Malta and the Knights Hospitallers (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Malta and the Knights Hospitallers

When the traveller to the East has accomplished half of his Mediterranean voyage, which is generally on the fourth day after leaving Gibraltar, he enters the Malta channel, a stretch of sea between Sicily on the north, the snowy peak of Etna occasionally making itself visible, and on the south a rocky shore, which swells gradually up to hills of some 600 or 700 feet in height, without trees, and therefore presenting a heavy though undulating outline; about a third of its surface bare rock, and the other two-thirds partitioned off into small fields by enclosures of loose stones similar to those of Westmoreland or the North Riding. This is gozo, and his eye will inform him that the country is productive and highly cultivated, even if another sense is not pene trated by the odour of garlic, the favourite green crop of the Gozo farmer. The fields in March are red with clover blossom; the orange groves are in flower or fruit all the year long, yet there is no vacuity or want of energy about the people. Passing the mouth of the strait of Comino where, upon the little island of the same name, the nu lucky Su/tan man of war was wrecked a few years ago, the steeper cliffs of the western coast-line of Malta come into view, in colour of a bright orange, and the eye can distinctly make out that great geological fault which traverses both islands, as Mr. Adams so happily says, just as if Atlas had raised the entire island group to the level of the higher plateau, when a large portion in the middle gave way and sank, leaving the remainder of Malta south-eastward.

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