Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which surround it, Candia would have almost the appearance of an Indian town, the similarity being increased by its dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and by the British soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad, stone-paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour up the hill, past rows of blackened ruins—grim reminders of the latest insurrection—past square after square of white-walled, red-tiled houses; through noisy bazaars where the turbaned shopkeepers squat patiently in their doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose stained carvings would make many a museum director envious; past mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups of filthy beggars grovelling on their steps for alms; past the ornate, twin-domed Greek cathedral, and so on to the ramparts where the British garrison is quartered in yellow barracks that overlook the sea. But the real Crete is no more to be judged from glimpses of Canea and Candia than America could be judged by visiting New York and Chicago. It is in the picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote range that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is to be found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount Ida, alone of all the scattered branches of the great Hellenic family, have preserved in form and feature the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, the mountain village of Archanais as our destination, and with an escort of gendarmerie clattering at our heels, we set out from Candia one morning before the sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard riding between us and dinner, and roads in the Sphakiote country often consist of nothing more than dried-up water-courses. For the first few miles the road was crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to market—droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings of the sturdy, shaggy native ponies tethered head to tail and tail to head, their panniers filled with purple figs or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed Turks driving rude native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes and hiding even them in the presence of the _giaours_; chattering Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy native lace; now and then a prosperous farmer, striding along with a peculiar rolling walk, due to the round-soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying a measure of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat of his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown Turkish cemetery where the gilded tombstones, capped by carven fezes or turbans in the case of men, and shells in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight, while, a little farther on, we halted for a few moments before the tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits of cloth which the passing faithful had torn from their garments and tied to it.