The local saints held themselves aloof, but a group of some forty armed Bedawis gathered to see us go. Squatting, eagle-beaked and narrow-eyed, like so many vultures on a rocky ledge, they set us thinking whether they could have found a use for their long guns and spears in some gully of the downward road, had we given them a little longer time for thought. As it was, we felt no fear, and gave back their stare. The Beni Haasa must be very pure Arab. I have noticed no finer type, even among the Bedawis who have come from Nejd itself within short historic memory. A few of their gipsy-like wives, seen not then but next day in the plain of Apollonia, showed the same high breeding in their unveiled faces.
The mudir added himself and his orderly to our cavalcade, and led us back briskly down the rock road towards the sea, the Syrian soldiers swinging alongside without any sign of tiring. Near the brink of the lower shelf we got glimpses right and left into the great gorges hewn in it, which have been for any number of ages haunts of cave-dwelling men; but their grandeur seemed to us somewhat below the enthusiasm of earlier travellers. Perhaps the thick, sunless air of that afternoon robbed them of their due effect. Perhaps we had come too lately from the splendid Lycian valleys and peaks to find the Cyrenaica all that those have found it whose eyes had first been blistered and blinded by the sun and sands of the Syrtis.
Our only fear was for the yacht. As we left the shelter of the forest and drew rein on the edge of the last steep, we knew how fierce a gale drove across the path. White wrinkles of surf alone betrayed the sea, for the mirk of the scirocco lay on the plain; and half an hour later, when we came to the Cretan huts, we could see no farther than the reefs, and had to be assured by the soldiers on the beach that the yacht was really gone. She had put out to sea the night before, they said, and appeared again with the sun; but since noon she had sheered off, and Allah knew where she might be now. If He willed, she had found peace behind Ras Hilal.
It was Wednesday at four of the afternoon, and not till Saturday, a little after midday, should we see her again. But for the doubt of her safety, which weighed most heavily on the Owner, and the certainty, to which we were all alive, that, should the gale haul to north or east of north, she must run from the Cyrenaic shore altogether, leaving us marooned for many days, we found ourselves in no very evil plight. True, we had slender baggage chosen for the needs of one night, not five; but how soon one forgets to change raiment even for sleep, and finds happiness far from a bath! The captain of the little post made over to us his guest-room, a roofed recess in a quarry, and thither his woman folk sent cushions and quilts, and trays of meat and rice and sticky pastry seasoned with curdled milk and garnished with herbs from the garden, which our host and the mudir helped us to clear with finger and thumb. There was good water; for the source a few miles inland, which used to keep Apollonia alive, has been led into an aqueduct again by the Cretans; and we found tobacco, which would at least burn, and rahat, peace, all the day long. What more, said the genial old soldier, do your hearts desire?
More, however, they did desire. We were Western men, with an itch to be doing, and we tried to fulfil our souls a little among the fallen churches and rock-tombs of Apollonia. But, with all our leisure, we made no great discovery there; and I doubt if the best thing we found were not wild watercress growing thickly in the conduit, which we taught the Cretans and the soldiers to relish. What is left of Apollonia is only a long landward slice of the city, which in Christian times outstripped dying Cyrene. All the seaward face of it, with the harbour-wall and gate and port, has been eaten by the waves. There is no doubt the coast has sunk here since Roman times, and is probably sinking still, and that the shallow bay, all rocks and shoals, in which we had made a difficult landing, is not any part of the old harbour of Apollonia, but was dry land when that harbour was sought by shipping. The reefs and islets, out at sea, over which the surf was now breaking so wildly, remain perhaps from the old foreshore. Further westward we found tombs into whose doors the waves flowed freely, and, had it been fairer weather, we might have espied others altogether submerged; for the calm sea on this coast is of such a wonderful clearness that when our leadsman was dipping for an anchorage on the first evening off Ras el-Tin, he could see a bottom of rock and sand, which, nevertheless, his plummet could not reach.
The ruins of two fine Apollonian churches are marked by magnificent monoliths of cipollino, which it would pay some marble merchant to ship away; but lack of moulded fragments and inscriptions shows that almost everything on the surface, except bits of black glazed pottery and stamped Samian ware, is of a very base age. Without powerful tackle one could not hope to get below that mass of fallen blocks, honeycombed by the blown sea salts. The landward wall, however, is in great part of the Greek time, remaining probably from the first foundation of the city, and seen from the hollow plain, it stands up finely. Somewhat, but not much later are the remains of an Ionic temple and of a theatre, which faces seawards without the wall. Here the work of the waves may be well admired, for the stage buildings are now awash and the surf runs up into the horseshoe of the seats.
APOLLONIA IN STORM.
The daily life of the little garrison was good to watch. The old commander had turned farmer. With the water-conduit under his control and thirty of the sturdiest knaves in the Levant at his orders, he was making more out of the red plain than any of the Cretans whom he had come to guard. The full privates hoed his garden: the corporal drove up his ewes at nightfall; and under the moon the old man himself would tuck his braided cuffs, tie half a dozen milky mothers head to tail, and tug at their teats. The soldiers, peasant conscripts born to such a life, seemed only too happy to go back to it, and the field-work filled their time and thoughts, and kept them in the rude health of shepherds.
Most of our time, however, we spent in watching sea and sky and uttering hopeful prophecies, which were slow to be fulfilled. All the scirocco died out of the weather by the first midnight, and a hard north-wester brought a livelier air, with rain and thunder and an ever-rising sea. By the third morning a surf was running both within and without the reefs, in which only a well-manned lifeboat could have lived; and at last, unwillingly resigning hope that the yacht would return to take us off, we did what should have been done at least a day earlier—we found a trusty Bedawi, and sent him eastward down the coast to Ras Hilal. He came back at evening with a scrawl from our skipper, and the Owner ate a heartier meal than he had made yet in Marsa Susa.