Colonel White, 1st Royal Scots, who was the chief commissioner
at Lefkosia, had kindly waited to accompany us.
As St. Hilarion was only
a short distance to the left of the Kyrenia road, I had determined not
to return, but to send the camels and luggage on direct. We left all
unnecessary luggage locked up within the vans, which Sir Garnet Wolseley
kindly permitted us to leave at head-quarters. We took leave of our good
and big friend Georgi and his sharp companion Theodori, who returned to
Dali, where Georgi would meet the only Venus that I have seen in Cyprus,
his wife; but even that pretty Venus was ruined by high boots and baggy
trousers.
Crossing the dry bed of the Pedias below the Government House, we struck
a line over the open and withered plain to a direct route to Kyrenia. At
a distance of about five miles from Lefkosia, the broad and well-trodden
road became lost in a variety of independent paths, which at length
converged into one narrow route that ascended a curious formation of
water-washed and utterly denuded hills, composed of sandstone,
claystone, and peculiar deposits of sedimentary rock, which in places
resembled an artificial pavement. In many places the strata were
vertical, exhibiting the confusion that had been created by the
upheaval. Having passed through a succession of ups and downs for about
three miles, sometimes winding through narrow gorges where the soil was
covered with an efflorescence of salt, at other places clambering over
loose rocks and entering narrow glens, we arrived in a plain at the foot
of the bold and bluff range of the Carpas mountains.
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