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At length we saw the house that the Messrs. Christian have built to live in while the works are in progress. It is splendidly placed upon a bluff overlooking the great plain, and from a distance, I know not why, has the appearance of a small ruined temple. Very glad were we to reach it about three o'clock in the afternoon, and partake of a lamb roasted whole in the Cyprian fashion, with other luxuries.

Just below this house start the six miles of massive dam that runs across the plain to form the retaining wall of the vast body of water which is to be held up. As yet this water is allowed to escape, but next winter, when the dam is completed, it will be saved and let out for purposes of irrigation. There is nothing new in the world. In the course of the building of the dam were discovered the remains of one more ancient, also running across the plain, but enclosing a smaller area; indeed its sluice is to be pressed into the service of the present generation. I examined it, and came to the conclusion that the masonry is of the Roman period. Mr. J. H. Medlicott of the Indian Irrigation Department, the very able engineer who has designed these great works and carried them out so successfully, is however of opinion that it is Venetian. Probably he is right. This at least is clear, that people in days long dead could plan and execute such enterprises as well as we do to-day. Roman or Venetian, the stone-work is admirably laid and bound together with some of the hardest and best cement that ever I saw.

The Messrs. Christian, who have contracted to complete this undertaking, employ about three thousand men and women, mostly on a system of piece-work. In the evening I walked along the great dam and saw them labouring like ants there and in the trenches which are to distribute the water. They were then engaged in facing the dam with stone which is fitted together but not mortared, carrying up great blocks upon their backs

and laying them in place under the direction of overseers. At first the provision of this facing stone was difficult and expensive, as the stuff had to be carted six or seven miles; indeed its cost threatened to swallow up most of the contractors' profits. Then it was, that within half a mile of the place where the material was needed, very luckily Mr. Charles Christian in the course of an evening walk discovered an outcrop of excellent stone, soft to work but with the property of hardening in water. The cutters get it out by a simple but effective system, no doubt that which has been followed by their ancestors for thousands of years. A skilled man can loosen a great number of suitable blocks in a day, apparently with ease. When I tried it, however, I found the task somewhat beyond me.

From the strong resemblance of the material I believe that this was the very stone used by the builders of the ancient dam below the house. Doubtless they discovered the quarry as Mr. Christian did, although oddly enough the natives who had lived in the neighbourhood all their lives, declared that nothing of the sort existed for miles around. It was the old case of eyes and no eyes.

I said some pages back that living in Cyprus is cheap, and of this here I had an instance. The house put up by Messrs. Christian for their convenience while directing the works is spacious, two-storeyed, and capitally built of stone, with, if I remember right, a kind of mud roof laid upon rafters covered with split cane mats. Properly made and attended to, such roofs last for years. The whole cost of the building, which was quite large enough to accommodate with comfort seven or eight people and servants, was less than £300, including the large verandahs. In England it would cost at the very least a thousand, and probably a great deal more.

CHAPTER XI

FAMAGUSTA

THAT night a great gale blew roaring round the house as though we had been in Coll, or at Kessingland, instead of southern Cyprus. In the morning the wind had dropped, but the sky was heavy with ominous-looking rain-clouds floating here and there in the blue deeps. After breakfast we mounted the ponies that had been provided for us, a blessed change from the familiar mule, and set out to explore the Messaoria plain and the Kouklia dam. This magnificent plain, which varies in breadth from ten to twenty miles, runs practically the whole length of the body of the island from Famagusta on the east to Morphu on the west, that is, a distance of about fiftyfive miles. Once it was a dense forest, now it is open level country cultivated here and there, but for the most part barren. On either side of it, north and south, stretch the two ranges of Cyprian mountains, that of Kyrenia and that of Trooidos, and it is the decomposed, basic-igneous rock brought down from these mountains in the winter-floods by the river Pidias and other torrents that form the soil of the plain.

What a soil it is! Deep brown in colour, of an unknown thickness-it has been proved to fifty feet-and I suppose as rich and productive as any in the world. Hitherto, or at any rate since the Venetian days, two natural accidents however have made it comparatively valueless, that of drought and that of flooding. The greater part of this end of the plain which I am now describing, for instance, has been a swamp in winter and

an arid wilderness in summer. It is to remedy this state of things that the irrigation dams have been constructed, to hold up the waters in winter and pour their life-giving streams forth again in summer.

In the future all this vast area of land, or thousands of acres of it that will fall under their influence, ought to produce the most enormous crops. On this point I see only one fear; upon the top surface of the soil, and in places going a foot or two into it, are little veins of white salty substance, deposited, I suppose, from the floods. These may make the surface earth sour and, until they are evaporated, affect the health of crops. I know that the same thing happens in Coll in the Hebrides, where new-drained lands have to be treated, I think with lime, in order to sweeten them. It is my belief that here, however, one or two deep ploughings and the exposure of the earth to the scorching heat of a Cyprian summer would do this work effectively. I have suggested to Mr. Christian that he should cut out a block, or blocks of soil to the depth of three feet, enclose them as they stand in boxes with the natural vegetation growing on the top, and ship them to me. This he has promised to do, and I shall then submit them for analysis to the chemists of the Royal Agricultural Society, to which I belong, who will doubtless be able to advise as to the nature and power of the salts, and to say what method should be adopted to be rid of them.

Now when flooding is prevented and water will be available for irrigation, it seems to me that upon the Messaoria, if anywhere on the earth, farming ought to pay. I can imagine no more interesting and, as I believe, profitable experiment, than to take up let us say five thousand acres of this area upon easy terms such as no doubt the Government would grant, paying its price for example by a certain tithe of the profit of the produce terminable in a certain number of years. This land might then be farmed by the process, simple, where

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