ABSTRACT
Crete is often rightly enough described as the cradle of European civilization; yet it is modest in size, being no more than about 156 miles long from east to west and about 36 miles from north to south even at its widest point, from Cape Stavros to Cape Kephala. Massive chains of mountains with peaks 8,000 feet high in places, coming very near to the coast in the south, straddle the whole length of the island. To the west are the White Mountains, separated from a second mountain system piled around Mount Ida by a lower, rolling countryside, similar to that which again intervenes before the Dikte massif. Beyond is the flat isthmus of Hierapetra, with the Thriphte mountains to the east, succeeded by a table of limestone as far as the eastern coast. There are fertile plains, like that of Khania on the north-west coast, or the great central plain of Messara in the mid-south. Apart from the low-lying fertile coastal areas, there are upland plains, hilly areas which afford good pasture or arable, and areas higher in the mountains which afford only summer pasturage. But extensive areas have always been unproductive, because they are too high, too wild, too desolate. In the plains the climate is favourably dry, with normal heavy rain in October and in February or March. There is one lake, the 160 acres of Lake Kournas, some eleven miles west of Rhethymnon, in the north-west. There are only five rivers that have never been known to be dry; there are springs in the mountains and wells in the coastal plains.
