me that I should be expected to dine with him and the commander of the post at eight. The residual breakfast, supplemented by a plate of kibaubs, the mutton-chop of the East, despatched; the ceremonial pipes and coffee finished, and the more than usually complimentary speeches said, the shadows meanwhile falling longer on the plain; I accepted the Pasha's offer of a fresh horse, and rode across to the famous descent into the glen of Samaria, the Xyloscala, so-called from a zigzag colossal staircase made with fir-trunks, and formerly the only means of descent into the glen. There was a detachment of troops building a blockhouse to command the upper part of the glen, and the commander kept me salaaming, coffee-taking, etc., until I saw that the sunlight was getting too red to give me time to explore the ravine, and I contented myself with a look from the brink down into the blue depths.

I doubt if, in the range of habitual travel, there is another such scene. It was as if the mountains had gaped to their very bases. In front of me were bare stony peaks 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, whose precipitous slopes plunged down unbrokenly, the pines venturing to show themselves in increasing number as the slope ascended, and ended in a narrow gorge. At the side, the rock rose like the aiguilles of Chamouny, cloven and guttered, with the snow still lying in its clefts, and broad fields of it on the opposite eastern peaks. I looked down through the pines and cedars that clung in the crevices of the rocks below me, and the bottom of the glen looked blue and faint in their interstices. The Xyloscala, destroyed by the insurgents at the beginning of the insurrection, was replaced by a laborious zigzag road, which sidled off under crags, and came back along slopes, blasted out of rock, and buttressed up with pines, seeming to me, where I stood, as if it finally launched off into mid-air, and would only help another DÆdalus into the mystery of the labyrinth of pines and rock gorges below.

As I watched, the flame of the sunlight crept up the peaks across the glen, the purple-blue shadow following it up, changing the snow-fields from rosy to blue, and the peaks of pale-gray rock to russet, as the day died away. The chill of night reminded me to put my overcoat on. We rode back across the plain in the twilight, accompanied by the building gang, whose polyglot murmur was as cheerful and full of mirth as though they were peasants going home from the vintage.

Nothing can surpass the good-humor and patience of the Turkish soldier. Brutal and barbarous they doubtless were when their fanaticism and the rage of battle united to excite them, but in camp and in peace I have found them always models of the purely physical man.

Our dinner was luxurious, and in the true Eastern manner. The Pasha, the Bey commanding the place, and his aide-de-camp made four with me, and one dish, placed in the middle of the table, served our fingers or spoons according as the viand was dressed, each one of the four scrupulously adhering to his quadrant of the copper circle. The dinner was almost interminable; it was dark and cold when the end did come.

The soldiers, gathered round their camp some half a mile away, had eaten their suppers and were at ease, the shouting of their merriment coming to us occasionally above the general hum. Presently we saw them taking fir-branches, and, each lighting one at the nearest campfire, come running to us at full speed, making a long madcap procession of torch-bearers, the pitchy fir giving out an immense flame; and, making for the headquarters, followed by the battalion band playing, they threw their branches in a pile on a level space before the Pasha's tent, and then, turning to the right and left, sat down in a semicircle open towards us. A detachment was told off to keep up the fire, and a sort of glee club, accompanied by rude instruments, drums beaten by the hand, and a kind of flute and mandolin, commenced singing at the top of their voices the plaintive monotonous songs which all who have been in the East know.

This was the overture to a terpsichorean and dramatic entertainment most unique and amusing. The programme opened with a dance of Zebeques, the barbarous race who occupy the country behind Smyrna. They are wrapped in a sash from the armpits to the hips, with a sort of baggy knee-breeches, and bearing long knives thrust crosswise through their sashes. They formed a circle, and began a movement which seemed like a dance of men in armor, half stage-stride and half hop. The music struck up an appropriate air, and the dancers, joining in the song, circled slowly two or three times in the same staid and deliberate manner, then, drawing their knives, brandished them in time, quickening their pace, and hurrying around quicker and quicker as the song grew more excited, when they finally came to a climax of fury, rushing in on each other at the centre of the circle as if to cut each other down. But the raised knives were arrested by the opposing empty hands; and, the paroxysm passed, the song died down to its lower tone and moderate time, and the dance began a new movement, each dancer thrusting his knife into the ground at the centre, and then repeated the quickening circles; this time, rushing, at the climax, on their knives and drawing them from the earth, they threw themselves on an imaginary enemy outside the circle, and, having hypothetically demolished him, returned to their gyrations, varying the finale by lifting one of the company into the air on their hands, and dropping him simultaneously with their voices. This lasted half an hour.

After an intermission, in which the soldiers, unawed by the presence of the Pasha, laughed and joked and shouted to their content, a soldier entered the circle dressed as an Egyptian dancing woman. He was one of the tallest men in the regiment, capitally travestied, and all who have seen the dance of the Almah can imagine the bursts of laughter with which his grave, precise imitation of one of them was received by the circle. I have never seen anything more exquisitely ludicrous. His figure seemed lithe as a willow-wand, and he twisted and bent, and bowed and doubled, with the peculiar expression of physique which seemed impossible to any other than the slender Egyptian girl.

Roars of applause followed this performance, and the next was a pantomime—"The Honey-Stealers." Two men enter dressed as peasants, one carrying a gun on his back, and begin groping about as in the dark, run against each other, stumble and fall, and finally, by much listening, find a box, which had been placed to represent the hive. The thief lays down his gun to be more free in his motions, and a soldier runs into the circle and carries it off. Enter presently a third honey-seeker, blacked to represent a negro or some diabolical personage, it was impossible to say which, and, stumbling on the other two, an affray ensues, in the course of which the bees get disturbed, and come out in swarms, the luckless black getting the lion's share of the stings. At this moment an alarm is given, and the gunner misses his gun, upon which he falls on the black as the thief, and between the stings and the blows the intruder expires, the play ending with the efforts of the two living to carry out and dispose of the one dead, interfered with greatly by a spasmodic life remaining in the members, which refuse to lie as they are put. But this finally subsiding, the body is satisfactorily disposed of, and the pantomime gives way, amid the most uproarious laughter and applause, to a Circassian dance. The dancers were few, and the dance tame, and, not meeting any appreciation, gave way to a repetition of the Zebeque saltations, of which they seemed never disposed to tire.

The entertainment lasted till eleven o'clock, when, each soldier taking a branch of fir, the actors and audience raced off like a demoniac festival breaking up, the band following with a blare of trumpets and bang of drums, and we were left to our dignity and the dying embers of the theatre fire. Although in July, the night was so intensely cold that, sharing the Pasha's tent, and with all the covering he could spare me, in addition to my own Persian carpet over instead of under me, I was almost too cold to sleep, and the morning found me well disposed to put my blood in motion by vigorous exercise. Coffee served, we rode over to the Xyloscala, and, after more coffee-and-pipe compliments, we began the descent of the new zigzag road. It was so steep that no loaded beast could mount it, and it took me two hours' walk to get to the bottom, where the road straightens and follows the river, here a dancing, gurgling stream, rushing amongst boulders and over ridges, under overhanging pines, as though there were no tropics and the land had not had rain for two months. The whole gorge was filled with the balsamic odors of firs and pine, which covered the slopes wherever the rock would give them place; and above that, bare splintery cliffs overhung the gorge, so that it seemed that a stone would fall three thousand feet if thrown from the summit. A few Turkish soldiers, lazily felling or trimming pines for the blockhouses, were the only signs of humanity we saw. Above, in the pines, we heard the partridge's note, as the mother called to her young brood to follow her. The gorge widened to a glen; the slopes receded slightly, and then, after another hour of walking, we came to a sharp turn in its course, where the high mountains walled up the glen to the east with a sheer slope of five or six thousand feet from the peaks to the brook bed, and the rocks on each side shut in like the lintels of a doorway. Here is the little village of Samaria, so long the refuge of the women and children of this section of Crete, and where, so long as arms and food lasted, a few resolute men might have defended them against all comers. I doubt if in the known world there is such another fortress. No artillery could crown those heights, no athletes descend the slopes; while the only access from below is through the river-bed, in one place only ten feet wide, and above which the cliffs rise perpendicularly over a thousand feet; the strata in some places matching each other, so that it seems to have been a cloven gorge—the yawn of some earthquake, which suggested closing again at a future day—and for two hours down from the glen there is no escaping from the river course, except by goat-paths, and these such as no goat would care needlessly to travel.

Pashley has described the village of Samaria, and its magnificent cypresses and little chapel, as they are now. No destruction, no sacrilege, has entered there; and perhaps this is the only church in Crete, outside the Turkish lines of permanent occupation, which has not been desecrated. The roof of the chapel is made of tiles, which must date from the early Byzantine Empire.

The river below here, the St. Roumeli, is a rapid perennial stream, which at times of flood shuts off all travel by the road. Lower down is a tiny village of the same name as the river, in a gorge into which only an hour's sunlight can enter during the day—damp, chilly, and aguish—the residence of a half-dozen families of goat-herds. Pashley identifies a site near the mouth of the river as that of Tarrha, the scene of Apollo's loves with Acacallis, who, if bred in this glen, must have been of that icy temperament which should have best suited the professional flirt of Olympus.

To travellers who care to visit Samaria, I would give the hint to leave their horses at Omalos, and have a boat to meet them at the mouth of the St. Roumeli, as the ascent is long and painful, even by the new road, which, since I saw it the torrents may have demolished. They may thus visit the Port Phoenix of St. Paul, which lies a few miles to the eastward, and landing at Suia, west of St. Roumeli, have their horses come down by the pass of Krustogherako, and so return by way of St. Irene—a very wild pass of the Selinos mountains—to CanÉa.

We had made no such provision, and so we were obliged to toil back in the intense heat of the July sun beating down into the gorge, and, arriving past noon, to be refreshed by sherbet and coffee by the hospitable commander of the station at Xyloscala, the snow of the sherbet being brought from the opposite cliff two hundred yards away, but an hour's climb to get to it. The commander was a more intelligent man than it is usual for Turkish officers to be, and he related how during the insurrection he had led a detachment round to the top of the opposing cliffs, and how when they got there they were like the twenty thousand men of the King of France, and had to come back by the way they went.

However, they have now a blockhouse at the Xyloscala, another at Samaria in sight and signalling of it, and a third at St. Roumeli, so that, for the future, there need be no doubt as to who holds the Heart of Crete.

The night's discomforts had been too great to allow me to spend another in Omalos, so, after a slight detour to look at the immense wild pear-trees which grow on the plains, we rode directly back to CanÉa, accompanied by the Pasha. Meeting the priest of Lakus by the way, I gave the village a vicarious berating for having in such an ungrateful manner refused hospitality to a man who had been their advocate and friend so long, and whom they had obliged to go back to their enemies and his for a dinner. He seemed much ashamed, and the day after I received a profound apology from the primates pleading ignorance of my personality.

I improved the acquaintance with the Pasha (Mehmet Ali, "the Prussian," so-called from his race, though he was brought up from boyhood as a Mussulman), whom I found more intelligent and liberal than any Turkish official I had met with, except A'ali and Server Effendi, to introduce the condition of the chiefs of the insurrection remaining in exile, many of them old and worn out, afflicted with the nostalgia which mountain people know so well, and ready to submit unreservedly to the government. A nominal amnesty had been granted, relieving all from any political prosecution, but not from the civil suits for damages, etc., which might be brought against the chiefs who had taken sheep or cattle or destroyed any property. Two or three of the chiefs who had returned had already been thrown into prison on suits of this kind, and as the complainants were always adherents of the government through the war, and all the minor officials were of that class whose loyalty had been beyond question from the beginning, a civil suit had pretty much the same color as a political persecution. This state of things effectually prevented the return of any of the prominent personages of the insurrection, who, living in exile, were reasons of the strongest against the restoration of tranquillity, and made a convenient appliance for agitation and renewed strife on any disturbance of the political atmosphere of Europe.

My only interest was the restoration of the island to such peace as was possible, and this Mehmet Ali comprehended, and, throwing aside all hostility, he entered into the discussion of the positions, and on a subsequent interview begged me to go to Constantinople and place the matter before A'ali Pasha, to whom he gave me a letter of introduction.

I accordingly went to Constantinople, and was received in the kindest and most considerate manner by the Grand Vizier, to whom I stated at length my ideas of the difficulties of the pacification, and at his request made a memoir of all the facts and motives involved, with a description of the class of men to whom was entrusted the carrying out of the measures by which the Porte had hoped to conciliate the Cretans, embittered political and religious adversaries, full of wrath at the losses and indignities they had suffered, and more anxious to avenge their own wrongs than to secure the true interest of the Porte. He begged me to wait until he could send to Crete and obtain a report on my memoir, and, as he found on its receipt that my assertion was just, he promised to correct the abuses of administration, and proposed to me to go to Crete to superintend the carrying out of the measures which seemed necessary to restore the confidence of the late insurgents, pledging himself to accord complete immunity to any individuals whom I should designate as possessing my confidence, and offering me a stipend more than sufficient for all my needs in the service. I knew that so long as he was Grand Vizier I could depend on the fulfilment of these promises, but, in the event of any change of administration, the understanding between us would fail as between his successor and myself. I demanded, therefore, a comprehensive measure securing all the insurgents from civil suits on account of acts of war committed during the insurrection, as a condition of my acceptance of the official position thus created for me. This the Grand Vizier declared the government could not grant without assuming all the personal liabilities thus discharged, which he was not willing to recommend, and so, after several interviews and thorough discussion, I was obliged to decline the offer made me, much to my regret, for the islanders had ever a place in my regard, which, with the interest of common suffering and loss, the years of advocacy of rights kept back and redress denied, and perhaps the personal attachment I had found for me and mine in so many of them, disposed me to make any effort in my making to secure their good. But to engage my faith and influence with them on such uncertain grounds as the continuance in power of a Grand Vizier, or the maintenance of harmony between myself and the local administration, was too great a risk for a prudent man, unwilling to engage others in a position from which he might not have the power to extricate them.

It was with such a pain as the waiting of my own sentence of exile would have given me that I went to meet the old captains on my return to Athens, and told them that there was no hope of their repatriation through my efforts at least. I never shall forget the silent despair in the face of old Costa Belondaki, tall and straight under his seventy-odd years, white-haired, and meagre, but alert as a man of forty, as he turned from me when he got his sentence. As with his elder compatriots, the mountain nostalgia fevered him and the idle exile broke his spirit, but I could give him no hope that in his day European civilization or Turkish administration would be wise enough to economize his devotion to his country, and make use of rather than crush the spirit which makes Crete rebellious while its government is criminal.

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