Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/265

Rh business for the vice-consul none. The luxuriant fruit-trees, for which the island had been so celebrated, had been cut down by the ever to be remembered great frost two years ago, which furnished materials for the despatches of all the consuls in the Archipelago during a whole winter. It is supposed that such a frost had not been for fifty years, because it destroyed trees of that age. Scio has a rich level shore, out of which bold bleak mountains rise abruptly; but seen from the sea, it has not the beauty of Mytilene, from the absence of olive-trees on the hill-sides.

We went over the castle, of which the fortifications had a more modern character than those of Mytilene and Rhodes. I noticed a great number of long brass guns like those at Rhodes, which doubtless belong to the period when this island was occupied by the Genoese. On one was the inscription,—

MDLIII.

I also noticed in the castle the pedestal of a statue to a Roman emperor. But no other trace of Greek antiquities was to be met with there. "We went to see the Governor-General of the Archipelago, Ishmael Pasha, a nephew of the famous Ali Pasha, of Jannina, and found him in a beautiful kiosk in the environs of Scio, surrounded by orange-trees and fountains. He is now making the round of the islands, and begged me to report to him any