HISTORY ETHNOGRAPHY NATURE WINE-MAKING SITE MAP
Selected and rare materials, excerpts and observations from ancient, medieval and contemporary authors, travelers and researchers about Cyprus.
 
 
 
 
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SIR SAMUEL WHITE BAKER
CYPRUS AS I SAW IT IN 1879
page 134

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I advised them to leave this "useful dog " behind, as hostilities might be declared by my three English I spaniels in the event of his swallowing a wounded I hare. This being agreed to, we all started, and, crossing the valley, entered a gorge upon the other side. W e now ascended naked hills of pure crystallised j gypsum ; the strata were vertical, and the perfectly 1 transparent laminée were packed together like small sheets of glass only-a few inches in width. It was I easy to walk up the steep slopes of this material without slipping, as the exterior edges, having been exposed to the weather, had become rough, and were exactly like coarse glass placed edgeways. W e spread out into a line of skirmishers extending up the hills upon both sides of the gorge, and quickly arrived in very likely ground covered with dwarf-cypress. Here the dogs immediately flushed partridges, and a Turk having wounded one, a considerable delay took place in searching for it at the bottom of a deep wooded hollow, but to no purpose. W e now arrived at lovely ground within a mile of the sea, forming a long succession of undulations, covered, more or less, with the usual evergreen brushwood as far as the eye could reach. This uneven surface, broken by many watercourses, was about eighty feet above the water-level, and descended in steep rocky ledges to within a few hundred yards of the sea, where the lower ground was flat and alternated in open glades and thick masses of mastic scrub ; the beach being edged by drift sanddunes covered by the dense jungle of various matted bushes. There was a fair amount of game in this locality, and had the Turks shot well we should have made a tolerable bag ; but they did not keep a good line, and

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