Sunset in Cyprus

BITTER LEMONS (256 pp.) -- Lawrence Durrell--Duffon ($3.50).

Antony gave the island to Cleopatra as a gift, and other conquerors would gladly have given a Cleopatra to get Cyprus. For the last 2,000 years, tidal waves of conquest have continued to sweep over the island's pebbled shores. Cyprus has been ruled by medieval Knights Templar, Venetians, Turks and British. By 1953, when Author Lawrence (Justine) Durrell (TIME, Aug. 26) arrived in Cyprus in search of a writer's low-cost retreat, the Greek Cypriots (four-fifths of the population) were scrawling their own historic handwriting on the village walls: "Enosis and only enosis" (union, i.e., with Greece).

Bitter Lemons is a poignant account of the deepening tragedy of Anglo-Cypriot relations. But it is also much more--a superlative piece of travel writing by an Anglo-Irishman who has long and lovingly rooted himself in the Mediterranean scene. Author Durrell, 46, taps the juice and joy of his Cypriot friends, Greek and Turkish, and his poetic style transforms the Cypriot landscape into a "sun-bruised" demi-paradise.

The Tree of Idleness. After a hilarious session of Near Eastern haggling, Author Durrell took over "an iron key the size of a man's forearm" to a house in the sleepy, whitewashed mountain village of Bellapaix. Under "the Tree of Idleness" in the village square, the town greybeards sipped Turkish coffee and played a sempiternal game of cards. To Durrell's knowledge no one ever died, and the town gravedigger had to eke out a living digging cesspits. Each day toward twilight, a dozen cattle burst across the main street at racehorse pace, urged on by a bearded Hercules. He looked "like some dispossessed character from the Homeric cycle, who had yoked the oxen of the sun."

To earn his keep. Author Durrell taught English, and his giggling teen-age girl pupils promptly became infatuated with Teacher. Asked to submit an essay on her favorite historical character, one girl in the class wrote: "I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me . . . My glad is very big."

Symbols of Liberty. Imperceptibly, the glad grew smaller. On Greek Independence Day, Teacher Durrell found his blackboard shrouded in crape with the message: WE DEMAND OUR FREEDOM ! Among the first symbols of liberty in modern Cyprus were Coca-Cola bottles, with which Author Durrell one day saw his girls pelt the police. During this "operatic phase" of the disturbances, Durrell took the post of press adviser to the governor. He still hoped that neither British hotheads ("Squeeeze the Cyps") nor Cypriot hotheads ("The British must go") would prevail. In retrospect, he believes that had Britain granted the Cypriots the right to vote on enosis, even in 20 years' time, tragedy might have been averted. Early British inflexibility, he argues, turned Coke bottles into grenades.

Even when the terror reached its height, Author Durrell found it hauntingly unreal. In 1956, when he went to close up the house at Bellapaix before returning to London, the villagers said not a word to him, though some had tears in their eyes. "I cannot say that they were full of hate," says Author Durrell. "It was simply that ... the sight of an Englishman had become an obscenity on that clear, honeygold spring air."

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