Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/371

Rh a business requiring much forethought and trouble; and the absolute necessity of exerting myself in order to exist kept my mind from the utter stag- nation into which it would otherwise have fallen, from the extreme monotony and eventless character of the life I led. My communications with the outer world of civilization were carried on by stray caiques which sometimes wandered about the Archipelago for many days unable to pass Cape Crio, but which ultimately succeeded in conveying to me huge packets of letters and newspapaers from Rhodes, containing the only authentic intelligence of what was passing in the Crimea which ever reached the island of Calymnos.

Christmas and New-year's-day were particularly doleful times to me. These festivals are celebrated by the Greeks twelve days after ours; and for about a fortnight we had a series of processions and feasts, in which the population take the greatest delight, but which were singularly tiresome to an indifferent spectator.

The constant recurrence of festivals, in which perfect idleness is enforced on the whole population, made the progress of the excavations very slow. My labourers were anxious to work as many days in the week as they could; but the Archbishop intimated to them one morning through a priest, that they must on no account work on any feast-day, of which there were constantly two in each week. Bread was so dear, that this restriction was a great hardship to the poor. Fasts are kept in Calymnos with extraordinary rigour. When the caique was shipwrecked in which my former letter was sent,