"There, there, sweet child!" Ecciva had slipped easily back into her old, mocking, taunting way—"go look out thy tire for the morrow and try on thy jewels, for the pageant will be fine: and, do thy best, I shall outshine thee—thee and the Dama Margherita! One pageant in six months of woe—it is not over much."
XXVI
The pageant had been brilliant, as one may read in the chronicles of the time.
Even the Queen of the Adriatic, in all her pride, could offer little to surpass the splendor of this great esplanade by the sea where the review had been held. The pavement of costly mosaic stretched along the coast, guarded by the lofty tower which jutted out upon the sea; while the other side of this unusual piazza was dominated by the famous Citadel which climbed the steep acclivity with intricate windings of crenellated walls, dotted with sentry towers where banners were floating. In that clear atmosphere distance was not appreciable, and the castellated slopes seemed to lead up to the highest peak of the Troödos, whose snow-crowned summit flashed its crystal against the deep blue of the Cyprian sky.
The massive walls of modern Famagosta skirted the esplanade, and above their mighty bulwark rose the domes and pinnacles of her palaces and churches—a city of delight. There were strange monuments breaking the sky-line; there were statues and fountains gleaming in the sunlight; there were hedges of rose and myrtle outlining the terraced gardens on the hill-slopes, where rioted all manner of fruits and bloom: back of them the vineyards of Varoschia—lemons, burning like topaz against the dark thatch of their glossy leaves, and near them the thin gray of the olive-trees, outlining with pale shadow the forests that spread to the mountains.
Vast vases of stone looked down from the heights in grotesque shapes—serpents coiled, thrusting out their tongues tipped with rubies, with glaring emeralds for eyes: and below them, deep cut in the living rock and blazoned so that one might read them from afar, the arms of the kingdom—as if sacred pythons, terrible and fierce, kept watch above the harbor for the honor of the realm.
And far off, against that wonderful mountain background, a colossal marble lion stood guard over the ruins of the city that slept upon the coast below—with demoniac, fiery eyes of flashing jewels, striking terror to the souls of mariners who might have wandered with sacrilegious feet among those crumbling tombs and temples in search of buried treasure.