Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/121

 Pococke regards rather as philosophers, however, than as monks. Their religion, if they had any, consisted in the worship of nature; and from their veneration for the calf, the lingam, and the yoni, the figures of which they were said to preserve in a small silver box, I should conjecture that both they and their religion are an offshoot from the great Brahminical trunk; and the same thing may with equal probability be said of the Yezeedees, the Ismaelaah, and the Nessariah, whose doctrines had found their way into the west, and caused the founding of altars to the yoni in Cyprus long before the birth of history.

Our traveller continued his researches among the rude tribes who inhabit the fastnesses of Lebanon, visited the cedars, Baalbec (where he found the body of a murdered man in the temple), Damascus, Horus, and Aleppo; and having made an excursion across the Euphrates to Orfah, returned by way of Antioch and Scanderoon to Tripoli, where he embarked on the 24th of October for Cyprus.

On approaching Limesol from the sea, its environs, consisting entirely of vineyards, and gardens planted with mulberry-trees, and interspersed with villas, present a charming landscape to the eye. The wines for which the island is celebrated are all made here. In Cyprus what principally interests the traveller are the footsteps of antiquity; he seeks for little else. The temples and worship of Venus, hallowed, if not spiritualized, by poetry, have diffused a glow over the soil which neither time nor barbarism, potent as is their influence, has been able to dissipate. The heart thrills and the pulse quickens at the very names of Paphos and Amathus. A thousand pens have celebrated their beauty: Love has waved his wings over them. Pococke seems, however, notwithstanding his passion for beholding celebrated places, to have visited these scenes with as much coolness as he would a turnip-field.