Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/167

Rh a strange tenantless aspect; for Rhodes is a place which has been long wasting away with that atrophy which is consuming the Ottoman empire. The town is far too large for its inhabitants, who are huddled away into holes and corners. About a year ago an earthquake threw down one of the fine old towers. Its ruins fell in one of the principal streets, blocking it up. Not a stone has been touched by the Turks, and the ruins may perhaps lie there till another earthquake shakes them up again.

After having been jostled by the throng of mules and market-people in the long, crooked, miry streets of Mytilene, it is pleasant to walk in a place where for miles you meet nothing but a stray donkey, where no sound is heard but the echo of your own footsteps on a pavement of pebbles, the most beautifully clean that I ever trod on. All the court-yards and many of the streets in the Frank quarter are paved with round shingle-stones from the beach, in many places worked in very neat patterns, which we might well imitate in England.

I delight in the distant views, which are on a much grander scale than those of Mytilene. Looking at the map, you will see that the opposite shores of Lycia and Caria are much broken by bays and headlands, which form a magnificent jagged sky-line, sweeping round in a kind of panorama towards the south, where the vast forms of snow-capped mountains come into view. The sea is perpetually agitated, sometimes by tremendous gales, and has not that look of molten metal which it has generally in the Archipelago. The