The Cruise of the Branwen

CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN gates ; and after dinner we drove back, along that fairv-like coast-road to Gravosa, and soon slept sound on board the Branwen. She had started long before I was awake, and by five on the afternoon of May 7 we had reached Spalato. It will be well for other travellers to remember that the day of the town's patron saint is not the best choice for a visit. But we elbowed our way through crowds of evil-smelling Croats, who fought or whistled, or joined in heavy dances with flat-footed damsels in thick petticoats, or stood round the inns and drank. Their wretched shops and houses had filled almost every available space in the Palace of Diocletian, within which the town is built. Its sea-front is Diocletian's marvellous colonnade. On a far larger scale, the place looks like what the amphitheatres of Arles or Nimes must have looked when they were built over in the seventeenth century. A mighty column rises suddenly at the angle of a sordid street. Above the reeking doorway of a wine-shop spreads the gorgeous pattern of a cornice. The sea itself, now barred back by the quays, once entered the palace by a canal and water-gate, like the old Stairs in Somerset House on our Embankment. Diocletian was in the fifty-ninth year of a vigorous life when he retired to the district where his father and mother had been slaves, in order to grow the cabbages he so much preferred to crowns. It was not, however, an entirely simple life to which the first emperor who wore the dia– dem withdrew; and the ruins of his country 162