Travels and Researches in Crete Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 Excerpt: ...as I brought no tent, the season being advancing towards winter, and I expected to find it very cold at this elevation; for to hope for rest and sleep, unprovided against such companions as a Cretan's house contains, is out of the question, as I have often experienced when duty or the pleasure of travel has thrown me, as it too frequently has, into the company of legions of those tormentors of the human frame and mind, the fleas, and, alas too, of those trou Or THE TRAVELLER. 183 bled spirits that haunt the long, long Levantine night, when they are present, with their trumpeting--a song that never ceases, but trumpets the louder the more they are thwarted and disappointed in their attack--and with snouts also that, in one's dozy, dreamy state of combat and resistance, the victim is led to compare to the bill of a snipe or the probe of a vampire which is endeavouringito bore into your flesh. And then there is that other enemy of the thinskinned man, the " B flat" (to use a delicate name often applied to distinguish it from the first-named, the " F sharp"), and yet an unmusical fellow, too, who steals upon you without sound, and generally without crawl or even touch that can be felt to warn you of his approach, but from some part of the clothes nearest you, under or over, as the case may be, probes or bites with head erect or bent backwards from his flat body, and with the mouth only just reaching you. Thus this cunning fellow, then and from there, sends the unfelt but yet penetrating probe into you, and sucks his full from the sweetlveins he has reached, and, as a return for the nectar he has drawn, deposits an irritant something as a memento of his feast, that soon sets blood and skin in a blaze of fever' and of ce...