After that their path led for a way through a field of half-grown wheat. Around nearly every shoot the sweet wild-pea had twined its graceful spiral, bravely lifting the pretty blue of the flowers among the pale green of the grain. When the wind swept over the field it looked like changeable silk. Toward sunset they came within seeing distance of a white village on a mountain side. A vast olive orchard surrounded it and a dozen or more dark green cypress trees pointed heavenward among the houses, like spires. "_Voilà_, Monsieur," cried Kostakes, gaily. "There we shall rest to-night, and shall find time to eat. Are you hungry?" CHAPTER XVIII A DESERTED TOWN An air of indescribable sadness hangs over a deserted town. Any one who has ever passed through a shepherd village, from which the inhabitants have gone for the summer, expecting to return again when the first snows of autumn drive them down from the mountains, has experienced this feeling. Here is the fountain, where the slender, merry maidens met at sundown, to gossip and fill their water jars; here is the café, where the old men gathered together under the platane tree and smoked and dreamed of the long ago; here is a secret nook, guarded by sweet poverty vines, where lovers held tryst in the fragrant twilight. But all is lonely, lonely. The waters splash with a melancholy sound, the tables and chairs are gone from under the platane tree and the lovers--let us hope they are fled together. The spirit of loneliness dwells where man has been and is not--in a tenantless house, in the chamber of death, by the embers of a camp fire in a vast wilderness. As you follow the streets of a deserted town you hear nothing but the splash, splash of the waters of the fountain or the enquiring twitter of some little bird. Perhaps a cat, tamed more by solitude than by hunger, tiptoes to meet you, purring with diplomatic fervor. But these sounds do not break the silence, they are its foil, its background. Galata was deserted because its inhabitants had fled two days before from the terrible Turk. Thanks to a timely warning, most of the people had succeeded in getting away, though an occasional corpse proved how narrow had been the escape of the entire population from sudden death. Kostakes and his little troop now marched through an olive orchard, whose gnarled and venerable trunks had perhaps witnessed the cruelties of the only oppressors worse than the Turk--the haughty, treacherous and inhuman Venetians; they climbed a flight of steps cut in the natural rock and followed a street paved with cobblestones from the walls of partly ruined houses to the village square.