The dinner was beyond description. From a Cretan standpoint it was doubtless a feast for the gods. I, being ravenous with hunger, asked not the names of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal began with ripe olives and spiced meat chopped up with wheat grains and wrapped in mulberry leaves; it passed on through a course that resembled fried egg-plant but wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and olives and cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it had been flavoured with _eau de cologne_, concluding with small native melons, which I have never seen equalled for flavour except in Turkestan, and, of course, coffee and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which ran entirely around the room, the whole party dropped one by one to sleep. The one recollection of Archanais which will always remain with me is that of a roomful of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered, armed-to-the-teeth, overfed men, notorious revolutionists every one, all sound asleep and all snoring like steam-engines. That night we rode down the mountains in the moonlight, the snow-capped peaks looming luridly against the purple sky. The moonbeams lighted up the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played fitfully among the gnarled branches of the ancient olive-trees, giving to the silent land an aspect of unutterable peace. The whole world seemed sleeping and the hoofs of our horses rang loudly against the stones. The road which had been white with dust in the morning was a ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees stirred ever so gently in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient Knossos grew larger in the moonlight until all its ancient glory seemed restored; the crosses on the Greek cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers pointing toward heaven; the great guns that frowned from the ramparts were hidden in the shadows—all was silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we walked our tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into the city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow of the walls, a rifle flashed in the moonlight, and a harsh voice challenged: “Halt! Who goes there?” INDEX Abbas Hilmi II, 112. Abyssinia, 10. Africanders, 226. Agriculture in: French Africa, 24; German Africa, 181; Morocco, 32; Rhodesia, 214; South Africa, 234; the Sudan, 128; Tripolitania, 85-86. Ahaggar (Sahara), 24. Alexandria, bombardment of, 111. Algeria, 3, 9, 14, 16. Algerian hinterland, 57. Algiers, 10. Americans in: Rhodesia, 217-8; the Transvaal, 237. Anglo-German secret treaty, 178-9. Angola, 177-8. Antanarivo, 9. Arab: justice, 75; resistance to Italian rule, 98; weddings, 78; women, 77. Arabi Pasha, 110. Arabi's rebellion, 111. Archanais (Crete), 283.