The passage is always eight or ten feet wide, and four, five, six, eight, or ten feet or more high. In many places it had fallen in. The peasants tell all sorts of stories about it. They told me that in one place there are reeds and a pool, and that the hole goes right through the mountain for three miles; that a sow went in and came out seven years after with a litter of pigs; and so on. We slept at Hagios Deka, left it at dawn and rode close to the foot of Ida through a very rich country, and in spite of waiting an hour on the road, reached Candia in seven hours and a half. It was evident that for purposes of his own our janissary had taken us something like fifteen hours out of our way in coming, and we had a serious dispute with him in consequence. Our hurrying back was of no use. There was no prospect of our getting away. _Candia._--We have plenty of time on our hands and can only employ it in the worst possible way by the assistance of the agas, who in the name of dullness come and pass away their ennui in our company. To crown our bliss, imagine us sleeping, feeding, and sitting all in one room, without the possibility of finding a hole to hide our heads alone in. What was to me perhaps the worst affliction of all, was that to entertain our guests we had to have music, wearing on unceasingly in melancholy monotony. Our situation, in fact, was getting to be very trying. We had a visit from our friend Alilah Agas, who begged us to send for music, which was brought. Then he wished the girls of the house (Jewesses) to come up and dance, and had we not been there no doubt he would have compelled them to come. As it was, we discountenanced it, and he gave it up. But he is a Turk; which is as good as to say utterly unprincipled. He told me himself that in raising recruits in Anatolia for the Bey of Tunis, he gave them three hundred piastres apiece, and set it down as six hundred. That dishonesty and bestiality go hand in hand with ignorance is well seen among the Turks. Moreover they lack the civilising influence of women in their society. As soon as their affected gravity is laid aside, they betray the vilest indecency of feeling. One cannot give instances, but the fact was painfully brought home to us.