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THE NEAR EAST

[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF SULEIMAN AT CONSTANTINOPLE]

    THE
    NEAR EAST

    DALMATIA, GREECE
    AND CONSTANTINOPLE

    BY
    ROBERT HICHENS

    ILLUSTRATED BY
    JULES GUÉRIN
    AND WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

    LONDON
    HODDER AND STOUGHTON
    1913

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES BY THE DE VINNE PRESS

CONTENTS

                                                            PAGE
    CHAPTER I
    PICTURESQUE DALMATIA                                       1

    CHAPTER II
    IN AND NEAR ATHENS                                        49

    THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS                                    95

    CHAPTER IV
    DELPHI AND OLYMPIA                                       137

    CHAPTER V
    IN CONSTANTINOPLE                                        181

    CHAPTER VI
    STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES                            225

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    The Mosque of Suleiman at Constantinople      _Frontispiece_
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

                                                            PAGE
    The Roman Amphitheater at Pola                             4
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Market-Place at Spalato                                9
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    Zara--Piazza delle Erbe                                   14

    The Harbor of Mezzo                                       17

    Spalato--Peristilio                                       24

    Trau--Vestibule of the Cathedral                          27

    Ragusa                                                    32

    The Rector's Palace and the Public Square at Ragusa       37
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Jesuits' Church and the Military Hospital, Ragusa     45

    The Parthenon at Athens                                   52
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Acropolis, with a View of the Areopagus and Mount
        Hymettus, from the West                               55

    The Theater of Dionysus on the southern slope of the
        Acropolis                                             62

    The Temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens                 65
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    In the Portico of the Parthenon                           70

    The Temple of Athene Nike at Athens                       75
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Stadium, Athens                                       82

    The Academy, Mount Lycabettus in the background           87

    The Acropolis at Athens, early morning                    92
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Temple of Poseidon and Athene at Sunium               98
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Temple of Athene, Island of Ægina                    103
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Theater of Dionysus, Athens                          108

    The Plain of Marathon                                    113

    A Monastery at the foot of Hymettus                      120

    Ruins of the Great Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis    125

    The Odeum of Herodes Atticus in Athens                   133
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Site of Ancient Delphi                               140
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    Delphi--Gulf of Corinth in the distance                  143

    The Lion of Chæronea, the Acropolis and Mount Parnassus  150

    Place of the famous Oracle, Delphi                       154

    View of Mount Parnassus                                  159

    Ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi                  165

    The Temple of Hera at Olympia                            170

    Olympia--Entrance to the Athletic Field                  175

    The Grand Bazaar in Constantinople                       184
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Bosphorous--Constantinople in the distance           190

    Galata Bridge, which connects Galata and Pera            193

    The Water-front of Stamboul, with Pera in the distance   200

    Looking down Step Street, Constantinople                 203

    Public Letter-writers in a Constantinople Street         208

    The Courtyard of the "Pigeon's Mosque"                   213
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    Street Scene in Constantinople                           221

    The Mosque of the Yeni-Validé-Jamissi, Constantinople    228
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Royal Gate leading to the old Seraglio               231
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    The Mosque of Santa Sophia                               238
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    In the Cemetery of Eyub, on the Golden Horn              241
        From a painting by Jules Guérin

    Interior of Santa Sophia                                 246

    St. George's Greek Church, now a mosque, Constantinople  251

    Street vista in Galata from end of bridge,
        Constantinople                                       258

    A view over Constantinople showing the Mosque of Santa
        Sophia                                               263

PICTURESQUE DALMATIA

[Illustration: THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATER AT POLA]

THE NEAR EAST

CHAPTER I

PICTURESQUE DALMATIA

Miramar faded across the pale waters of the Adriatic, which lay like a
dream at the foot of the hills where Triest seemed sleeping, all its
activities stilled at the summons of peace. Beneath its tower the
orange-colored sail of a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed
like some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship moved onward to
the forgotten region of rocks and islands, of long, gray mountains, of
little cities and ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose
campanile the medieval voices of bells ring out the angelus to a people
still happily primitive, still unashamed to be picturesque. By the way
of the sea we journeyed to a capital where no carriages roll through the
narrow streets, where there is not a railway-station, where the citizens
are content to go on foot about their business, and where three quarters
of the blessings of civilization are blessedly unknown. We had still to
touch at Pola, in whose great harbor the dull-green war-ships of Austria
lay almost in the shadow of the vast Roman amphitheater, which has
lifted its white walls, touched here and there with gold, above the sea
for some sixteen hundred years, curiously graceful despite its gigantic
bulk, the home now of grasses and thistles, where twenty thousand
spectators used to assemble to take their pleasure.

But when Pola was left behind, the ship soon entered the watery
paradise. Miramar, Triest, were forgotten. Dalmatia is a land of
forgetting, seems happily far away, cut off by the sea from many
banalities, many active annoyances of modern life.

Places that are, or that seem to be, remote often hold a certain
melancholy, a tristesse of "old, unhappy, far-off things." But Dalmatia
has a serene atmosphere, a cheerful purity, a clean and a cozy gaiety
which reach out hands to the traveler, and take him at once into
intimacy and the breast of a home. Before entering it the ship coasts
along a naked region, in which pale, almost flesh-colored hills are
backed by mountains of a ghastly grayness. Flesh-color and steel are
almost cruelly blended. No habitations were visible. The sea, protected
on our right by lines of islands, was waveless. No birds flew above it;
no boats moved on it. We seemed to be creeping down into the ultimate
desolation.

But presently the waters widened out. At the foot of the hills appeared
here and there white groups of houses. A greater warmth, like a breath
of hope, stole into the air. White and yellow sails showed on the breast
of the sea. Two sturdy men, wearing red caps, and standing to ply their
oars, hailed us in the Slav dialect as they passed on their way to the
islands. The huge, gray Velebit Mountains still bore us company on our
voyage to the South, but they were losing their almost wicked look of
dreariness. In the golden light of afternoon romance was descending upon
them. And now a long spur of green land thrust itself far out, as if to
bar our way onward. The islands closed in upon us again. A white town
smiled on us far off at the edge of the happy, green land. It looked
full of promises, a little city not to be passed without regretting. It
was Zara, the capital without a railway-station of the forgotten
country.

Zara, Trau, Spalato, Ragusa, Castelnuovo, Cattaro, Sebenico--these, with
two or three other places, represent Dalmatia to the average traveler.
Ragusa is, perhaps, the most popular and interesting; Spalato the most
populous and energetic; Cattaro the most remarkable scenically. Trau
leaves a haunting memory in the mind of him who sees it. Castelnuovo is
a little paradise marred in some degree by the soldiers who infest it,
and who seem strangely out of place in its tiny ways and its
tree-shaded piazza on the hilltop. But Zara has a peculiar charm, half
gay, half brightly tender. And nowhere else in all Dalmatia are such
exquisite effects of light wedded to water to be seen as on Zara's
Canale.

Zara, like other sirens, is deceptive. The city has a face which gives
little indication of its soul. Along the shore lie tall and cheerful
houses,--almost palaces they are,--solid and big, modern, with windows
opening to the sea, and separated from it only by a broad walk, edged by
a strip of pavement, from which might be taken a dive into the limpid
water. And here, when the ship tied up, a well-dressed throng of joyous
citizens was taking the air. Children were playing and laughing. Two or
three row-boats slipped through the gold and silver which the sun, just
setting behind the island of Ugljan opposite, showered toward the city.
Music came from some place of entertainment. A simple liveliness
suggested prosperous homes, the well-being of a community apart, which
chose to live "out of the world," away from railroads, motor-cars, and
carriage traffic, but which knew how to be modern in its own quiet and
decorous way.

Yet Zara had a great soaring campanile--it had been visible far off at
sea--and tiny streets and old buildings, San Donato, the duomo, San
Simeone; and five fountains,--the _cinque pozzi_,--and a Venetian
tower,--the Torre di Buovo d'Antona,--and fortification gardens, and
lion gateways. Where were all these? A sound of bells came from behind
the palaces. And these bells seemed to be proclaiming the truth of Zara.

[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE AT SPALATO]

Bells ringing in hidden places behind the palaces; bells calling across
strange gardens lifted high on mighty walls; bells whispering among
pines and murmuring across green depths of glass-like water; bells
chiming above the yellowing vines on tiny islands! Who that remembers
Zara remembers not Zara's bells?

Walk a few steps from the sea, passing between the big houses which
front it into the Piazza delle Erbe, and you come at once into a busy
strangeness of Croatia girdled about by Italy. Dalmatia has been
possessed wholly or in part by Romans, Goths, Slavs, Hungarians, Turks,
Venetians. Now smart Austrian soldiers make themselves at home in Zara,
but Italy seems still to rule there, stretching hands out of the past.
Italian may be heard on all sides, but the peasants who throng the
_calle_ and the market-place and the harbor speak a Slavonic dialect,
and in the piazza on any morning, almost in the shadow of the Romanesque
cathedral, and watched over by a griffin perched on a high Corinthian
column hung with chains, which announce its old service as a pillory,
you may hear their chatter, and see the gay colors of costumes which to
the untraveled might perhaps suggest comic opera.

There is a wildness of the near East in this medieval Italian town, a
wildness which blooms and fades between tall houses of stone, facing
each other so closely that friend might almost clasp hand with friend
leaning from window to opposite window. Against the somber grays and
browns of façades, set in the deep shadows of the paved alleys which are
Zara's streets, move brilliant colors, scarlet and silver, blue and
crimson and silver. Multitudes of coins and curious heavy ornaments
glitter on the caps and the dresses of women. Enormous boys and great,
striding men, brave in embroidered jackets, with bright-red caps too
small for the head, silver buttons, red sashes stuck full of weapons and
other impedimenta, gaiters, and pointed shoes, march hither and thither,
calmly intent on some business which has brought them in from the
outlying districts. It varies, of course, with the changing seasons. In
the latter part of October and beginning of November most of the male
peasants were selling very large hares. Live cocks and hens were being
disposed of by many of the women, and it is a common thing in Zara to
see well-dressed people bearing about with them bunches of puffed-out
and drearily blinking poultry, which they have bought casually at some
corner; by the great Venetian tower; or near the round, two-storied
church of San Donato, founded on the spot where once stood a Roman
forum, whose pavement still remains; or perhaps by San Simeone, close to
the palace of the governor, where under the black eagles of Austria the
sentry, in blue and bright yellow, stands drowsily in the sunshine
before his black and yellow box.

[Illustration: ZARA--PIAZZA DELLE ERBE]

Sometimes the peasants bring live stock to church. One morning, on a
week day, I went into San Simeone, to which Queen Elizabeth of Hungary
gave the superb arca of silver gilt which contains, it is said, the
remains of the saint. I found there a number of peasants, men and women,
all in characteristic costumes. Only peasants were there. Some were
quietly sitting, some kneeling, some standing, with their market-baskets
set down on the pavement beside them. In a hidden place behind the high
altar, above which is raised the great, carved sarcophagus, priests were
droning the office. A peasant in red, with a gesture, invited me to sit
beside him. I did so, and he whispered in my ear some words I could not
understand; but I gathered that something very important was about to
take place. Every face was expectant. All eyes were earnestly fixed upon
the sarcophagus. A woman came in, carrying in her arms a turkey, which
looked anxious-minded, crossed herself, and waited with us, gazing. The
droning voices ceased. A sort of carillon sounded brightly. We all
knelt, the woman with the turkey, too, as a priest in scarlet and white
mounted the steps which divide the altar from the area. There was a
moment of deep silence. Then the great, glittering, and sloping lid,
with its recumbent figure of the saint, slowly rose between the bronze
supporting figures. My peasant friend touched me, stood up, and led the
way toward the altar. I followed him with the rest of the congregation,
and we filed slowly up the steps, and one by one gazed down into the dim
coffin. There I saw a skull, and the vague brown remains of what had
once been a human being, lying in the midst of votive offerings. On the
fingers of one hand, which looked as if made of tobacco leaf, were
clusters of rings. The fat, bronze faces on each side seemed smiling.
But the peasants stood in awe. And presently the great lid sank down.
All made the sign of the cross. The market-baskets were picked up, and
the turkey was restored to the sunlight.

[Illustration: THE HARBOR OF MEZZO]

Close to San Simeone are the cinque pozzi--five fountains in a row, with
iron wheels above them. They are between four and five hundred years
old, and lie almost at the foot of the Venetian tower, near a Corinthian
column and the fragments of a Roman arch. Just behind them some steps
lead up to one of the delicious shady places of Zara. Mount them, and
you will have a happy surprise such as the little Dalmatian cities
are always ready to give you.

You have been walking away from the sea, with your back to the harbor,
and here is another, but minute, harbor nestling under a great fortress
wall above which, in a garden, some young soldiers are idly leaning and
laughing under trees with leaves of gold and red-brown. Brightly painted
vessels, closely packed together, lie on the blue-green water. Beyond
them are the trees of Blažeković Park. And just beneath you, on
your right, is the great, yellow stone Porta di Terra Ferma, with its
winged lion of St. Mark. Beyond, over the narrow exit from the harbor,
the landlocked Canale di Zara, which sometimes, especially at evening,
reminded me of the Venice lagoons, lies glittering in the sun. And a
Venetian fort on the peak of Ugljan shows like a strange and determined
shadow against the blue of the sky.

The great white campanile which dominates Zara, and which from the sea
looks light and graceful, is the campanile of the duomo, Sant'
Anastasia, and was partly built by the Venetians, and completed not many
years ago. From the narrow street which skirts the duomo this campanile,
though majestic, looks heavy and almost overwhelming, too huge, too
tremendously solid, for the little town in which it is set. And, its
blanched hue, beautiful from the sea, has a rather unpleasant effect
against the deep, time-worn color of the church, the façade of which,
with its two rose windows, one large, one small, its three beautiful,
mellow-toned doorways, and its curious and somehow touching, though
stolid, statues, is very fine. The interior, not specially interesting,
contains some glorious Gothic stalls dating from the fifteenth century.
They are of black wood, relieved with bosses and tiny statuettes of
bright gold, and above each one is the half-length of a gilded and
painted man, wearing a beard and holding a scroll. The Porta Marina,
through which the chief harbor is gained, is remarkable for its carved,
dark-gray lion, companioned by two white cherubs of stone brilliantly
full of life despite their almost terrifying obesity. One of the most
beautiful things in Zara is the delicate and lovely campanile of Santa
Maria, over six hundred years old. St. Grisogono, the church of the
city's patron saint, was in the hands of workmen and could not be
visited when I was in Dalmatia.

Almost the whole of Zara is surrounded by water. On the great walls of
the ancient fortifications are gardens, and from these gardens you look
down on quiet inlets of the sea. Old buildings, old walls and gardens,
tiny, medieval streets through which no carriage ever passes, fountains,
lion gateways, painted boats lying on clear and apparently motionless
waters shut in from the open sea by long lines of mountainous islands,
pine-trees and olives and golden vineyards, and over all an ancient
music of bells. It is difficult to say good-by to Zara, even though
Spalato sends out a summons from the _riviera_ of red and of gold, even
though Ragusa calls from its leafy groves under the Fort Imperiale.

Bora, the wind of the dead, blew when our ship rounded the lighthouse of
Spalato long after darkness had fallen. And the following day was the
"_giorno dei morti_." The strange cathedral, octagonal without, circular
within, once the mausoleum of the Emperor Diocletian, was crowded with
citizens and peasants devoutly praying. Incense rose between the dark,
hoary walls, the columns of granite and porphyry, to the dome of brick.
Outside in the wind the black hornblende sphinx kept watch on those who
came and went, mourning for their departed. The sky was a heavy gray,
and the temple was dark, and looked wrinkled and seared with age, and
sad despite its pagan frieze showing the wild joys of the chase, despite
the loveliness of its thirteenth-century pulpit of limestone and marble,
raised high on wonderfully graceful columns with elaborately carved
capitals.

Spalato is the biggest, most bustling town of Dalmatia. Much of it is
built into the great palace of Diocletian, which lies over against the
sea, huge, massive, powerful, once probably noble, but now disfigured
by the paltry windows and the green shutters of modern dwellings, by a
triviality of common commercial life, sparrows where eagles should be.
When nature takes a ruin, she usually glorifies it, or touches it with a
tenderness of romance. But when people in the wine trade lay hold upon
it, hang out their washing in it, and establish their cafés and their
bakeries and their butchers' shops in the midst of its rugged walls, its
arches, and its columns, the ruin suffers, and the people in the wine
trade seem to lose in value instead of gaining in importance.

[Illustration: SPALATO--PERISTILIO]

Spalato is a strange confusion of old and new. It lacks the delicacy of
Zara, the harmonious beauty of Ragusa. One era seems to fight with
another within it. Here is a noble twelfth-century campanile, nearly a
hundred and eighty feet high, there a common row of little shops full of
cheap and uninviting articles. Turning a corner, one comes unexpectedly
upon a Corinthian temple. It is the Battistero di San Giovanni, once
perhaps the private temple of Diocletian. For the moment no one is near
it, and despite the icy breath of Bora raging through the city and
crying, "This is the day of the dead!" a calm of dead years infolds you
as you enter the massive doorway and pass into the shadow beneath the
stone wagon-roof. A few steps, and the smell of fish assails you,
hundreds of strings of onions greet your eyes, and the heavy rolling
of enormous barrels of wine over stone pavements breaks through the
noise of the wind. You have come unexpectedly out through a gateway of
the palace on to the quay to the south, and are in the midst of
commercial activities. The contrasts are picturesque, but they are
rough, and, when complicated by Bora, are confusing, almost distressing.
Nevertheless, Spalato is well worth a visit. It contains a small, but
remarkable, museum, specially interesting for its sarcophagi found at
Salona and its collection of inscriptions. The sarcophagus showing the
passage of the Red Sea is very curious. Apart from the now disfigured
palace, the Battistero, the very interesting and peculiar cathedral,
with its vestibule, its rotunda, and its Piazza of the Sphinx, like
nothing else I have seen, the town is full of picturesque nooks and
corners; and its fruit market at the foot of the massive octagonal
Hrvoja Tower, which dates from 1481, is perhaps even more animated, more
full of strangeness and color, than Zara's Piazza delle Erbe. Here may
be seen turbans of crimson on the handsome heads of men, elaborately
embroidered crimson jackets covering immense shoulders and chests, women
dressed in blue and red, white and silver, or with heads and busts
draped in the most brilliant shade of orange color. When Bora blows, the
men look like monks or Mephistopheles; for some--the greater
number--wrap themselves from head to foot in long cloaks and hoods of
brown, while others of a more lively temperament shroud themselves in
red. They are a handsome people, rustic-looking, yet often noble, with
kind yet bold faces, steady eyes, and a magnificent physique. Their gait
is large and loose. There are giants in Dalmatia in our days. And many
of the women are not only pretty, but have delightful expressions, open,
pure, and gay. There seems to be nothing to fear in Dalmatia. I have
driven through the wilds, and over the flanks of the mountains, both in
Dalmatia and Herzegovina, in the dead of the night, and had no
unpleasant experience. The peasants have a high reputation for honesty
and general probity as well as for courage. And beggars are scarce, if
they exist at all, in Dalmatia.

Trau has a unique charm. The riviera of the Sette Castelli stretches
between it and Spalato, along the shore of an inlet of the sea which is
exactly like a blue lake. And what a marvelous blue it is on a cloudless
autumn day! Every one knows what is meant by a rapture of spring. Those
who traverse that riviera at the end of October, or even in the opening
days of November, will know what a rapture of autumn can be.

[Illustration: TRAU--VESTIBULE OF THE CATHEDRAL]

Miles upon miles of bright-golden and rose-red vineyards edge the
startling blue of the sea. And the vines are not stunted and ugly,
but large, leafy, growing with a rank luxuriance. Among them, with
trunks caught as it were in the warm embraces of these troops of
bacchantes, are thousands of silver-green olive-trees. And peasants in
red, peasants in orange-color, move waist-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep,
through the glory, under the glory of the sun. Here and there in a
grass-grown clearing, like a small islet in the ocean of vines, appears
a hut of brushwood and woven grasses, and under the trees before it sit
peasants eating the grapes they have just picked warm from the plants.
Now and then a sportsman may be seen, in peasant costume, smoking a
cigarette, his gun over his shoulder, passing slowly with his red-brown
dog among the red-gold vines. Now and then a distant report rings out
among the olives. Then the warm silence falls again over this rapture of
autumn. And so, you come to Trau.

Trau is a tiny town set on a tiny island approached by bridges,
medieval, sleepy, yet happy, almost drowsily joyous, in appearance, with
that air of half-gentle, half-blithe satisfaction with self which makes
so many Dalmatian places characteristic and almost touching. How odd to
live in Trau! Yet might it not be a delicious experience to live in dear
little Trau with the right person, separated from the world by the
shining water,--for who comes over the bridges, when all is
said?--guarded by the lion and the statue which crown the gateway,
cradled in peace and mellow fruitfulness?

The gateway passed, a narrow alley or two threaded, a corner turned,
and, lo! a piazza, a loggia with fine old columns, a tiled roof and a
clock-tower, a campanile and a cathedral with a great porch, and
underneath the porch a marvel of a doorway! Can tiny Trau on its tiny
island really possess all this?

The lion doorway of the duomo at Trau is certainly one of the finest
things in Dalmatia. The duomo dates from the thirteenth century, but has
been twice enlarged. It is not large now, but small and high, dim, full
of the smell of stale incense, blackened by age, almost strangely
silent, almost strangely secluded. In the choir is a deep well with an
old well-head. There are many tombs in the pavement. The finely carved
pulpit, with its little lion, and the fifteenth-century choir-stalls are
well worth seeing, and the roof of the chapel of St. Giovanni Orsini,
which contains a great marble tomb, has been made wonderful by age, like
an old face made wonderful by wrinkles. But Radovan's doorway is
certainly the marvel of Trau. In color it is a rich, deep, dusty brown,
and it is elaborately and splendidly carved with two big lions, with
Adam on a lion and with Eve on a lioness. The lioness is grasping a
lamb. There is a multiplicity of other detail. The two big lions,
which stick out on each side of the round-arched doorway, as if about to
step forth into the alleys of Trau, have a fine air of life, though they
both look tame. Their mouths are open, but almost smiling.

[Illustration: RAGUSA]

When you leave the duomo, wander through the Venetian streets of this
wonderful little island city, where Gothic windows and beautifully
carved balconies look out to, lean forth to, the calm, blue waters,
edged by the red and the gold of the vines. For this place is unique and
has an unique charm. Peace dwells here, and beauty has found a quiet
abiding-place, where it lingers, and will linger, I hope, for many
centuries yet, girdled by olive-groves, by vineyards, by sun-kissed
waters, guarded by the lions of Venice.

From Spalato I visited the white ruins of Salona, where the Emperor
Diocletian was born, and near which, in his palace at Spalato, he spent
the last eight years of his life, cultivating his garden, seeking after
philosophy, and, let us hope, repenting of his bitter persecution of the
Christians. From the hill, on the site of the Basilica Urbana, I saw one
of those frigid and almost terrible lemon sunsets which come with the
wind of the dead. I stayed till night despite the intense cold, till the
fragments of the city, scattered far over the sloping ground above the
riviera of the Sette Castelli, and creeping up to the solitary
dwelling-house built by Professor Bulic of old Roman stones, took on sad
and unnatural pallors in the darkness, till lonely columns stood up like
watching specters, and fragments of wall were like specters crouching.
For a long while the lemon hue persisted in the western sky, and the
voice of the wind rose with the night, crying among the burial-places.

A few hours' voyage on a splendid ship, and you step ashore at Gravosa,
the port for Ragusa, the most popular place in Dalmatia, and in many
ways the most attractive. For it is embowered in woods and gardens;
contains remarkable old buildings; is girdled about by tremendous
fortress walls, and by forts perched on bastions of rock overlooking the
sea and the isle of Lacroma, where Richard Cœur de Lion touched land
and founded a monastery; is thoroughly and deliciously medieval, yet
full of Slav and Austrian life; possesses a railway-station, many
well-built villas, and a good hotel, and is surrounded by delightful
country. Perhaps in all Dalmatia Ragusa is the best center from which to
take long walks and make expeditions. It is cheery, cozy, and wonderful
at the same time. The terrific walls of the fortresses do not appal or
overwhelm, for all about them cluster the gardens. Ivy climbs over the
archways. In what was once a moat the grass grows thickly, the flowers
bloom, and many trees give shade. This is a medieval paradise, and its
inhabitants have reason to rejoice in it and to say there is no place
like it.

Though small, it is intricate. At every moment one is surprised by some
unexpected view, by some marvel of masonry, militant or ecclesiastical;
by a fountain or a statue, an old doorway, a courtyard, a campanile, an
exquisite façade, with arches and lovely columns, balconies and carved
window-frames; by cloisters, a strange alley ending in flights of steps,
which lead to a mountain from which a fort looks down; by a secret
harbor, or a secret garden, or a little magical grove nestling beneath a
protecting wall which dates from the Middle Ages, when Ragusa was a
proud republic.

Was Burne-Jones ever in Ragusa? It is like one of the little enchanted
towns he loved to paint in the backgrounds of his pictures. Was William
Morris ever there? It is like a city in one of his poems. It is full of
churches, and their towers are full of bells. Monks and priests pass
perpetually through the narrow streets with smartly dressed Austrian
soldiers. And military music, the triumph of bugles and trumpets, the
beat and rattle of drums, joins with the drowsy sound of church organs,
and the old voices of clocks chiming the hours, to make the symphony of
Ragusa. Men and women from the Breno Valley, from Canali the golden,
where oaks grow among the rocks, and the autumn vineyards are a wonder
forever to haunt the memory, from Melada and the Stag Islands, from the
Ombla and Herzegovina, pass all day down "the Stradone," stroll in the
Brsalje, a piazza with mulberry-trees overlooking the sea, talk by the
Amerling fountain, or sit on the wall by Porta Pille under the statue of
San Biagio, the patron saint of the town. And each one is in a
picturesque, perhaps even a brilliant, costume. The men often wear long
chains, and carry handsomely chased weapons and long, elaborate pipes.
Some have sheepskins flung jauntily over their shoulders, and bright-red
caps. The women wear golden ornaments, embroidered jackets, and
marvelous aprons almost like prayer-rugs, handsome pins, pleated
head-dresses, bright-colored handkerchiefs or tiny caps, coins hanging
on chains over their thickly growing hair.

The chief hotels, the villas, and the railway-station, where a row of
victorias is drawn up,--for this is no Zara, but a city which believes
that it "moves with the times,"--lie among roses, oleanders, single
rhododendrons, trees, and masses of luxuriant vegetation outside Porta
Pille. As soon as you have passed beneath San Biagio and descended the
hill, you are in a bright, medieval world, in the heart of one of the
most original and fascinating little cities that exists in Europe.

[Illustration: THE RECTOR'S PALACE AND THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT RAGUSA]

On the left of the Stradone, the chief street and the newest, between
two and three hundred years old, at right angles to it, shadowed by tall
and ancient houses, tiny alleys, ending in steep flights of steps, lead
up toward the mountain. On the flat to its right is a happy maze of
alleys, clean, strange, old, yet never sad. A delicious cheerfulness
reigns in Ragusa. From the dimness of venerable doorways smiling faces
look forth. They lean down from carved stone balconies. Gay voices
chatter at the foot of frowning walls, huge bastions, mighty
watch-towers; before the statue of Roland, near the Dogana which has a
loggia and Gothic windows; by the fine and massive Onofrio fountain,
which for over four hundred and seventy years has given water to the
inhabitants; among the doves by Porta Place, which leads to the harbor.
The wide, but intimate, Stradone toward noon and evening is thronged
with cheerful and neatly dressed citizens, strolling to and fro in the
soft air between the delicious little shops full of fine rugs, weapons,
chains, and filigree ornaments.

Opposite the fountain of Onofrio are the church, monastery, and
cloisters of the Franciscans, with a courtyard and an old pharmacy
containing some wonderful vases. At the east end of the Stradone, away
to the right, are the church of San Biagio, the cathedral, and the
Palazzo dei Rettori. On the other side of the street are the military
hospital and the church of the Jesuits. Not far away is the Dominican
monastery.

Of these the most remarkable is the rector's palace. But the cloisters
of the Franciscans are beautiful and hold an extraordinary charm and
peace. The rector's palace is a noble Renaissance building, with a
courtyard containing a very handsome staircase, and with a really
splendid fifteenth-century colonnade fronting the piazza. The carving of
the capitals of the columns is wonderfully effective. Three are said to
be inferior to the remaining four, which were the work of an architect
of Naples, Onofrio. But all are remarkable. The little winged boys have
a tenderness and liveliness, a softness and activity, which are quite
exquisite. The windows of Venetian Gothic are beautiful; and the whole
effect of this façade, with its carved doorway, the round arches, richly
dark, with notes of white, the two tiers of stone seats raised one above
the other, and the double rows of windows, square and arched, in the
shadow of the colonnade, is absolutely noble.

The cathedral is not very interesting, and the "Assumption" over the
high altar, though attributed to Titian, cannot be by him. Much more
attractive is a copy of the Madonna della Sedia of Raphael. The treasury
contains some remarkable jewels and silver and many relics.

In the Dominican church there is a genuine Titian, and there are some
very curious and interesting pictures by Nicolo Ragusano, a painter of
Ragusa who lived in the fifteenth century. The cloisters contain a white
well-head, guarded by graceful columns, orange-trees, and flowers, above
which peer the small windows of the monks. But if one had to be a monk
in Ragusa, surely it would be wise to cast in your lot with the
Franciscans at the other end of the street, whose Romanesque
fourteenth-century cloisters with octagonal columns are quite beautiful
and in excellent preservation. The capitals of the columns are carved
with animals. Palms flourish there, and roses. Above, a terrace, with a
wonderful balustrade--a series of tiny arches resting on tiny columns, a
sort of stone echo of the arches and columns below,--runs all round the
court. The peace is profound, but not sad. As one lingers there one can
understand, indeed one can scarcely help understanding, the very
peculiar charm which must often attach to the monkish life.

Ragusa contains some nine thousand inhabitants. One of them remarked
that eight hundred of these were ecclesiastics. And he was unsympathetic
enough to add, "E molto troppo!" Perhaps his statement was untrue. But
certainly the ways of Ragusa swarm with religious. Nevertheless,--one
thinks of Rome, with its crowds of priests and its crowds of
free-thinkers,--the inhabitants of Ragusa seem to be very devout. In
almost all of the many churches, at all times of the day, people may be
found praying, meditating, telling their beads, worshiping at shrines of
the saints.

Around Ragusa there are many beautiful walks, on Lacroma, on Lapad by
Gravosa, on Monte Sergio, on Monte Petka. A really superb drive is the
expedition to Castelnuovo in the Bocche di Cattaro, along the Dalmatian
riviera, which is as fine as almost any part of the French riviera, and
which is still wild and natural, not yet turned into a vanity-box. Those
who take this glorious drive will cross the frontier into Herzegovina,
and, best of all, they will pass by the wonderful vineyards of Canali,
which roll in waves of gold to the very feet of a chain of naked and
savage mountains.

The voyage from Ragusa to Cattaro is one of the finest in Europe. The
entrance into the bocche, the journey through them, and the arrival at
Cattaro, hidden away like some precious thing that must not be revealed
to the dull gaze of the ordinary world, almost, but mercifully not
quite, under the giant shadow of the Black Mountain, make for the
voyager what comes to seem at length a deliberately planned, and
triumphantly carried out, scenic crescendo, which closes in sheer magic.

The coast of Dalmatia is guarded by chains of islands and is pierced by
many long and narrow inlets. During the voyage from Triest or Fiume to
the extreme south of the country, the ship, often for many hours, seems
to be traveling over a series of lakes. Rarely does she emerge into open
water. But between Gravosa and the bocche there is open sea. Nature has
not neglected to make her preparations. She gives you the stretch of
open sea as a contrast to what is coming. And just when you are
beginning to feel its monotony, the prow of the vessel veers to the
left, seems to be sensitively searching for some unseen opening in the
rugged coast. She finds that opening between Punta d'Ostro and Punta
d'Arza, leaving the little isle of Rondoni, with its round, yellow fort,
on the right and the open sea behind.

The mountains which guard the bocche are nearly six thousand feet high,
bare, cruelly precipitous, in color a peculiar, almost ashy, gray. When
you are at a long distance from them they seem to descend sheer into the
water; but as you draw nearer over the waveless sea, you find that along
their bases runs a strip of beautiful fertile country, green, thickly
wooded in many places, with gay little villages set among radiant
gardens, with a white highroad, along which peasants are passing. There
is Castelnuovo on its hill among leafy groves, with its old, narrow
fortress on the rock fought for by Turks and Venetians; near by is
Zelenika; and there another large fortress, with the Austrian flag
above it. The sensitive prow of the ship veers again, this time to the
southeast, where the ash-gray precipices surely hold the sea forever in
check. But the ship knows better. The Canale di Kumbur shows itself,
leading to the splendid Bay of Teodo surreptitiously observed from afar
by the mountains of Montenegro. If you held your breath and listened,
might you not hear the boom of guns by the lake of Scutari? All sense of
being at sea fades from you as the ship penetrates ever more deeply into
the secret recesses of the mountains. This is like superb lake scenery,
austere, grand, almost terrible, and yet radiant. Nature is even
coquettish on this perfect morning of autumn, for in these remoter
regions she has cast a swathe of the lightest and whitest possible mist,
like one of those scarfs of Tunis, over the cultivated land which edges
the precipices. As the ship draws near, the mist seems to disperse in a
sparkle of gold, revealing intimate beauties, full of charming detail: a
little Byzantine church with a pale-green cupola, a priest in a sunny
garden leaning over a creeper-covered wall, white horses trotting
briskly along a curly, white road, soldiers marching through a village
with a faint beat of drums, children perhaps going to school through a
riot of green. But the mist is ever there in the distance, part of the
spirit of autumn.

[Illustration: THE JESUITS' CHURCH AND THE MILITARY HOSPITAL, RAGUSA]

Do not miss the tiny twin islands with their two little churches. One of
them, Santa Maria dello Scalpello, is a place of pilgrimage. Old, gray,
minute yet dignified, with its few tall cypresses about it, it so
completely covers the island that you see only a church with cypresses
apparently floating upon the water. Now there is a scatter of
ivory-white birds on the steel-colored surface, a glint of powder-blue
on the ridges made by the ship. Marvelous harmonies of pearl color,
gray, and blue, with here and there faint dashes of primrose-yellow,
make magic in the distance before you. This is really an enchanted
place, home of a peace that seems touched with eternity. And the ship
creeps on, as if fearing perhaps to disturb it, farther and farther into
places more secret still, and of a peace even more profound, till the
pearl color and the gray, with their hints of yellow and blue, begin to
give way to another dominion. The last bay has been gained. The secret
of Cattaro is to be at length revealed. Through the wondrous delicacies
of the now rather suggested than actually seen mist, and above them,
dawns a marvelous pageant of autumn, which bears a curiously exact
resemblance to one of Turner's superb visions.

It is like a dream, but a dream of ardor and power, in which browns,
reds, russets, greens, and many shades of gold and of yellow march
together from the circle of the waters through climbing valleys to the
mountains, which here at last give pause to the sea. And bells are
ringing in this great, this triumphant dream. And now surely faint
outlines are becoming visible, as of turrets and cupolas striving to
break in glory through the mist. The fires of autumn glow more fiercely,
like a furnace fanned. Trails of smoke show here and there. Mist, smoke,
and fire--it is like a grand conflagration. The turrets reveal
themselves as great groups of trees. But the smoke rises from household
fires; the cupolas are cupolas of churches; and the bells are the bells
of Cattaro, calling from this vale of enchantment to the cannon which
are thundering before Scutari beyond the mountains of Montenegro.

IN AND NEAR ATHENS

[Illustration: THE PARTHENON AT ATHENS]

CHAPTER II

IN AND NEAR ATHENS

What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen,
and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does
not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the
Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the
bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats
the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade
cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the
summer, and many said to me, "You should come in spring, when it is
green."

Greece must be very different then, but can it be much more beautiful?

Disembark at the Piræus at dawn, take a carriage, and drive by Phalerum,
the bathing-place of the Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer,
and though for just six months no rain has fallen, you will enter a bath
of dew. The road is dry and dusty, but there is no wind, and the dust
lies still. The atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at
Ismailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when they are talking quite
naturally, if they speak of Europe, always speak of it as a continent in
which Greece is not included. They talk of "going to Europe." They say
to the English stranger, "You come to us fresh from Europe." And as you
drive toward Athens you understand.

This country is part of the East, although the Greeks were the people
who saved Europe from being dominated by the races of Asia. All about
you--you have not yet reached Phalerum--you see country that looks like
the beginning of a desert, that holds a fascination of the desert. The
few trees stand up like carved things. The small, Eastern-looking
houses, many of them with flat roofs, earth-colored, white, or tinted
with mauve and pale colors, scattered casually and apparently without
any plan over the absolutely bare and tawny ground, look from a distance
as if they, too, were carved, as if they were actually a part of the
substance of their environment, not imposed upon it by an outside force.
The moving figure of a man, wearing the white fustanella, has the
strange beauty of an Arab moving alone in the vast sands. And yet there
is something here that is certainly not of Europe, but that is not
wholly of the East--something very delicate, very pure, very sensitive,
very individual, free from the Eastern drowsiness, from the heavy
Eastern perfume which disposes the soul of man to inertia.

[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS, WITH A VIEW OF THE AREOPAGUS AND MOUNT
HYMETTUS, FROM THE WEST]

It is the exquisite, vital, one might almost say intellectual, freshness
of Greece which, between Europe and Asia, preserves its eternal
dewdrops--those dewdrops which still make it the land of the early
morning.

Your carriage turns to the right, and in a moment you are driving along
the shore of a sea without wave or even ripple. In the distance, across
the purple water, is the calm mountain of the island of Ægina. Over
there, along the curve of the sandy bay, are the clustering houses of
old Phalerum. This is new Phalerum, with its wooden bath-houses, its one
great hotel, its kiosks and cafés, its shadeless plage, deserted now
except for one old gentleman who, like almost every Greek all over the
country, is at this moment reading a newspaper in the sun.

Is there any special charm in new Phalerum, bare of trees, a little
cockney of aspect, any exceptional beauty in this bay? When you have
bathed there a few times, when you have walked along the shore in the
quiet evening, breathing the exquisite air, when you have dined in a
café of old Phalerum built out into the sea, and come back by boat
through the silver of a moon to the little tram station whence you
return to Athens, you will probably find that there is. And from what
other bay can you see the temple of the Parthenon as you see it from the
bay of Phalerum?

You have your first vision of it now, as you look away from the sea,
lifted very high on its great rock of the Acropolis as on a throne.
Though far off, nevertheless its majesty is essentially the same, casts
the same tremendous influence upon you here as it does when you stand at
the very feet of its mighty columns. At once you know, not because of
the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of the historical
associations clinging about it, but simply because of the feeling in
your own soul roused by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that
the soul of Greece--eternal majesty, supreme greatness, divine calm, and
that remoteness from which, perhaps, no perfect thing, either God-made
or, because of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt--is
lifted high before you under the cloudless heaven of dawn.

You may even realize at once and forever, as you send on your carriage
and stand for a while quite alone on the sands, gazing, that to you the
soul of Greece must always seem to be Doric. From afar the Doric
conquers.

The ancient Hellenes, divided, at enmity, incessantly warring among
themselves, were united in one sentiment: they called all the rest of
the nations "barbarians." The Parthenon gives them reason.
"Unintelligible folk" to this day must acknowledge it, using the word
"barbarian" strictly in our modern sense.

But the sun is higher, the morning draws on; you must be gone to Athens.
Down the long, straight, new road, between rows of pepper-trees, passing
a little church which marks the spot where a miscreant tried to
assassinate King George, and always through beautiful, bare country like
the desert, you drive. And presently you see a few houses, like the
houses of a quiet village; a few great Corinthian columns rising up in a
lonely place beyond an arch tawny with old gold; a public garden looking
new but pleasant,--not unlike a desert garden at the edge of the Suez
Canal,--with a white statue (it is the statue of Byron) before it; then
a long, thick tangle of trees stretching far, and separated from the
road and a line of large apartment-houses only by an old and slight
wooden paling; a big square with a garden sunken below the level you are
on, and on your right a huge, bare white building rather like a
barracks. You are in Athens, and you have seen already the Olympieion,
the Arch of Hadrian, the Zappeion garden, Constitution Square, and the
garden and the palace of the king.

Coming to Athens for the first time by this route, it is difficult to
believe one is in the famous capital, even though one has seen the
Acropolis. And I never quite lost the feeling there that I was in a
delightful village, containing a cheery, bustling life, some fine modern
buildings, and many wonders of the past. Yet Athens is large and is
continually growing. One of the best and most complete views of it is
obtained from the terrace near the Acropolis Museum, behind the
Parthenon. Other fine views can be had from Lycabettus, the solitary and
fierce-looking hill against whose rocks the town seems almost to surge,
like a wave striving to overwhelm it, and from that other hill,
immediately facing the Acropolis, on which stands the monument of
Philopappos.

It is easy to ascend to the summit of the Acropolis, even in the fierce
heat of a summer day. A stroll up a curving road, the mounting of some
steps, and you are there, five hundred and ten feet only above the level
of the sea. But on account of the solitary situation of the plateau of
rock on which the temples are grouped and of its precipitous sides, it
seems very much higher than it is. Whenever I stood on the summit of the
Acropolis I felt as if I were on the peak of a mountain, as if from
there one must be able to see all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them.

[Illustration: THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS ON THE SOUTHERN SLOPE OF THE
ACROPOLIS]

What one does see is marvelously, almost ineffably beautiful. Herodotus
called this land, with its stony soil and its multitudes of bare
mountains, the "rugged nurse of liberty." Though rugged, and often
naked, nevertheless its loveliness--and that soft word must be used--is
so great and so pure that, as we give to Greek art the crown of wild
olive, so we must give it surely also to the scenery of Greece. It is a
loveliness of outline, of color, and above all of light.

Almost everywhere in Greece you see mountains, range upon range, closing
about you or, more often, melting away into far distances, into outlines
of shadows and dreams. Almost everywhere, or so it seemed to me, you
look upon the sea. And as the outlines of the mountains of Greece are
nearly always divinely calm, so the colors of the seas of Greece are
magically deep and radiant and varied. And over mountains and seas fall
changing wonders of light, giving to outline eternal meanings, to color
the depth of a soul.

When you stand upon the Acropolis you see not only ruins which, taking
everything into consideration, are perhaps the most wonderful in the
world, but also one of the most beautiful views of the world. It is
asserted as a fact by authorities that the ancient Greeks had little or
no feeling for beauty of landscape. One famous writer on things Greek
states that "a fine view as such had little attraction for them," that
is, the Greeks. It is very difficult for those who are familiar with
the sites the Greeks selected for their great temples and theaters, such
as the rock of the Acropolis, the heights at Sunium and at Argos, the
hill at Taormina in Sicily, etc., to feel assured of this, however
lacking in allusion to the beauty of nature, unless in connection with
supposed animating intelligences, Greek literature may be. It is almost
impossible to believe it as you stand on the Acropolis.

All Athens lies beneath you, pale, almost white, with hints of mauve and
yellow, gray and brown, with its dominating palace, its tiny Byzantine
churches, its tiled and flat roofs, its solitary cypress-trees and
gardens. Lycabettus stands out, small, but bold, almost defiant. Beyond,
and on every side, stretches the calm plain of Attica. That winding
river of dust marks the Via Sacra, along which the great processions
used to pass to Eleusis by the water. There are the dark groves of
Academe, a place of rest in a bare land. The marble quarries gleam white
on the long flanks of Mount Pentelicus, and the great range of Parnes
leads on to Ægaleos. Near you are the Hill of the Nymphs, with its
observatory; the rocky plateau from which the apostle Paul spoke of
Christ to the doubting Athenians; the new plantation at the foot of
Philopappos which surrounds the so-called "Prison of Socrates."
Honey-famed Hymettus, gray and patient, stretches toward the
sea--toward the shining Saronic Gulf and the bay of Phalerum. And there,
beyond Phalerum, are the Piræus and Salamis. Mount Elias rules over the
midmost isle of Ægina. Beneath the height of Sunium, where the Temple of
Poseidon still lifts blanched columns above the passing mariners who
have no care for the sea-god's glory, lies the islet of Gaidaronisi, and
the mountains of Megara and of Argolis lie like dreaming shadows in the
sunlight. Very pure, very perfect, is this great view. Nature here seems
purged of all excesses, and even nature in certain places can look
almost theatrical, though never in Greece. The sea shines with gold, is
decked with marvelous purple, glimmers afar with silver, fades into the
color of shadow. The shapes of the mountains are as serene as the shapes
of Greek statues. Though bare, these mountains are not savage, are not
desolate or sad. Nor is there here any suggestion of that "oppressive
beauty" against which the American painter-poet Frederic Crowninshield
cries out in a recent poem--of that beauty which weighs upon, rather
than releases, the heart of man.

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS AT ATHENS]

From this view you turn to behold the Parthenon. A writer who loved
Greece more than all other countries, who was steeped in Greek
knowledge, and who was deeply learned in archæology, has left it on
record that on his first visit to the Acropolis he was aware of a
feeling of disappointment. His heart bled over the ravages wrought by
man in this sacred place--that Turkish powder-magazine in the Parthenon
which a shell from Venetians blew up, the stolen lions which saw Italy,
the marbles carried to an English museum, the statues by Phidias which
clumsy workmen destroyed.

But so incomparably noble, so majestically grand is this sublime ruin,
that the first near view of it must surely fill many hearts with an awe
which can leave no room for any other feeling. It is incomplete, but not
the impression it creates.

The Parthenon, as it exists to-day, shattered, almost entirely roofless,
deprived of its gilding and color, its glorious statues, its elaborate
and wonderful friezes, its lions, its golden oil-jars, its Athene
Parthenos of gold and ivory, the mere naked shell of what it once was,
is stupendous. No memory of the gigantic ruins of Egypt, however
familiarly known, can live in the mind, can make even the puniest fight
for existence, before this Doric front of Pentelic marble, simple, even
plain, but still in its devastation supreme. The size is great, but one
has seen far greater ruins. The fluted columns, lifted up on the marble
stylobate which has been trodden by the feet of Pericles and Phidias,
are huge in girth, and rise to a height of between thirty and forty
feet. The architrave above their plain capitals, with its projecting
molding, is tremendously massive. The walls of the cella, or sanctuary
of the temple, where they still remain, are immense. But now, where
dimness reigned,--for in the days when the temple was complete no light
could enter it except through the doorway,--the sunlight has full
possession. And from what was once a hidden place the passing traveler
can look out over land and sea.

[Illustration: IN THE PORTICO OF THE PARTHENON]

Some learned men have called the Parthenon severe. It is wonderfully
simple, so simple that it is not easy to say exactly why it produces
such an overpowering impression of sublimity and grandeur. But it is not
severe, for in severity there is something repellent, something that
frowns. It seems to me that the impression created by the Parthenon as a
building is akin to that created by the Sphinx as a statue. It
suggests--seems actually to send out like an atmosphere--a tremendous
calm, far beyond the limits of any severity.

The whole of the Parthenon, except the foundations, is of Pentelic
marble. And this marble is so beautiful a substance now after centuries
of exposure on a bare height to the fires of the sun, to the sea-winds
and the rains of winter, that it is impossible to wish it gilded, and
painted with blue and crimson. From below in the plain, and from a long
distance, the temple looks very pale in color, often indeed white. But
when you stand on the Acropolis, you find that the marble holds many
hues, among others pale yellow, cocoa color, honey color, and old gold.
I have seen the columns at noonday, when they were bathed by the rays of
the sun, glow with something of the luster of amber, and look almost
transparent. I have seen them, when evening was falling, look almost
black.

The temple, which is approached through the colossal marble Propylæa, or
state entrance, with Doric colonnades and steps of marble and black and
deep-blue Eleusinian stone, is placed on the very summit of the
Acropolis, at the top of a slope, now covered with fragments of ruin,
scattered blocks of stone and marble, sections of columns, slabs which
once formed parts of altars, and broken bits of painted ceiling, but
which was once a place of shrines and of splendid statues, among them
the great statue of Athena Promachos, in armor, and holding the lance
whose glittering point was visible from the sea. The columns are all
fluted, and all taper gradually as they rise to the architrave. And the
flutes narrow as they draw nearer and nearer to the capitals of the
columns. The architrave was once hung with wreaths and decorated with
shields. The famous frieze of the cella, which represented in marble a
great procession, and which ran round the external wall of the
sanctuary, is now in pieces, some of which are in the British Museum,
and some in Athens. A portion of this frieze may still be seen on the
west front of the temple. The cella had a ceiling of painted wood. On
one of its inner walls I saw traces of red Byzantine figures, one
apparently a figure of the Virgin. These date from the period when the
Parthenon was used as a Christian church, and was dedicated to Mary the
mother of God, before it became a mosque, and, later, a Turkish
powder-magazine. The white marble floor, which is composed of great
blocks perfectly fitted together, and without any joining substance,
contrasts strongly with the warm hues of the inner flutes of the Doric
columns. Here and there in the marble walls may be seen fragments of red
and of yellow brick. From within the Parthenon, looking out between the
columns, you can see magnificent views of country and sea.

Two other temples form part of the Acropolis, with the Propylæa and the
Parthenon, the Temple of Athene Nike and the Erechtheum. They are
absolutely different from the profoundly masculine Parthenon, and almost
resemble two beautiful female attendants upon it, accentuating by their
delicate grace its majesty.

The Temple of Nike is very small. It stands on a jutting bastion just
outside the Propylæa, and has been rebuilt from the original materials,
which were dug up out of masses of accumulated rubbish. It is Ionic,
has a colonnade, is made of Pentelic marble, and was once adorned with a
series of winged victories in bas-relief.

Ionic like the Temple of Nike, but much larger, the Erechtheum stands
beyond the Propylæa, and not far from the Parthenon, at the edge of the
precipice beneath which lies the greater part of Athens. A marvelously
personal element attaches to it and makes it unique, giving it a charm
which sets it apart from all other buildings. To find this you must go
to the southwest, to the beautiful Porch of the Caryatids, which looks
toward the Parthenon.

There are six of these caryatids, or maidens, standing upon a high
parapet of marble and supporting a marble roof. Five of them are white,
and one is a sort of yellowish black in color, as if she had once been
black, but, having been singled out from her fellows, had been kissed
for so many years by the rays of the sun that her original hue had
become changed, brightened by his fires. Four of the maidens stand in a
line. Two stand behind, on each side of the portico. They wear flowing
draperies, their hair flows down over their shoulders, and they support
their burden of marble with a sort of exquisite submissiveness, like
maidens choosing to perform a grateful and an easy task that brings with
it no loss of self-respect.

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE NIKE AT ATHENS]

I once saw a great English actress play the part of a slave girl. By
her imaginative genius she succeeded in being more than a slave: she
became a poem of slavery. Everything ugly in slavery was eliminated from
her performance. Only the beauty of devoted service, the willing service
of love,--and slaves have been devoted to their masters,--was shown in
her face, her gestures, her attitudes. Much of what she imagined and
reproduced is suggested by these matchlessly tender and touching
figures; so soft that it is almost incredible that they are made of
marble, so strong that no burden, surely, would be too great for their
simple, yet almost divine, courage. They are watchers, these maidens,
not alertly, but calmly watchful of something far beyond our seeing.
They are alive, but with a restrained life such as we are not worthy to
know, neither fully human nor completely divine. They have something of
our wistfulness and something also of that attainment toward which we
strive. They are full of that strange and eternal beauty that is in all
the greatest things of Greece, from which the momentary is banished, in
which the perpetual is enshrined. Contemplation of them only seems to
make more deep their simplicity, more patient their strength, and more
touching their endurance. Retirement from them does not lessen, but
almost increases, the enchantment of their very quiet, very delicate
spell. Even when their faces can no longer be distinguished and only
their outlines can be seen, they do not lose one ray of their soft and
tender vitality. They are among the eternal things in art, lifting up
more than marble, setting free from bondage, if only for a moment, many
that are slaves by their submission.

About two years ago this temple was carefully cleaned, and it is very
white, and looks almost like a lovely new building not yet completed.
Here and there the white surface is stained with the glorious golden hue
which beautifies the Parthenon, the Propylæa, the Odeum of Herodes, the
Temple of Theseus, the Arch of Hadrian, and the Olympieion. The interior
of the temple is full of scattered blocks of marble. In the midst of
them, and as it were faithfully protected by them, I found a tiny tree
carefully and solemnly growing, with an air of self-respect. Above the
doorway of the north front is some very beautiful and delicate carving.
This temple was once adorned with a frieze of Eleusinian stone and with
white marble sculpture. Its Ionic columns are finely carved, and look
almost strangely slender, if you come to them immediately after you have
been among the columns of the Parthenon. Majesty and charm are supremely
expressed in these two temples, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, the
smaller of which is on a lower level than the greater. One thinks again
of the happy slave who loves her lord.

The group of magnificent, gold-colored Greco-Roman columns which is
called the Olympieion stands in splendid isolation on a bare terrace at
the edge of the charming Zappeion garden. In this garden, full of firs
and pepper-trees, acacias, palms, convolvulus, and pink oleanders, I saw
many Greek soldiers, wearied out with preparations for the Balkan war
against Turkey, which was declared while I was in Athens, sleeping on
the wooden seats, or even stretched out at full length on the light,
yellow soil. For there is no grass there. Beyond the Olympieion there is
a stone trough in which I never saw one drop of water. This trough is
the river-bed of the famous Ilissus!

The columns are very splendid, immense in height, singularly beautiful
in color,--they are made of Pentelic marble,--and with Corinthian
capitals, nobly carved. Those which are grouped closely together are
raised on a platform of stone. But there are two isolated columns which
look even grander and more colossal than those which are united by a
heavy architrave. The temple of which they are the remnant was erected
in the reign of Hadrian to the glory of Zeus, and was one of the most
gigantic buildings in the world.

From the Zappeion garden you can see in the distance the snow-white
marble Stadium where the modern Olympic and Pan-Hellenic games take
place. It is gigantic. When full, it can hold over fifty thousand
people. The seats, the staircases, the pavements are all of
dazzling-white marble, and as there is of course no roof, the effect of
this vastness of white, under a bright-blue sky, and bathed in golden
fires, is almost blinding. All round the Stadium cypress-trees have been
planted, and their dark-green heads rise above the outer walls, like
long lines of spear-heads guarding a sacred inclosure. Two comfortable
arm-chairs for the king and queen face two stelæ of marble and the
far-off entrance. The earthen track where the sports take place is
divided from the spectators by a marble barrier about five feet high,
and till you descend into it, it looks small, though it is really very
large. The entrance is a propylæum. It is a great pity that immediately
outside this splendid building the hideous panorama should be allowed to
remain, cheap, vulgar, dusty, and despicable. I could not help saying
this to a Greek acquaintance. He thoroughly agreed with me, but told me
that the Athenians were very fond of their panorama.

[Illustration: THE STADIUM, ATHENS]

In a straight line with the beautiful Arch of Hadrian, and not far off,
is the small and terribly defaced, but very graceful, Monument of
Lysicrates, a circular chamber of marble, with small Corinthian columns,
an architrave, and a frieze. It is surrounded by a railing, and
stands rather forlornly in the midst of modern houses.

The Temple of Theseus, or more properly of Hercules, on the other side
of the town, is a beautifully preserved building, lovely in color, very
simple, very complete. It is small, and is strictly Doric and very
massive. Many people have called it tremendously impressive, and have
even compared it with the Parthenon. It seems to me that to do this is
to exaggerate, to compare the very much less with the very much greater.
There really is something severe in great massiveness combined with
small proportions, and I find this temple, noble though it is, severe.

Athens contains several very handsome modern buildings, and one that I
think really beautiful, especially on a day of fierce sunshine or by
moonlight. This is the Academy, which stands in the broad and airy
University Street, at whose mouth are the two cafés which Athenians call
"the Dardanelles." It is in a line with the university and the national
library, is made of pure white marble from Pentelicus, and is very
delicately and discreetly adorned with a little bright gold, the
brilliance of which seems to add to the virginal luster of the marble.
The central section is flanked by two tall and slender detached columns
crowned with statues. Ionic colonnades relieve the classical simplicity
of the façade, with some marble and terra-cotta groups of statuary. The
general effect is very calm, pure, and dignified, and very satisfying.
The Athenians are proud, and with reason, of this beautiful building,
which they owe to the generosity of one of their countrymen.

Modern Athens, despite its dust, is a delightful city to dwell in.
Nobody in it looks rich,--that dreadful look!--and scarcely anybody
looks poor. The king and the princes stroll casually about the streets,
or may be met on the Acropolis or walking by the sea at Phalerum. I was
allowed to wander all over the palace gardens, which are full of palms
and great trees, and which resemble a laid-out wood. A Rumanian friend
of mine told me that one day when he was in the garden, on turning a
corner, he came upon the king and queen, with the crown-princess, who
had just come down from the terrace in front of the royal apartments.
All the center of the palace was burned out more than a year ago, and is
now being slowly rebuilt. Greece is the home of genuine democrats, but
democracy is delightful in Greece. Nobody thinks about rank, and
everybody behaves like a gentleman. The note of Athens is a perfectly
decorous liveliness, which is never marred by vulgarity. The stranger is
welcomed and treated with the greatest possible courtesy, and he is
never bothered by objectionable people such as haunt many of the cities
of Italy, and of other lands where travelers are numerous. Athens indeed
is one of the most simpatica of cities, wonderfully cheerful, simply
gay, of a perfect behavior, yet unceremonious.

I have said that the Greeks are democrats. Nevertheless, like certain
other democrats of whom one has heard, there are Greeks who love to
think that they are not quite as all other Greeks. America, I am
informed, has her "four hundred." Greece has her "fifty-two." In New
York the "four hundred" consider themselves the advance-guard of
fashion, if not of civilization. In Athens the "fifty-two" rejoice in a
similar conviction. They do daring things sometimes. There is a
card-game beloved of the Greeks called "Mouse." The fifty-two have
introduced bridge and despise "Mouse." In Athens they frequent one
another's houses. In the summer they "remove" to Kephisia in the
pine-woods, where there are many pleasant, and some very fantastic,
villas, and where picnics, tennis, and card-parties, theatrical
performances and dances, fleet the hours, which are always golden, away.
They are sometimes criticized by the "outsiders," for even gods are
subject to criticism. People say now and then, "What will the fifty-two
do next?" or, "Really there is no end to the folly of the fifty-two!"
But have not similar remarks been heard even at Newport or upon Fifth
Avenue pavements? Nevertheless, despite the fifty-two, you have only to
look at the thin and decrepit palings of King George's garden to
realize that at last you have found the true democracy, and a democracy
sensible enough to understand the advantage of possessing a royal
family. Every society needs a leader, and royalty leads far more
effectively than any one else, however self-assured, however glittering.
The Greeks are not without wisdom.

Their manners are charming and excellent. I had an unusual opportunity
of putting them to the test. I was in Athens just before and just after
the declaration of war against Turkey, when spies were everywhere, when
a Turkish spy was discovered in Athens disguised as a Greek priest, and
a woman was caught near Lycabettus in the act of poisoning the
water-supply of the city. One morning early, when I was on the sea near
Salamis in a small boat with a Greek fisherman, I was arrested on
suspicion of being a spy, and was brought before the admiral in supreme
command of the fleet. My passport was in Athens at my hotel, the admiral
evidently disbelieved my explanations, and I was handed over to the
police at the Piræus, accompanied by a report from the admiral in which,
as was afterward made known to me, he stated that I was "a very
suspicious character." And now to the test of Hellenic good manners.

[Illustration: THE ACADEMY, MOUNT LYCABETTUS IN THE BACKGROUND]

Eventually a guard of police carrying rifles was sent to convey me from
the Piræus to Athens, and in the middle of the afternoon I was obliged
to walk as a prisoner through the streets of the Piræus, to take the
tram to Phalerum, to get out there and wait for half an hour at a
railway-station, and to travel in the train to Athens. In Athens I was
made to walk three times, always guarded closely, through the principal
streets and squares of the city, and twice past my hotel in the
Constitution Square during the most busy hour of the day. Eventually, at
night, I was released. Now, the Hellenes are considered by many people
to be very inquisitive. During my public exposure as a prisoner I met
with no really disagreeable curiosity from the crowd. Many people
discreetly inquired of my guards who I was and what I had done, and
naturally a great many more stared at me. But nobody followed me and my
attendants as we marched on our way from one police station to another,
to the War Office, etc. There was no pushing or jostling, such as there
would certainly have been in an English town if a prisoner with guards
was exposed to the public gaze. Curiosity was, as a rule, almost
carefully dissembled, and inquiries were made with a charming
discretion. I confess I felt grateful to the Greeks that day, though not
to the admiral who had me arrested, or to the police who put me to so
much inconvenience. And I was grateful for one thing more, that I was
released just in time to see King George's arrival in Athens on the eve
of the war.

The Hellenes are not an enthusiastic people, as a rule. They are
critical, intellectual, sometimes rather cynical. But that night they
gave way to emotion. Great crowds were lined up in Constitution Square,
and were massed on the brow of the hill before the palace, when at
length the police let me go. Darkness had long since fallen, but the
square was illuminated brightly. All the balconies were packed with
people. The terrace before the Grande Bretagne was black with
sight-seers. And everywhere in the forefront were rows of eager,
vivacious Greek children, many of them the soldiers of the future.

We had to wait for a very long time. But at last the king came in an
open carriage, driving with "the Diádochos," as the crown-prince is
always called in Greece. Both were in uniform. There was no ceremonial
escort, so the people formed an unceremonial one. They ran with the
carriage, shouting, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, cheering till
they were hoarse, and crying, "War! War!" The great square rang with the
clapping of thousands of hands. "Never before," said a Greek to me, "has
the king had such a reception." When the carriages containing the rest
of the royal family and the ministers had gone by, we ran in our
thousands to the palace. Above the great entrance porch there is a
balcony, and after a short time slim King George stepped out, rather
cautiously, I thought, upon it, followed by all the princes and
princesses. It was very dark, but a footman accompanied his Majesty,
holding an electric light, and we had our speech.

[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS, EARLY MORNING]

The king read the first part of it in a loud, unemotional voice, bending
sometimes to the light. But at the close he spoke a few words extempore,
commending the Hellenic cause, if war should come, to the mercy of God.
And then, again with precaution, he retired into the palace amid a storm
of cheers.

I was afterward told that, with the whole of the royal family, his
Majesty had been standing upon some loose planks which spanned an abyss.
The royal palace, owing to the disastrous fire, is not yet what it
seems. Fortunately, the Greek army has proved more solid, and the God of
battles, so solemnly invoked by their king, has been favorable to the
arms of the Greeks. No one, I think, who was in Greece during that time
of acute tension, who saw the feverish preparations, the devotion of the
toiling soldiers, the ardor of the volunteers; no one who witnessed, as
I did, the return to Athens of the "American Greeks," who gave up
everything and crossed the ocean to fight for their little, splendid
country, could wish it otherwise.

The descendants of those who made the Parthenon have shown something of
that Doric soul which is surely the soul of Greece.

THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF POSEIDON AND ATHENE AT SUNIUM]

THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS

Upon the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone
precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon
shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of
Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who
spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught
rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of
Dionysus, in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their
dramas, is of stone and silver-white marble. Many of the seats are
arm-chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncommon thing to see
weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acropolis, resting in
them with almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction.

It is evident to any one who examines this great theater carefully that
the Greeks considered it important for the body to be at ease while the
mind was at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted to their
purpose, but ample room is given for the feet of the spectators, the
distance between each tier and the tier above it being wide enough to do
away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs
were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the
theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This
is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats
are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape.
Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them
headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though
almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. His rather round
forehead resembles the very characteristic foreheads of the
Montenegrins.

Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his time it had been
embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, the orator, and disciple of Plato. It
is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the
upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of the Attic plain to
the isolated grove of cypresses where the famous Schliemann is buried,
and beyond to gray Hymettus.

Standing near by is another theater, Roman-Greek, not Greek, the Odeum
of Herodes Atticus, said to have been built by him in memory of his
wife. This is not certain, and there are some authorities who think
that, like the beautiful arch near the Olympieion, this peculiar, very
picturesque structure was raised by the Emperor Hadrian, who was much
fonder of Athens than of Rome.

The contrast between the exterior, the immensely massive, three-storied
façade with Roman arches, and the interior, or, rather, what was once
the interior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very strange. They
do not seem to belong to each other, to have any artistic connection the
one with the other.

The outer walls are barbarically huge and heavy, and superb in color.
They gleam with a fierce red-gold, and are conspicuous from afar. The
almost monstrous, but impressive, solidity of Rome, heavy and bold,
indeed almost crudely imperious, is shown forth by them--a solidity
absolutely different from the Greek massiveness, which you can study in
the Doric temples, and far less beautiful. When you pass beyond this
towering façade, which might well be a section of the Colosseum
transferred from gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find
yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, almost meanly, small
and pale and graceful. With a sort of fragile timidity it seems to be
cowering behind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched marble seats
were crowded with spectators it contained five thousand persons. As you
approach the outer walls, you expect to find a building that might
accommodate perhaps twenty-five thousand. There is something bizarre in
the two colors, fierce and pale, in the two sizes, huge and
comparatively small, that are united in the odeum. Though very
remarkable, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmonious ruins in
Greece.

The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard exercise, and except in
the height of summer, when many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and
others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for a "cure," they
seem well content to remain within their city. They are governed, it
seems, by fashion, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I
was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot.
Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an hour by train from Constitution Square,
was deserted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or three
children, in the baths half a dozen swimmers. The pleasure-boats lay
idle by the pier. I asked the reason of this--why at evening dusty
Athens was crammed with strollers, and the pavements were black with
people taking coffee and ices, while delightful Phalerum, with its
cooler air and its limpid waters, held no one but an English traveler?

"The season is over," was the only reply I received, delivered with a
grave air of finality. I tried to argue the matter, and suggested that
anxiety about the war had something to do with it. But I was informed
that the "season" closed on a certain day, and that after that day the
Athenians gave up going to Phalerum.

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA]

The season for many things seemed "over" when I was in Athens. Round
about the city, and within easy reach of it, there is fascinating
country--country that seems to call you with a smiling decision to enjoy
all Arcadian delights; country, too, that has great associations
connected with it. From Athens you can go to picnic at Marathon or at
Salamis, or you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which slope
down to the Convent of Daphni, and come back to it after paying a visit
to Eleusis. Or, if you are not afraid of a "long day," you can motor out
and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under the columns at Sunium.
If you wish to go where a king goes, you can spend the day in the thick
woods at Tatoï. If you are full of social ambition, and aim at
"climbing," a train in not many minutes will set you down at Kephisia,
the summer home of "the fifty-two" on the slope of a spur of Mount
Pentelicus.

Thither I went one bright day. But, as at Phalerum, I found a deserted
paradise. The charming gardens and arbors were empty. The villas,
Russian, Egyptian, Swiss, English, French, and even now and then Greek
in style, were shuttered and closed. All in vain the waterfalls sang,
all in vain the silver poplars and the yellow-green pines gave their
shade. No one was there. I went at length to a restaurant to get
something to eat. Its door was unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted
room, with many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. I called,
knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a thin elderly lady in a gray
shawl, who seemed alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice
begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, she said there was
nothing to eat except what they were going to have themselves. The
season was over. Eventually she brought me _mastika_ and part of her own
dinner to the terrace, which overlooked a luxuriant and deserted garden.
And there I spent two happy, golden hours. I had sought the heart of
fashion, and found the exquisite peace that comes to places when fashion
has left them. Henceforth I shall always associate beautiful Kephisia
with silence, flowers, and one thin old woman in a gray shawl.

[Illustration: THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS, ATHENS]

Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main a very
cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of much of it is not
depressing, the bareness of much of it is not sad. I began to understand
this on the day when I went to the plain of Marathon, which,
fortunately, lies away from railroads. One must go there by carriage or
motor or on horseback. The road is bad both for beasts and machinery,
but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through
which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend
two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens
you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while
in an exquisite pastoral--a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes
of Pan have fluted to you,--I heard little music in Greece,--but which
has been full of that lightness, brightness, simplicity, and delicacy
peculiar to Greece. The soil of the land is light, and I believe, though
Hellenes have told me that in this belief I am wrong, that the heart of
the people is light. Certainly the heart of one traveler was as he made
his way to Marathon along a white road thickly powdered with dust.

Has not each land its representative tree? America has its maple.
England its oak, France its poplar, Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress,
Egypt its palm, and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the
pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns
were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek
landscape the masses of color are usually formed by the silver-green
olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still in remembrance,
that the lovely little pine is the most precious ornament of the Grecian
scene.

Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and blue, of pines and sea.
On the way I passed through great olive-groves, in one of which long
since some countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to
be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees,
and acres and acres of vines, with here and there an almost black
cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow than green, and the
bright blue sea made the picture that lives in my memory.

Not very long after we were clear of the town we passed not far from the
village of "Louis," who won the first Marathon race that was run under
King George's scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water is found that
Athens loves to drink. And then away we went through the groves and the
little villages, where dusty soldiers were buying up mules for the
coming war; and Greek priests were reading newspapers; and olive-skinned
children, with bright, yet not ungentle, eyes, were coming from school;
and outside of ramshackle cafés, a huddle of wood, a vine, a couple of
tables, and a few bottles, old gentlemen, some of them in native dress,
with the white fustanella, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the
knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels,
were busily talking politics. Carts, not covered with absurd but lively
pictures, as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peasants,
sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on trotting donkeys. Now
and then a white dog dashed out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and
stretched their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Women, with
rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads, were working in the
vineyards or washing clothes here and there beside thin runlets of
water. Two German beggars, with matted hair uncovered to the sun, red
faces, and fingers with nails like the claws of birds, tramped by, going
to Athens. And farther on we met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy and full
of a lively malice, whose tents were visible on a hillside at a little
distance, in the midst of a grove of pines. All the country smiled at us
in the sunshine. One jovial man in a fustanella leaned down from a cart
as we passed, and shouted in Greek: "Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy
yourselves!" And the gentle hills, the olive- and pine-groves, the
stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry.

What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a
sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the
boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications,
its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the
tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage
tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely
anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and
the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One
looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish
Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small,
exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it had been
deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a
lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely.
The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of
Greece are the color of happiness. You smile involuntarily when you see
them. And when, descending among them, you are greeted by the shining of
the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches along the edge of the plain of
Marathon, you know radiance purged of fierceness.

The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it, appears
another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads
to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a habitation was
perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of
poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood
and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there was a wide
outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling
belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is the tomb of
those who died in the great battle.

[Illustration: THE PLAIN OF MARATHON]

I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the rustic
watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now
cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful ground. In
all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was one low,
red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and
unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed at me from
below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly toward the
pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteriously
to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures could I see
between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of
Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the
slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance "at a running
pace." One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me;
instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood
and wheat and maize; silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard,
sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking
thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild
oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great
fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course is marked by
sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow
hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the hills form the
Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles from Athens, this
place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I suppose, will not be
forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far away,
hidden from the world between woods and waters, solitary, but not sad.
Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of
Eubœa.

A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards, coming
back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with
a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out "Addio!" Then
he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his easy work. How
strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Marathon!

If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping
in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the
dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet
I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece,
for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the
surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when
the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends
making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men
dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar's delight, shaded,
and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the
country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds,
Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, "sons of the soil."

In the very height of summer, I am told, the Athenians do condescend to
go to the pine-woods. They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of
doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the
trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainless September, if I
may judge by my own experience, they prefer Constitution Square and "the
Dardanelles" to any more pastoral pleasures.

I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra one morning, past the
oldest olive-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have
been planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of Daphni, now
fallen into a sort of poetic decay.

Once more I was among pine-trees. They thronged the almost park-like
slopes under Ægaleos. They crowded toward the little Byzantine church,
which stands on the left of the road on the site of a vanished temple of
Apollo, with remains of its once strongly fortified walls about it.
Lonely, but smiling, as though with a radiant satisfaction at its own
shining peace, is the country in whose bosom the church lies. A few
sheep, small, with shaggy coats of brown and white, were grazing near
it; a dog lay stretched out in the sun; and some lean, long-tailed
horses were standing with bowed heads, as if drowsing. An ancient and
very deep well was close by. In the marble well-head the friction of
many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them nearly an inch in depth.
The court of the convent is roughly paved and is inclosed within rough
walls. In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper-tree, and
one gigantic cypress. From a branch near the entrance a big bell hung by
a chain. But the only sound of bells came to me from without the walls,
where some hidden goats were moving to a pasture. Fragments of broken
columns and two or three sarcophagi lay on the hot ground at my feet. To
my right, close to the church, a flight of very old marble steps led to
a rustic loggia with wooden supports, full of red geraniums and the
flowers of a plant like a very small convolvulus. From the loggia, which
fronted her abiding-place, a cheerful, kindly-faced woman came down and
let me into the church and left me with two companions, a black kitten
playing with a bee under the gilded cupola.

[Illustration: A MONASTERY AT THE FOOT OF HYMETTUS]

The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches I saw in Greece, is
very small, but it is tremendously solid and has a tall belfry. The
exterior, stained by weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the
cupola is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look very
ancient, and are blackened in many places by the fingers of Time. Made
more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics
are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a
very large head of a Christ ("Christos Pantokrator"), which looks as if
it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but
expressive. There are several other mosaics, of the apostles, of
episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of angels. None of them seemed
to me beautiful, though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Christos,
which dominates the whole church. Until comparatively recent times there
were monks attached to this convent, but now they are gone.

I passed through a doorway and came into a sort of tiny cloister, shaded
by a huge and evidently very ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here
I found the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I returned to the
dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight
fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from
the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind me with
a large key, handed to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed growing
in the loggia, and bade me "Addio!" And soon the sound of the goat-bells
died away from my ears as I went on my way back to Eleusis.

There is nothing mysterious about this road which leads to the site of
the Temple of the Mysteries. It winds down through the pine-woods and
rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and well-cultivated
Thriasian plain, whence across a brilliant-blue stretch of water, which
looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses
and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of
houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong
to a factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road passes between the
sea and a little salt lake, which latter seems to be prevented from
submerging it only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this lake
is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the mountainous and rocky
island of Salamis.

When I reached the village, I found it a cheery little place of small
white, yellow, and rose-colored houses, among which a few cypress-trees
grow. Although one of the most ancient places in Greece, it now looks
very modern. And it is difficult to believe, as one glances at the
chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy
steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter
was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the
Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend, it was here that she came,
disguised as an old hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that
she taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to reap the first
harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward for the hospitable welcome given to
her by his father Celeus.

The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordinary traveler, though
interesting to the archæologist. They have none of the pathetic romance
which, notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar persons set forth in
a certain visitors' book, broods gently over poetic Olympia. Above the
village is a vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, bits of
wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen medallions, vaults,
propylæa, substructures, scraps of architraves carved with inscriptions,
and subterranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the processional way,
by which the chariots came up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory
and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The
remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire
of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our
understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even
now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic _débâcle_ to remain
wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time
and humanity have wrought here creates emotion, when one remembers that
here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and Plato; that
here they worshiped and adored under cover of the darkness of night;
that here, seeking, they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to
sustain them when, the august festival over, they took their way back
into the ordinary world along the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no
longer beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no longer
mysterious. A successful man is making a fortune out of soap there. But
it is a place one cannot easily forget. And just above the ruins there
is a small museum which contains several very interesting things, and
one thing that is superb.

This last is the enormous and noble upper part of the statue of a woman
wearing ear-rings. I do not know its history, though some one assured me
that it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, and the color of
it is akin to that of the earth. The roughly undulating hair is parted
in the middle of a majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure
and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this
great work of art, were the expression of the face, and the deep bosom,
as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues
have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, as
this nameless woman shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of
underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierceness that may
sometimes leap up in an imperial nature. Are there not royal angers
which flame out of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman seems to
me to be the present glory of Eleusis.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS]

The mountainous island of Salamis, long and calm, with gray and orange
rocks, lies like a sentinel keeping guard over the harbor of the Piræus.
It is so near to the mainland that the sea between the two shores looks
like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called "the
throne of Xerxes" standing out characteristically behind the low-lying
bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did
really watch the famous battle from a throne placed on the hill with
which his name is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers like
to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are quite ready to stiffen
their credulity.

The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are wild. The water is
wonderfully clear, and is shot with all sorts of exquisite colors. The
strip of mainland, against which the liquid maze of greens and blues and
purples seems to lie motionless, like a painted marvel, is a tangle of
wild myrtle and dwarf shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with
rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays
and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you
coast along in a fisherman's boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of
Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from
the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has
little sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall not easily forget
the expression that came into his face when, in reply to his question,
"What did you come here for?" I said, "To visit the scene of the
celebrated battle." A weary incredulity made him suddenly look very old;
and I believe it was then that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of
his report about me that I was "a very suspicious person."

It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away from Salamis; but if
you care for smiling wild places where the sea is, where its breath
gives a vivid sense of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her
myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and turquoise.

Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape
Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the
glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and
Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height.
And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its
romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire.
And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see
it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece.

In going to Sunium I passed through the famous mining district of
Laurium, where now many convicts work out their sentences. In ancient
times slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens who had
hereditary leases granted by the state. They worked the mines for
silver, but now lead is the principal product. It happened that just as
we were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, where the miners
and their families dwell,--for only some of them are convicts,--a tire
of the motor burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to see
something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had heard that they were a
fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I
found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and
polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to
have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from
the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came
from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned
eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I
could not understand what they said, and all they could understand was
that I came from London, a circumstance which seemed greatly to impress
them, for they called it out from one to another up the street. We
carried on intercourse mainly by facial expression and elaborate
gesture, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. And when I got
into the car to go we were all the best of friends. The machine made the
usual irritable noises, but from the good people of Laurium came only
cries of good-will, among them that pleasant admonition which one hears
often in Greece: "Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself!"

When Laurium was left behind we were soon in wild and deserted country.
Now and then we passed an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his
shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a shepherd watching
his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All
the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be
very few. As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far
behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the
wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble
columns of the Temple of Sunium.

Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their
original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with
gold and red-gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant
whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea,
exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of
heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on
a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there
were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of
architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in
height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the
contrary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which is lacking both
in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. They do not move you to awe or
overwhelm you; they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white
simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of sea and sky on
the white and gray platform, there is something that allures.

Upon one of the columns I found the name of Byron carved in bold
letters. But I looked in vain for the name of Turner. Byron loved the
Cape of Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to make it less
wonderful since his time. It is true that fewer columns are standing to
bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as
Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men
begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward
into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the
columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and
all the winds of the hills--winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from
crested Eubœa, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its
beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia.
And it seems as if all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in
golden fire, as if there could be none left over for the rest of the
world. The coasts of Greece stretch away beneath you into far distances,
curving in bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny and volcanic,
there gray and quietly sober in color, but never cold or dreary. White
sails, but only two or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of
Poseidon's kingdom--white sails of mariners who are bound for the isles
of Greece. Poets have sung of those isles. Who has not thought of them
with emotion? Now, between the white marble columns, you can see their
mountain ranges, you can see their rocky shores.

Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. I got up and looked. And
there on a slab of white marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in
the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were
echoed not only by the mariner's sails, but by tiny Albanian villages
inland, seen over miles of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where
the pines would not be denied.

[Illustration: THE ODEUM OF HERODES ATTICUS IN ATHENS]

There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in the atmosphere, of
Greece. No other land that I know possesses an exactly similar spell.
Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing
wildness with a calm that is full of romance. There the wilderness is
indeed a haven to long after, and there the solitudes call you as if
with the voices of friends.

As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon's white marble ruin, a
one-armed man came up to me, and in English told me that he was the
guardian of the temple.

"But where do you live?" I asked him, looking over the vast solitude.

Smiling, he led the way down to a low whitewashed bungalow at a little
distance. There, in a rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the
sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby among some small pots
of flowers. Remote from the world, with only the marble columns for
neighbors, with no voice but the sea's to speak to them, dwell these
four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he
has come home and entered the sea-god's service. Pittsburgh and the
Hellenic wilderness--what a contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it
philosophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his stump, and says,
"I guess I couldn't go on there like this, so I had to quit, and they
put me here."

They put him "here," on Cape Sunium, and on Cape Sunium he has built
himself a house and made for himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened
with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the
mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he intends to remain because,
unfortunately, having lost an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh.

I gave him some money, accepted the baby's wavering but insistent hand,
and left him to his good or ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness.

DELPHI AND OLYMPIA

[Illustration: THE SITE OF ANCIENT DELPHI]

CHAPTER IV

DELPHI AND OLYMPIA

There are two ways of going from Athens to Delphi: by sea from the
Piræus to Itea and thence by carriage; or by motor. Despite the rough
surfaces of the roads and the terrors of dust, I chose the latter; and I
was well rewarded. For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and
fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monument which many
travelers miss--the Lion of Chæronea, which gazes across a vast plain in
a solitary place between Thebes and Delphi.

Leaving Athens early one morning, I followed the Via Sacra, left Eleusis
behind me, traversed the Thriasian plain, the heights of Mount Geraneia,
and the rich cultivated plain of Bœotia, passed through the village
of Kriekouki, and arrived at Thebes. There I halted for an hour. After
leaving Thebes, the journey became continually more and more interesting
as I drew near to Parnassus: over the plain of Livadia, through the
village and khan of Gravia, where one hundred and eighty Greeks fought
heroically against three thousand Turks in 1821, over the magnificent
Pass of Amblema, across the delightful olive-covered plain of Krissa,
and up the mountain to Delphi.

Throughout this wonderful journey, during which I saw country
alternately intimate and wild, genial and majestic, and at one point
almost savage, I had only one deception: that was on the Pass of
Amblema, which rises to more than eight thousand feet above the level of
the sea. Delphi, I felt, ought to be there. Delphi, I believed, must be
there, hidden somewhere among the rocks and the fir-woods, where wolves
lurk, and where the eagle circles and swoops above peaks which are cold
and austere. Only when we began to descend in serpentine curves, when I
saw far below me great masses of olive-trees, and the distant shining of
the sea, did I realize that I was mistaken, and that Delphi lay beyond,
in a region less tragically wild, more rustic, even more tender.

During this journey of, I believe, about three hundred kilometers or
more, I realized fully the loneliness that happily shadows a great part
of Greece. We seemed to be almost perpetually in the midst of a
delightful desolation, gloriously alone with nature, now far up on bare
flanks of the hills, now traveling through deserted pine-woods or
olive-groves, now upon plains which extended to shadowy ranges of
mountains, and which here and there reminded me of the plains of
Palestine. Strange it seemed to come upon an occasional village of
Greeks or Albanians, strayed, surely, and lost and forgotten in the
wilderness; stranger still to see now and then some tiny Byzantine
church, perhaps with a few cypresses about it, perched on a mountain
height that looked as if it never had been trodden by foot of man. The
breezes that met us were alive with a tingling purity of hilltop and
sea, or sweet and wholesome with the resinous odor of pine. And the
light that lay over the face of the land made nearly all things magical.

[Illustration: DELPHI--GULF OF CORINTH IN THE DISTANCE]

Again we met Turkish Gipsies. In Greece they have made the wild life
their own. No longer one hears of brigands, though only a few years ago
these highways were dangerous, and men traversed them armed and at their
own peril. Now the Gipsies are in happy possession, and travel from
place to place in small caravans, with their mules, donkeys, and dogs,
and their tiny peaked tents, telling the _bonne aventure_ to the
superstitious, and, so the Greeks declare, stealing whatever they can
lay their dark hands on. They look wild and smiling, crafty rather than
ferocious; and they greet you with loud cries in an unknown tongue, and
with gestures expressive of the perpetual desire to receive which seems
inherent in all true vagabonds. They pitch their tents usually on the
outskirts of the villages, staying for days or weeks, as the luck serves
them. And, so far as I could judge, people receive them with good
nature, perhaps grateful for the excitement they bring into lives that
know little variation as season follows season and year glides into
year. Just outside Thebes I found eleven of their tents set upon some
rough ground, the beasts tethered, the dogs on guard, the babies
toddling and sprawling, while their mothers were cooking some mysterious
compound, and the men were away perhaps on some nefarious errand among
the excited Thebans. For that day Greek officers were visiting the town,
and in front of the café, among the trees, and above the waterside,
where we stopped to lunch, there was a parade of horses, mules, and
donkeys from all the neighborhood. War was taking its toll of the
live-stock, and the whole population was abroad to see the fun.

As soon as I had descended from the car and begun to unpack my
provisions, an elderly man came up, asked whether we were from Athens,
and then put the question that is forever on the lips of the Greek,
"What is the news?" Every Greek has a passion for the latest news.
Often, when I was traveling through the country, people I passed on the
way called out to me, "What is the news?" or, "Can you give us a
newspaper?"

Thebes, where, according to legend, Hercules was born; where the stones
gathered themselves together when Amphion struck his lyre; where blind
Tiresias prophesied; and, seated upon a block of stone, the Sphinx asked
her riddle of the passers-by and slew them; where Œdipus ruled and
suffered his hideous fate; where the Epigoni took their vengeance; and
Epaminondas showed how one man can lift a city and set it on a throne
above all the cities of its fatherland--Thebes, where letters were first
brought into use among the Greeks, and where weak-voiced Demosthenes by
his eloquence persuaded the people to march to their glorious death
against Philip of Macedon, is now just a busy village on the flank of a
hill. Frequently devastated by earthquakes, which are the scourge of
this region, it looks newly built, fairly clean and neat. It dominates
the plain in which Plutarch was born, and the murmur of its waters is
pleasant to the ear in a dry and thirsty land. But though Thebes is not
specially interesting, below it, in that plain once celebrated for its
flowers,--iris and lily, narcissus and rose,--beyond all sound of the
voices of chattering peasants or determined soldiers, solitary in its
noble rage and grief, is that most moving of monuments, the Lion of
Chæronea.

I came upon it unexpectedly. If I had not happened to be looking toward
the left my chauffeur would have driven me on without pause to
Parnassus, the mighty flanks of which were already visible in the
distance. When he pulled up we were already almost out of sight of the
lion. And I was glad as I walked back alone, still more glad when I
stood before it in solitude, surrounded by the great silence of the
plain.

There where the lion sits, raised now on a high pedestal and with
cypresses planted about him, was fought the great battle of Chæronea
between the Greeks and Philip of Macedon; and there the Greeks lost
much, but not their honor. Had it been otherwise, would the lion be
there now after so many centuries, testifying to the grief of men long
since dead, to their anger, even to their despair, but not to their
cowardice or shame? I have heard people say that the face of the lion
does express shame. It seems to me nobly passionate, loftily angry and
sad, but not ashamed. The Thebans raised it to commemorate those of
their comrades in arms who died on the battle-field. What shame can
attach to such men? For long years the lion lay broken in pieces and
buried in the earth. Only in 1902 were the fragments fitted together,
though long before that they had lain above ground, where many noted
travelers had seen them. The restoration has been splendidly successful,
and has given to Greece one of the most memorable manifestations in
marble of a state of soul that exists not merely in Greece, but in
the world. Lion-hearted men are superbly commemorated by this lion.

[Illustration: THE LION OF CHÆRONEA, THE ACROPOLIS AND MOUNT PARNASSUS]

The height of the statue from the top of the pedestal is about twenty
feet. The material of which it is made, marble of Bœotia, was once, I
believe, blue-gray. It is now gray and yellow. The lion is sitting, but
in an attitude that suggests fierce vitality. Both the huge front paws
seem to grasp the pedestal almost as if the claws were extended in an
impulse of irresistible anger. The head is raised. The expression on the
face is wonderful. There is in it a savage intensity of feeling that is
rarely to be found in anything Greek. But the savagery is ennobled in
some mysterious way by the sublime art of the sculptor, is lifted up and
made ideal, eternal. It is as if the splendid rage in the souls of all
men who ever have died fighting on a losing side had been gathered up by
the soul of the sculptor, and conveyed by him whole into his work. The
mysterious human spirit, breathed upon from eternal regions, glows in
this divine lion of Greece.

Various writers on the scenery of Greece have described it as "alpine"
in character. One has even used the word in connection with some of the
mountain-ranges that may be seen from the plain of Attica. Such
distracting visions of Switzerland did not beset my spirit as I traveled
through a more beautiful and far more romantic land, absolutely
different from the contented republic which has been chosen by Europe as
its playground. But there were moments, as we slowly ascended the Pass
of Amblema, when I thought of the North. For the delicate and romantic
serenity of the Greek landscape did here give way to something that was
almost savage, almost spectacular. The climbing forests of dark and
hardy firs made me think of snow, which lies among them deep in winter.
The naked peaks, the severe uplands, the precipices, the dim ravines,
bred gloom in the soul. There was sadness combined with wildness in the
scene, which a premature darkness was seizing, and the cold wind seemed
to go shivering among the rocks.

It was then that I thought of Delphi, and believed that we must be
nearing the home of the oracle. As we climbed and climbed, and the cold
increased, and the world seemed closing brutally about us, I felt no
longer in doubt. We must be close to Delphi, old region of mysteries and
terror, where the god of the dead was thought to be hidden, where Apollo
fought with Python, where men came with fear in their hearts to search
out the future.

[Illustration: PLACE OF THE FAMOUS ORACLE, DELPHI]

But presently we began to descend, and I learned that we were still a
long way from Delphi. The sun set, and evening was falling when we were
once more down on the sea-level, traversing one of the most delightful
and fertile regions of Greece, the lovely plain of Krissa, which
extends to the sea. The great olive-gardens stretch away for miles on
every hand, interspersed here and there with plane-trees,
mulberry-trees, medlars, cypresses, and the wild oleander. Many battles
have been fought in that sylvan paradise, which now looks the home of
peace, a veritable Garden of Eden lying between mountains and sea.
Pilgrims traveling to Delphi were forced to pay toll there, and
eventually the extortion became so intolerable that it led to war. That
evening, as we drove along a road cut straight through the heart of the
olive-woods, the whole region seemed sunk in a dream. We met no one; we
heard no traffic, no voices, no barking of dogs. The thousands of
splendid trees, planted symmetrically, were moved by no breeze. Warmth
and an odorous calm pervaded the shadowy alleys between them. Here and
there a soft beam of light shone among the trees from the window of a
guardian's dwelling. And once we stopped to take Turkish coffee under a
vine-trimmed arbor, solitary and lost in the sweet silence, in the
silver dusk of the forest. A lodge in the wilderness! As I looked at the
dark, bright-eyed man who served us, I, perhaps foolishly, envied him
his life, his strange little home, remote, protected by his only
companions, the trees.

In this plain camels are used for transport, and, I believe, for plowing
and other work. They are to be found nowhere else in Greece. I saw none
that night; but one morning, after leaving Delphi, I met a train of them
pacing softly and disdainfully along the dusty road, laden with bales
and with mysterious bundles wrapped round with sacking.

In the dark we began to climb up once more. At last we were actually on
Parnassus, were approaching the "navel of the earth." But I was not
aware of any wildness, such as that of Amblema, about us. The little I
could see of the landscape did not look savage. I heard goat-bells
tinkling now and then not far off. Presently some lights beamed out
above us, as if in welcome. We passed through a friendly village street,
came out on the mountain-side, and drew up before a long house, which
stood facing what was evidently a wide view, now almost entirely hidden,
though a little horned moon hung in the sky, attended by the evening
star. The village was Kastri; the long house was the "Hôtel d'Apollon
Pythien."

Delphi is memorable, but not because of wildness or terror. In
retrospect it rises in my mind as a lonely place of light, gleaming on
volcanic rocks and on higher rocks that are gray; of a few mighty
plane-trees, pouring a libation of green toward olive-trees on the
slopes beneath them; of a perpetual sweet sound of water. And beside the
water travelers from the plain of Krissa, and travelers from Arachova,
that wonderfully placed Parnassian village, renowned for its beautiful
women, are pausing. They get down from their horses and mules to lave
their hands and to drink. They cross themselves before the little
Christian shrine under the trees by the roadside. They sit down in the
shadows to rest.

It is very sweet to rest for long hours by the Castalian fountain of
Delphi, remote from all habitations upon the great southern slope of
Parnassus, under the tree of Agamemnon; to listen to the voice of the
lustral wave. There, in the dead years, the pilgrims piously sprinkled
themselves before consulting the oracle; there, now, the brown women of
the mountains chatter gaily as they wash their clothes. The mountain is
bare behind the shrine, where perhaps is a figure of Mary with Christ in
her arms, or some saint with outspread wings. Its great precipices of
rock are tawny. They bloom with strong reds and yellows, they shine with
scars of gold. Among the rocks the stream is only a thread of silver,
though under the bridge it flows down through the olive-gardens, a broad
band of singing happiness.

Delphi has a mountain charm of remoteness, of lofty silence; it has also
a seduction of pastoral warmth and gentleness and peace. Far up on the
slope of gigantic Parnassus, it faces a narrow valley, or ravine, and a
bare, calm mountain, scarred by zigzag paths, which look almost like
lines sharply cut in the volcanic soil with an instrument. In the
distance, away to the right, the defile opens out into the plain of
Krissa, at the edge of which lies a section of sea, like a huge uncut
turquoise lying in a cup of the land. Beyond are ranges of beautiful,
delicate mountains.

The ruins of Delphi lie above the highroad to the left of it, between
Kastri and the Castalian fountain, unshaded, in a naked confusion, but
free from modern houses and in a fine loneliness. Once, and not very