Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/374

324 frame, and great activity. When he stood among my workmen, he overtopped them all like Saul, and he surpassed them in intelligence as much as in bodily stature. He had been much at sea, and had been tossed about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea from Marseilles to Odessa; every now and then he recounted little romantic bits of his adventurous life, from which I inferred that his Odyssey must have been a singular one,—a suspicion which was further confirmed by the study of his countenance, which to my mind was one of the most diabolical I ever beheld.

He was always armed to the teeth with a long gun, a formidable knife, and a brace of pistols. When I first took him into my service, I begged him to prevent any one from visiting the places where I was excavating at such times as work was not going on there. "Make yourself quite easy on that subject," said my friend Manoli; "I have told all the boys that if I catch any of them in our diggings I shall put a ball through them." The quiet way in which he said this, and the profound respect with which all the inhabitants, from the Archbishop downwards, treated him, made me feel that Manoli the Cassiote was no common man; that he had a mysterious influence in the place, which, so long as it was exerted in my behalf, would be particularly favourable to the success of the expedition.

One day, during a temporary cessation of the diggings, I thought of making a visit to the opposite coast of Asia Minor and taking Manoli