e great world was limited to occasional
voyages of the little caiques of the island to Syra, where they endured
two weeks' quarantine, and whence they brought back the mails and a
cargo of supplies, so that any arrival was an event to the Cydonians,
and that of a yacht flying the English and American flags at once was
enough to turn out the entire population. The fitful northerly breeze
had kept us the whole afternoon in sight of the port; and it was only as
sunset closed the doors of the health-office that we dropped anchor in
the middle of the little harbor,--the wondering centre of attraction to
a wondering town, whose folk came to assist at the sunsetting and our
arrival. Lazy soldiers, lying at full length on the old bronze cannon of
the batteries, looked out at us, only raising their heads from their
crossed arms; grave Turks, smoking their nargiles in front of the cafes
that open on the Marina, turned their chairs round to look at us without
stopping their hubble-bubbling; and all about us, where nothing else
was, a line of motley humanity--Greek, Turk, Egyptian, Nubian,
Abyssinian, under hats, caps, tarbouches, turbans, hats Persian and
ecclesiastical, and no hats at all--half circled us with mute and mostly
stupid admiration.

It was my first experience of a Turkish town, and perhaps I was more
struck with the dilapidation and evident decay than I ought to have
been. The sea-wall of the massive Venetian fortification seemed
crumbling and carious; the earth-work above it was half washed away; the
semicircle of houses on the Marina looked seedy and tottering; the
Marina itself was in places under-cut and falling into the water; and
above us, overtopping the whole city, the Pacha's palace, built on the
still substantial, though time-worn and neglected walls of the old
Venetian citadel, reared a lath-and-plaster shabbiness against the glow
of the western sky, reminding one of an American seaside hotel in the
last stages of popularity and profitable tenancy,--great gaps in the
plaster showing the flimsiness of the construction, while a coating of
unmitigated whitewash almost defied the sunset glow to modify it. On the
western point of the crescent of the Marina, under the height on which
stands the palace, is a domed mosque,--one large central dome surrounded
by little ones,--with a not ugly minaret, slightly cracked by
earthquakes, standing at one side in a little cemetery, among whose
turbaned tombstones grow a pa