Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie the ruins of Knossos, the one-time palace of King Minos, a powerful monarch of the Mycenæan age who is supposed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when mythology ended and history began. The audience chamber and the royal throne, which were old when the Pyramids were built, are still in a perfect state of preservation, though these amazing evidences of prehistoric grandeur are no more interesting than the marvellous network of cellars and subterranean passages which underlie the palace, many of them still lined, just as they were five thousand years ago, with row upon row of mammoth earthen jars for the storage of grain, of olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many eminent archæologists, by the way, maintain that it was from this bewildering maze of corridors and passage-ways that the legend of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete, arose. Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of Knossos would long since have taken rank with those which dot the banks of the Upper Nile. Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun-baked country and later through gloomy pine woods and mountain defiles, with an occasional halt at a wayside _xenodocheion_ that the troopers of our escort might refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermentation of rice known as _arrack_, which is the national drink of Greece, brought us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and weary, into the village square of Archanais. The demarch of the town, with a dozen or so of the insurrectionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, awaited our coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that shaded half the village square. Seats were placed for us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the ceremony of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with small cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable _loukoum_, which is a candy resembling “Turkish delight.” This formal welcome, which no Cretan ever neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a long, low-roofed, homelike dwelling, red tiles above and white plaster beneath, and surrounding it a garden ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a servant with a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands in a steady stream, according to the Cretan fashion.