Cholera was raging all over the Levant, and there was no direct communication with any Turkish port without passing through quarantine. In the uncertainty as to getting to my new post by any route, I decided to leave my wife and boy at Rome, with a newcomer,—our Lisa, then two or three months old,—and go on an exploring excursion. Providing myself with a photographic apparatus, I took steamer at Civita Vecchia for Peiraeus. Arrived at Athens I found that no regular communication with any Turkish port was possible, and that the steamers to Crete had been withdrawn, though there had not been, either at that or at any previous time, a case of cholera in Crete; but such was the panic prevailing in
Greece that absolute non-intercourse with the island and the Turkish empire had been insisted on by the population. People thought I might get a chance at Syra to run over by a sailing-boat, so I went to Syra.