This formed a street, the
sea upon one side, faced by a row of houses.
As with all Turkish
possessions, decay had stamped the town: the masonry of the quay was in
many places broken down, the waves had undermined certain houses, and in
the holes thus washed out by the action of water were accumulations of
recent filth. Nevertheless, enormous improvements had taken place since
the English occupation. An engineer was already employed in repairing
the quay, and large blocks of carefully faced stone (a sedimentary
limestone rock of very recent formation) were being laid upon a bed of
concrete to form a permanent sea-wall. The houses which lined the quay
were for the most part stores, warehouses, and liquor-shops. Among these
the Custom House, the Club, Post Office, and Chief Commissioner's were
prominent as superior buildings. There was a peculiar character in the
interior economy of nearly all houses in Larnaca; it appeared that heavy
timber must have been scarce before the town was built, as the upper
floor was invariably supported by stone arches of considerable
magnitude, which sprang from the ground-floor level. These arches were
uniform throughout the town, and the base of the arch was the actual
ground, without any pillar or columnar support; so that in the absence
of a powerful beam of timber, the top of the one-span arch formed a
support for the joists of the floor above. In large houses numerous
arches gave an imposing appearance to the architecture of the ground
floors, which were generally used as warehouses.
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