CHAPTER VIII

AMATHUS

Now I have to tell of Amathus, the place we passed on our journey down the coast, to-day a stone-strewn hill covered with springing corn. Even in the far past Amathus was so ancient that no one knew with certainty of its beginnings. It is said to have been founded by the Phoenicians; at any rate in it flourished a temple to the god Melkarth, and with it a famous shrine erected in honour of Venus. The mythical hero, Theseus, according to one account, is reported to have landed here with Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, who died in childbirth in the city, although the story more generally accepted says that he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Whatever truth there may be in all these legends and probably it is but little-this is certain, that in its day Amathus was a great town inhabited by a prosperous and powerful people. It lies about five or six miles from Limasol and is approached by a road which runs along the sea, whence it is separated by a stretch of curious black sand which blows a good deal in high winds. On the way Mr. Mavrogordato pointed out to me an ingenious method whereby he is attempting to turn that barren belt into profitable soil. He seems to have discovered that this sand, wherein one might imagine nothing would grow, is suitable to the needs of the black wattle. At any rate the trees of that species which he planted there, although scarcely more than a year old, are now large and flourishing shrubs.

As we drew near to Amathus I perceived curious

holes by the roadside, covered in for the most part with rough slabs of stone. Once these holes were tombs, rifled long ago. Then we came to the site of the town stretching down to the sea-beach, where stand the remnants of a castle which we saw from the steamer. Now it is nothing but a hillside literally sown with stones that, no doubt, once formed the foundations of the dwellings of Amathus. I say the foundations, for I

believe that the houses of these ancient cities, as in the villages of Cyprus to-day, were for the most part built of green brick, or what here in Norfolk we should call clay-lump, which in the course of centuries of sun and rain has melted away into the soil. The temple, public buildings, and palaces must have been magnificent, and as I shall show presently, wonderful care was lavished upon the tombs; but the habitations of the great mass of the citizens were in all likelihood humble and temporary structures, or so I think. It is the same in Egypt, where the old inhabitants grudged neither wealth nor labour in the preparation of graves, their everlasting abode, but were content to fashion their earthly lodgings of the Nile mud that lay at hand.

Amathus must have been very strong, indeed it would be difficult to find a site better suited to defence. It is surrounded by steep natural ravines which served the purpose of moats, and surmounted by a towering rock with precipitous sides, along whose slopes the city lay. Upon this rock, says tradition, stood an impregnable citadel; indeed the site is still called "The Old Castle" by the peasants of the neighbouring village of Agia Tychenos. Now all these countless stones furnish their humble tillers with a seed-bed for wheat and barley. The inexperienced might imagine that no place could be more unsuitable for the growing of crops, but in fact this is not so, seeing that in the severe Cyprian droughts stones have the property of retaining moisture to nurture the roots which otherwise would perish.

On arriving at the foot of the hill we rode round it to visit the tombs which lie behind and beyond, taking with us a supply of candles and several peasants as guides. These sepulchres were, I believe, discovered and plundered more than twenty years ago by General Cesnola, the consul, whose splendid collection of antiquities is to be seen in America. The first we reached lay at the bottom of a deep pit now rapidly refilling with silt washed into it by the winter wet. In the surrounding rubbish we could still see traces of its violation, for here lay many fragments of ancient amphore and of a shattered marble sarcophagus. After the rains that had fallen recently the path through the hole leading into the tomb was nothing but a pool of liquid mud through which, to win an entrance, the explorer must crawl upon his stomach, as the soil rises to within about eighteen inches of the top blocks of its square doorway. The task seemed dirty and in every way unpleasing, but I for one did not travel to Cyprus to be baffled by common, harmless mud. So I took off my coat, which in the scant state of our wardrobe I did not care to spoil, and went at it, on my hands and toes, that the rest of me might avoid the slush as much as possible.

It was a slimy and a darksome wriggle, but quite safe, in this respect differing somewhat from a journey of a like nature which I made a good many years ago. That was near Assouan in Egypt, where at the time certain new tombs had just been discovered which I was anxious to explore. These tombs were hollowed in the rock at the top of a steep slope of sand, which choked their doorways. Seeing that, as at Amathus, there was just sufficient space left beneath the head of the doorway of one of them for a man of moderate size to creep through, I made the attempt alone. Writhing forward, serpent-wise, through the sand, presently I found myself in the very grimmest place that I have ever visited. It was a cave of the size of a large room, and when my eyes

grew accustomed to the faint light which crept through the hole, I saw that it was literally full of dead, so full that their bodies must once have risen almost to the roof. Moreover these dead had not been embalmed, for round me lay their clean bones by hundreds and their skulls by scores. Yet once this sepulchre was at the service of older and more distinguished occupants, as under the skeletons I found a broken mummy-case of good workmanship, and in it the body of a woman whose wrappings had decayed. She died young, since at the time of her decease she was just cutting her wisdom teeth.

As I wondered over these jumbled relics of the departed, I remembered having read that about the time of Christ, Assouan was smitten with a fearful plague which slew its inhabitants by thousands. Doubtless, I thought, here are the inhabitants, or some of them, whose bodies in such a time of pestilence it would have been impossible to embalm. So they must have brought and piled them one on another in the caves that had served as sepulchres of the richer notables among their forefathers, till all were full. I remembered also that plague germs are said to be singularly long-lived and that these might be getting hungry. With that thought I brought my examination of this interesting place to a sudden end.

Just as I was beginning my outward crawl, foolishly enough I shouted loudly to my companion whom I had left at the entrance of another sepulchre, thinking that he might help to pull me through the hole. Almost immediately afterwards I felt something weighty begin to trickle on to my back with an ever-increasing stream, and in a flash understood that the reverberations of my voice had loosened the over-hanging stones already shaken and shattered by earthquakes, and that the sand was pouring down upon me from between them. Heavens! how frightened I was. Luckily one does not argue under

such circumstances where, indeed, he who hesitates is lost. If I had stopped to think whether it would be best to go back or to go forward, to go quick or go slow, it is very probable that long since I should have added an alien cranium to those of that various pile. Instead I crawled forward more swiftly than ever I crawled before, notwithstanding the increasing weight upon my back, for the sand fell faster and faster, with the result that as no stone followed it to crush me, presently, somewhat exhausted, I was sitting fanning myself with a grateful heart in the dazzling sun without.

To return to Amathus and a still older tomb: this doorway beneath which we passed was also square and surmounted by four separate mouldings. Once through it, we lighted our candles to find ourselves standing in a kind of chapel, where I suppose the relatives of the dead assembled at funerals or funerals or to make offerings on the anniversaries of death. Out of this chapel opened four tombs, each of them large enough to contain several bodies. They are empty now, but their beautiful workmanship is left for us to admire. Thousands of years ago-though to look at them one might think it yesterday-the hard limestone blocks of which they are built were laid with a trueness and finish that is quite exquisite. Clearly no scamped work was allowed in old Phoenician tombs. In these graves and others close at hand, General Cesnola found many antiques of value. Indeed one of our guides, who was employed to dig for him, assisted at their ransack.

Some readers may remember a violent controversy which arose among the learned over the allegation that Cesnola unearthed the most of his more valuable antiquities in a single treasury at Curium. The said antiquities, however, being, so the critics declared, of many different styles and periods, it was found difficult to understand how they could have been discovered in one place, unless indeed Curium boasted a prehistoric British Museum with a gold