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Safe ports are necessary for the commerce of a country or an island, and therefore to its prosperity. "In ancient times there were ports at Salamis, Paphos, and Famagusta, in the eastern part of the island, which was the portion celebrated in the past.
At the gate of the Embassy enclosure, staff members piled up boxes and bales and parcels for transport to the spaceport and thence to destinations whose names were practically songs. There were dispatches to Delil, where the Interstellar Diplomatic Service had a sector headquarters, and there were packets of embassy-stamped invoices for Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta.
Bragadino, the defender of Famagusta, did not die in vain; his terrible fate excited such a passion of anger in the whole of the armada of Don John that each individual of which it was composed felt that the sacrifice of his own life would be but a small thing if it only led to the destruction of such fiends as those against whom they were arrayed.
The indiscretions committed by some of its over-zealous followers, who had arrived in Constantinople, no doubt, aggravated an already acute situation. The fateful decision was eventually arrived at to banish Bahá’u’lláh to the penal colony of Akká, and Mírzá Yaḥyá to Famagusta in Cyprus. This decision was embodied in a strongly worded Farmán, issued by Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz.
The allies had gone no nearer Cyprus than the port of Suda in Crete. The whole expedition, therefore, came to nothing. In September Nicosia fell to the Turk, who then turned to the conquest of Famagusta, the last stronghold of the Venetians on the island.
As we have said, this campaign was brought about at the initiative of the Venetians, and an incident which occurred not long before the battle exacerbated the feelings with which the Turks were regarded by the Christians to the point of madness. The city of Famagusta, in Cyprus, had been captured by that Mustafa of whom we heard so much at the siege of Malta.
Famagusta surrendered August 4, 1571, and despite the promise of life and liberty, the garrison was massacred and the Venetian commander, Bragadino, cruelly burnt to death. Cyprus became a Turkish possession thenceforward to this day.
And, as it is foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those gorgeously-coloured verses which begin: I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those ships were certainly so old Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
Salterne? For those times were the day-dawn of English commerce; and not a merchant in Bideford, or in all England, but had his imagination all on fire with projects of discoveries, companies, privileges, patents, and settlements; with gallant rivalry of the brave adventures of Sir Edward Osborne and his new London Company of Turkey Merchants; with the privileges just granted by the Sultan Murad Khan to the English; with the worthy Levant voyages of Roger Bodenham in the great bark Aucher, and of John Fox, and Lawrence Aldersey, and John Rule; and with hopes from the vast door for Mediterranean trade, which the crushing of the Venetian power at Famagusta in Cyprus, and the alliance made between Elizabeth and the Grand Turk, had just thrown open.
And then that pea diminished until the spaceship from Krim, Walden, Cetis, Rigel and the Nearer Rim had become the size of a dust mote and then could not be seen at all. But one knew that it was going on to Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta and the Coalsack Stars. Hoddan shrugged and began to trudge toward the warehouses. The durya-drawn landing ramp began to roll slowly in the same direction.
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