Towards noon they entered the pass, and Jim and Monimé were afoot once more, whilst the tired horses rested. Behind them the gorges and valleys carried the eye down into the hazy distances, and they could see Nicosia lying like a white cameo upon the velvet of the plains. Before them a cleft in the towering rocks revealed the azure expanse of the Mediterranean, and beyond it the far-off coasts of Asia Minor, rising like the vision of a dream from the placid ocean.
Monimé shaded her eyes as she gazed over the sea. “There is Phrygia,” she exclaimed, “where Monimé lived, and Cappadocia and Cilicia! And away behind them is Pontus, the land her husband took her to....”
“I have no home to take you to, Monimé,” he said, unable to eschew the hazardous subject of their marriage.
“That’s just as well,” she answered, “because in the story, you remember, he involved her in his domestic troubles, which led to his suicide, and her own death followed.”
She smiled as she spoke, but to him her words were dark with portentous meaning. He felt like a criminal.
Entering the carriage once more, they descended from the pass for some distance, as though making for Kyrenia, which they could see far below them; but presently a rough track led them through the pines, and brought them at last to the foot of a tremendous bluff of rock, upon the summit of which stood the ruined walls and towers of the castle of St. Hilarion. Here the carriage was abandoned, and hand-in-hand they clambered up the track, the servant following with the luncheon basket.
Soon they passed within the ruinous walls of the castle, and, having rested in the shade and eaten their picnic meal, made their way amongst fallen stones and a profusion of weeds and grasses towards the main buildings, which mounted up the cliffs in front of them in a confused array of walls and turrets, roofs and chimneys, battlements and bastions, standing silent and withered in a blaze of sunlight.
Through a crumbling door they went, and up a flight of broken steps; through the ruined chapel, on the walls of which the faded frescoes could still be seen; along a shadowed passage, and up again by a rock-hewn stairway; until at last they reached a roofless chamber locally known as the Queen’s Apartment.
This side of the castle, which was built at the edge of an appalling precipice, seemed to be clinging perilously to the summit of the mountain; and through the broken tracery of the Gothic windows they looked down in awe to the pine forests two thousand feet below. All about them the bold mountain peaks rose up from the shadowed and mysterious valleys near the coastline; and before them the purple and azure sea was spread, divided from the cloudless sky by the hazy hills of Asia Minor.
From these valleys there rose to their ears the frail and far-off tinkle of goats’ bells, and sometimes the song of a shepherd was lifted up to them upon the tender wings of the breeze. All visible things seemed to be motionless in the warmth of the afternoon, with the exception only of two vultures, which slowly circled in mid-air with tranquil pinions extended. It was as though the crumbling stones of the castle, and the forests and valleys they surmounted, were deep in an enchanted slumber, from which they would never again awake.