’Then one inspired among us climbed up to the masthead, having in his teeth a piece of the True Cross set in a silver heart; and called aloud to the wild weather, “Save, Lord, we perish!” as was said of old by very sacred persons.  To which palpable truth so urgently declared an answer was vouchsafed, not indeed according to our full desires, yet (doubtless) level with our deserts.  The wind veered to the north; and though it abated nothing of its force, preserved us from the teeth of the rocks.  Before it now, under bare poles, without need of oars, we drove to the southward; and while a little light still endured descried a great mountainous and naked coast rising out of the heaped waters, which we knew to be the land of Cyprus.  Off the western face of this dark shore, in a little shelter at last, we lay-to and tossed all night.  Next day in fairer weather, hoisting sail, we made a good haven defended by stout sea-walls, a mole and two lighthouses:  these were of a city called Limasol.  Upon my galley, at least, there was one who sang Lauda Sion, whose tune before had been Adhaesit pavimento, when he rested tired eyes upon the clustered spires of a white city, smokeless and asleep in the early morning light.’

So far without weariness I hope Milo may have conducted the reader.  In relation to the sea you may take him for an expert in the terrors he describes.  Not so in Cyprus.  War tempts him to prolixity, to classical allusion, even to hexameters of astonishingly loose joints.  Every stroke of his hero’s sword-arm seems to him of weight.  No doubt it was, once; but not in a chronicle of this sort, where the Cypriote gests must take a lowly place among others fair and foul of this King-errant.  Let me put Milo on the shelf for a little, and abridge.

I tell you then that the Emperor of Cyprus, by name Isaac, was a thin-faced man with high cheek-bones.  A Greek of the Greeks, he undervalued what he had never seen, precisely for that reason.  When heralds went up to Nikosia to announce the coming-in of King Richard, Isaac mumbled his lips.  ‘Prutt!’ he said, ’I am the Emperor.  What have I to do with your kings?’ Richard showed him that with one king he had plenty to do, by assaulting Limasol and putting armies to flight in the plains about Nikosia.  Shall I sing the battle of the fifty against five thousand; tell how King Richard with precisely half a hundred knights came cantering against the sun and a host, as gay and debonair as to a driving of stags?  They say that he himself led the charge, covered in a wonderful silken surcoat, colour of a bullfinch’s breast, and wrought upon in black and white heraldry.  They say that at the sight of the pensils a-flutter, at the sound of the hunting-horns, the Grifons let fly a shaft a-piece; then threw down their bows and scattered.  But the knights caught them.  Isaac was on a hill to watch the battle.  ’Who is that marvellous tall knight who seems to be swimming