Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/266

216 wrong doings which might fall under my observation in this tour. He makes profession of a wish to administer his pashalick well; but, unfortunately, it is hardly possible for a Turkish governor to do more than to wish to do his duty. Between the wish and its execution his agents are sure to interpose so many difficulties that all honesty of purpose is thwarted. While I was with him, in came two Greek primates of Scio, with many genuflections and 🇬🇷. We began talkmg about the island, and I asked the two piimates why they did not make proper roads and bridges in order to convey the produce of the interior to the ports. The two venerable gentlemen said that they thought that the roads which were good enough for their ancestors were good enough for them; whereupon the Pasha asked whether Adam invented steam and the electric telegraph,—a question which puzzled them considerably, and which, I thought, was rather a creditable remark for a Turk to utter.

The town of Scio is very Italian in the character of its architecture, which has a solidity very rare in the Levant. In the suburbs, the fine houses built by the old merchants still stand in roofless and windowless desolation, just as the Turks left them after the Greek revolution, when Scio was utterly sacked. Up to that period its commerce was of great importance, and in the old capitulations made between the Porte and English monarchs Smyrna and Scio are mentioned together as the two principal ports where English trade was carried on in Turkey. We learn from a MS. in the Cotton collection in the