But the real Crete is no more to be judged from glimpses of Canea and Candia than America could be judged by visiting New York and Chicago. It is in the picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote range that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is to be found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount Ida, alone of all the scattered branches of the great Hellenic family, have preserved in form and feature the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, the mountain village of Archanais as our destination, and with an escort of gendarmerie clattering at our heels, we set out from Candia one morning before the sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard riding between us and dinner, and roads in the Sphakiote country often consist of nothing more than dried-up water-courses. For the first few miles the road was crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to market—droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings of the sturdy, shaggy native ponies tethered head to tail and tail to head, their panniers filled with purple figs or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed Turks driving rude native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes and hiding even them in the presence of the giaours; chattering Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy native lace; now and then a prosperous farmer, striding along with a peculiar rolling walk, due to the round-soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying a measure of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat of his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown Turkish cemetery where the gilded tombstones, capped by carven fezes or turbans in the case of men, and shells in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight, while, a little farther on, we halted for a few moments before the tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits of cloth which the passing faithful had torn from their garments and tied to it.

Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie the ruins of Knossos, the one-time palace of King Minos, a powerful monarch of the Mycenæan age who is supposed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when mythology ended and history began. The audience chamber and the royal throne, which were old when the Pyramids were built, are still in a perfect state of preservation, though these amazing evidences of prehistoric grandeur are no more interesting than the marvellous network of cellars and subterranean passages which underlie the palace, many of them still lined, just as they were five thousand years ago, with row upon row of mammoth earthen jars for the storage of grain, of olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many eminent archæologists, by the way, maintain that it was from this bewildering maze of corridors and passage-ways that the legend of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete, arose. Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of Knossos would long since have taken rank with those which dot the banks of the Upper Nile.

Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun-baked country and later through gloomy pine woods and mountain defiles, with an occasional halt at a wayside xenodocheion that the troopers of our escort might refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermentation of rice known as arrack, which is the national drink of Greece, brought us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and weary, into the village square of Archanais. The demarch of the town, with a dozen or so of the insurrectionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, awaited our coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that shaded half the village square. Seats were placed for us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the ceremony of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with small cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable loukoum, which is a candy resembling “Turkish delight.” This formal welcome, which no Cretan ever neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a long, low-roofed, homelike dwelling, red tiles above and white plaster beneath, and surrounding it a garden ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a servant with a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands in a steady stream, according to the Cretan fashion.

The dinner was beyond description. From a Cretan standpoint it was doubtless a feast for the gods. I, being ravenous with hunger, asked not the names of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal began with ripe olives and spiced meat chopped up with wheat grains and wrapped in mulberry leaves; it passed on through a course that resembled fried egg-plant but wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and olives and cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it had been flavoured with eau de cologne, concluding with small native melons, which I have never seen equalled for flavour except in Turkestan, and, of course, coffee and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which ran entirely around the room, the whole party dropped one by one to sleep. The one recollection of Archanais which will always remain with me is that of a roomful of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered, armed-to-the-teeth, overfed men, notorious revolutionists every one, all sound asleep and all snoring like steam-engines.

That night we rode down the mountains in the moonlight, the snow-capped peaks looming luridly against the purple sky. The moonbeams lighted up the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played fitfully among the gnarled branches of the ancient olive-trees, giving to the silent land an aspect of unutterable peace. The whole world seemed sleeping and the hoofs of our horses rang loudly against the stones. The road which had been white with dust in the morning was a ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees stirred ever so gently in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient Knossos grew larger in the moonlight until all its ancient glory seemed restored; the crosses on the Greek cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers pointing toward heaven; the great guns that frowned from the ramparts were hidden in the shadows—all was silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we walked our tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into the city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow of the walls, a rifle flashed in the moonlight, and a harsh voice challenged:

“Halt! Who goes there?”

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