Bedouin Love

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

The delights of the Stabilimento dei Bagni, however, did not long hold him in thrall. There was too much splashing and spitting; and, when the bathing hours were over for the day, the concert-hall and the open-air theatre offered a kind of entertainment which, owing to an unaccountable mood of discontent, soon began to pall. He therefore took ship across the Gulf of Venice to Trieste, and stayed for some days at a small hotel on the hillside towards Boschetto.

Here, one evening at dinner, he made the acquaintance of a ship’s officer, who told him that on the morrow the steamer on which he was employed was sailing for Cyprus; and, without a moment’s hesitation, Jim decided to take passage by it to that island of romance. It was September, and the weather was cooling fast. He had had some vague idea of crossing the sea to the Levant; but now this new suggestion came to him with a surprisingly definite appeal.

“Of Course, Cyprus!” he exclaimed. “The very place I have always wanted to visit. I had forgotten all about it.”

He had read books, and had heard travellers’ tales, about this wonderful land which rises from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean like a phantom isle of enchantment. Here the remains of temples dedicated to the old gods of Greece are to be seen: the mountain streams still resound at noon with the pipes of Pan; at sunset upon the seashore one may picture Aphrodite rising in her glory from the waves; and at midnight the barking of the dogs of Diana may be heard over the hills. The Crusaders endeavoured to establish a kingdom here on Frankish lines, and the place is full of the ruins of their efforts. The headlands are crested with crumbling baronial castles, and in the towns there still stand the walls of Gothic churches, wherein, at dead of night, they say that the ghostly chanting of hymns to the Blessed Virgin may be heard. Then came the Moslems; and to this day the call to prayer in the name of Allah synchronizes with the tolling of convent bells summoning the worshippers in the name of the Mother of Jesus, while the peasants, inwardly heedless of both, still make their little offerings at the traditional holy places of the gods of Olympus.

It is a land in which the movement of Time is forgotten, and in part it is a living remnant of the dead ages; and as such it had for long appealed to Jim’s imagination. Straightway, therefore, he wrote a letter to his bankers in Rome telling them to forward him some money to the Post Office at Nicosia, the capital city; and twenty hours later he was standing on the deck of the small coasting steamer, watching the land receding from sight in a haze of afternoon heat.

On the sixth morning, as the sun was rising, the anchor rattled into the blue waters of the roadstead before Larnaca, the chief port of Cyprus; and, after an early breakfast, Jim was rowed in a small boat, manned by a Greek and a negro, towards the little town which stood white and resplendent in the sunshine, its cupolas, minarets, and flat-roofed houses backed by the vivid green of the palms and the saffron of the hills. He knew a few words of Greek, and a considerable amount of Arabic; and, with the aid of his friend the ship’s officer, he had soon chartered the two-horse carriage in which he was to make the thirty-mile journey to Nicosia, the inland capital of the island.

The road passed across the bare, sunburnt uplands, and was flanked by scattered rocks, from which the basking lizards scampered as the carriage approached. Occasionally they passed a cart drawn by two long-horned bullocks, led by a scarlet-capped peasant; or a solitary shepherd driving his flock; or some cloaked and bearded rider upon a mule, jingling down to the coast. The glare of the road was great; but under the shelter of the dusty awning of the carriage Jim was cool enough, and there was a refreshing following-wind blowing up from the sea, which tempered the autumn heat.

The time passed quickly, and it did not seem long before they lurched, with a great cracking of the driver’s whip, into the half-way village of Dali. The second stage of the journey was more tedious, for now the novelty of the rugged scenery was gone, and the jolting of the rickety carriage was more noticeable. Jim was thankful, therefore, when, in the late afternoon, Nicosia came suddenly into sight, and the carriage presently rattled through the tunnelled gateway in the mediæval ramparts, and passed into the narrow and echoing streets of the city.

Here Greeks and Armenians, Arabs and Turks thronged the intricate thoroughfares; and as the driver made his way towards the Greek hotel, to which Jim had been recommended, there was much pulling at the mouths of the weary horses and much hoarse shouting. Now their passage was obstructed by an oxen-drawn cart, piled high with earthenware jars; now they seemed to be about to unseat a turbaned Oriental from his white steed; and now a group of Greek girls bearing pitchers upon their heads was scattered to right and left as the carriage lumbered round a corner. Here was a priest entering a Gothic doorway dating from the days of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and upon the wall above him were carved the arms of some forgotten knight of Normandy; here a sheikh in flowing silks stood kicking off his shoes before the tiled entrance of a mosque. Here were noisy Turkish children playing before a building which recalled the age of the Venetian Republic; and here wild-eyed Cypriot peasants wrangled and argued as they had argued since those far-off days when Cleopatra’s sister was queen of the island, and, ages earlier, when Phœnician seamen and the warriors of ancient Greece had held them in subjection.