It is impossible to give an idea of the romantic beauty of the situation of the temple. It stands on a high ridge looking over lofty barren mountains and an extensive country below them. The ground is rocky, thinly patched with vegetation, and spotted with splendid ilexes. The view gives one Ithome, the stronghold and last defence of the Messenians against Sparta, to the south-west; Arcadia, with its many hills, to the east; and to the south the range of Taygetus, with still beyond them the sea.
Haller had engagements, which I had got him, to make four drawings for English travellers. I made some on my own account, and there were measurements to be taken and a few stones moved for the purpose, all of which took time. We spent altogether ten days there, living on sheep and butter, the only good butter I have tasted since leaving England, sold to us by the few Albanian shepherds who lived near. Of an evening we used to sit and smoke by a fire, talking to the shepherds till we were ready for sleep, when we turned into our tent, which, though not exactly comfortable, protected us from weather and from wolves. For there are wolves—one of them one night tore a sheep to pieces close to us. We pitched our tent under the north front. On the next day after our arrival, the 25th, one of the primates of Andritzena came begging us to desist from digging or moving stones, for that it might bring harm on the town. This was very much what happened at Ægina. He did not specify what harm, but asked who we were. We in reply said that we had firmans, that it was not civil, therefore, to ask who we were, and that we were not going to carry away the columns. When he heard of the firmans he said he would do anything he could to help us. All the same, he seemed to have given some orders to our guide against digging; for the shepherds we engaged kept talking of the fear they were in, and at last went away, one of them saying the work was distasteful to him. They were no great loss, for they were so stupid that I was obliged to be always with them and work too, in doing which I tore my hand and got exceedingly fatigued. I was repaid by getting some important measurements.
In looking about I found two very beautiful bas-reliefs under some stones, which I took care to conceal again immediately."
This incident is described in greater detail by Stackelberg in the preface to his book.[27] The interior of the temple—that is to say, the space inside the columns—was a mass of fallen blocks of some depth. While Haller and Cockerell with the labourers were scrambling about among the ruins to get their measurements, a fox that had made its home deep down amongst the stones, disturbed by the unusual noise, got up and ran away. It is not quite a pleasant task to crawl down among such insecure and ponderous masses of stone with the possibility of finding another fox at the bottom; but Cockerell ventured in, and on scraping away the accumulations where the fox had its lair, he saw by the light which came down a crack among the stones, a bas-relief. I have heard this story also from his own lips. Stackelberg further says that the particular relief was that numbered 530 in the Phigaleian Marbles at the British Museum, and naïvely adds, "indeed one may still trace on the marble the injuries done by the fox's claws." He managed to make a rough sketch of the slab and carefully covered it over again. From the position in which it lay it was inferable that the whole frieze would probably be found under the dilapidations.
"Early one morning some armed shepherds came looking about for a lost sheep. They eventually found it dead not far from our tent, and torn to pieces by a wolf—as I mentioned before. The day being Sunday we saw some grand specimens of the Arcadian shepherds. They stalk about with a gun over their shoulders and a long pistol in the waist, looking very savage and wild—and so they are: but, wild as they may be, they still retain the names which poetry has connected with all that is idyllic and peaceful. Alexis is one of the commonest.
As our labourers had left us, there was nothing for it but to work ourselves. We were doing so and had just lit upon some beautiful caissons, when a man on horseback, Greek or Turk (they dress so much alike there is no distinguishing them), rode up accompanied by four Albanians all armed. He told us he was the owner of the land, and, although he was very civil about it, he forbade our digging any more. We asked him to eat with us, but being a fast day in the Greek Church, he declined. Finally, after writing to Andritzena, he left us.
After so many objections being made to our excavations we felt it would be too dangerous to go on at present, and promised ourselves to come again next year in a stronger party and armed with more peremptory and explicit authority to dig, and in the meantime there was nothing to do but to get through our drawings and studies as quickly as we could.
The uneasiness of our janissary Mahomet, since our camping out began, gave us serious doubts of his courage, and a plan was invented for testing it. This was to raise an alarm at night that we were attacked by klephts. Our Arcadian shepherds entered into the joke with surprising alacrity and kept it up well. Just after supper a cry was heard from the mountain above that robbers were near. In an instant we all sprang up, seized pistols and swords, and made a feint as though we would go up the hill. Our janissary, thunderstruck, was following, when we proposed that he should go on alone.
But he would not do that. In the first place he was ill; in the next place, Would it not be better to go to Andritzena? He begged we might go to Andritzena."