oth and
slippery walls, must have been practically impossible, save by
connivance on the part of the guards, or by the intervention of
some tender-hearted Ariadne.

If those dark walls could only reveal the story of the doomed lives
which they once imprisoned, we should probably be able to realize,
even more fully than we do, the shadowed side of all the glittering
splendour of Knossos, and the grim element of barbaric cruelty
which mingled with a refined artistic taste and a delight in all
forms of beauty. In none of these great civilizations of the ancient
world were splendour and cruelty separated by any great interval
from one another, nor was a very remarkable degree of refinement
inconsistent with a carelessness of life, and even such a thirst
for blood, as we would consider more natural in a savage state;
but it is seldom that the evidences of the two things lie so close
to one another as where at Knossos the innocent figure of the
crocus-gatherer almost covers the very mouth of the horrible pit
in which the captives of Minos waited for the day when their lives
were to be staked on the hazard of the arena.

Among the other treasures recovered by this season's work was a
quantity of fine painted pottery which had fallen from the upper
rooms into the basement when the palace floors collapsed. Some of
the fragments were of that early polychrome style known as 'Kamares
ware,' from the cave on the southern slope of Mount Ida, where it
was first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. Its designs are purely
conventional and largely geometric--zigzags, crosses, spirals, and
concentric semicircles--and are executed in beautiful tints of
brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes
in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The
extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels,
and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to
what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to
which they belong. Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted
naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional
polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also
found during the excavations of this season.

The frescoes of the previous year were supplemented by the discovery
of a number of others, representing zones of human figures, about
one-third of life-size, set out on blue and yellow fields with
triple borders of black,