THE VISION AT BASSAE
From the village of Leondari, held in a half-circle of the foothills of Helmos, where was to be the second link in the chain of beacons, it was impossible to see Andritsaena; but the mass of Mount Lycaon stood up fine and clear behind where Andritsaena was, and a series of smaller peaks a little to the west would prove, so Mitsos hoped, to be the hills above the temple. He and his host climbed the beacon-hill and took very sedulous note of these, and next morning the lad set off at daybreak to Andritsaena, which he reached in a day and a half. The country through which he travelled, an unkind and naked tract, was not suspected by the Turks to be tinged with any disaffection to their benignant rule, and his going was made without difficulty or accident. He found welcome at the house of the priest to whom Germanos had given him a letter, and after dinner the two rode off, on a fair, cloudless afternoon, to the hills above the temple, to verify its visibility from Taygetus on the south and the crag of Helmos on the north. An Englishman, whom the priest described as a "tall man covered with straps and machines," had been there a year or two before making wonderful drawings of the place, and had told them it was a temple to Apollo, and that the ancient Greek name for it was Bassae. "Yet I like not the place," said Father Zervas.
An hour or so after their departure, fleecy clouds began to spin themselves in the sky, and as they went higher they found themselves involved in the folds of a white fabric of mist, which lay as thick as a blanket over the hill-side, and through which the sun seemed to hang white and unluminous, like a china plate. This promised but ill for the profit of their ride, but Zervas said it was worth while to push on; those mists would be scattered in a moment if the wind got up; he had seen them roll away as the housewife rolls up the bed-linen. But as they got higher the mist seemed to thicken, and the sun was expunged, and when, by the priest's computation, they must be near the temple, they could scarcely see ten yards before them, and the gaunt, contorted oak-trees marched swiftly into their narrow field of vision, and out again, like ghosts in torment. Shoulder after shoulder of gray hill-side sank beneath them, dripping with the cold, thick mist, and unutterably waste, when, after moving ten minutes or more across a featureless flank of hill, gigantic shadows peered at them from in front, a great range of columns faced them, and they were there.
Mitsos' pony, tired with the four days' journey, was lagging behind, and Mitsos had got off to relieve it on the steeper part of the ascent, when suddenly there came from out of the chill, blank fog a scream like that of a lost soul. For one moment a superstitious fear clutched at the boy, and his pony, startled, went off at a nimbler pace to join the other, and Mitsos had to break into a run to keep up. Then suddenly the sun stared whitely through the mists, and in five seconds more the wind, which had screamed so shrilly, was upon them. In a moment the hill-side was covered with flying wreaths of vapor, which the wind tore smaller and smaller till there was nothing left of them; it ripped off ribbons from the skirts of the larger clouds, which it drove like herded sheep down the valleys, and as Mitsos gained the ridge where the temple stood, a brilliant sun sat in cloudless blue, looking down upon the great gray columns. At their feet in every direction new valleys, a moment before muffled in mist, were being carved out among the hill-sides, and already far to the south the plain of Kalamata, rimmed with a dim, dark sea, sparkled green through thirty miles of crisp air. Down in the valley through which they had come some conflicting current of air tilted the mist up in a tall column of whirling vapor, as if from some great stewing-pot below, and as it streamed up into the higher air it melted and dissolved away, and in five minutes the whole land—north, south, east, and west—was naked to the incomparable blue.
Mitsos gazed in wonder at the gray columns, which seemed more to have grown out of the hill than to have been built by the hands of men; but the priest hurried him on.
"It is as I hoped," said he; "the wind has driven the clouds off; but they may come back. We must go quickly to the top of the hill."
The lad left his pony grazing by the columns and ran up the brow of the hill some two hundred feet above the end of the temple. Northward Helmos lifted a snowy finger into the sky, and clean as a cameo on its south-eastern face stood the cone above Leondari, as if when the hills were set upon the earth by the stir of the forces of its morning it had been placed there for their purpose. Then looking southward they saw Taygetus rise shoulder above shoulder into the blue, offering a dozen vantage points. But Father Zervas was a cautious man.
"It seems clear enough, Mitsos," he said; "but Taygetus is a big place. This will I do for greater safety. You go straight south, you say, and will be at Kalamata two evenings from now, and on the third night you will sleep at some village on the pass crossing Taygetus over to Sparta. On that night directly after sundown I will kindle a beacon here, and keep it kindled for two hours, and in that time you will be able to choose a well-seen place for the blaze on Taygetus. Look, it is even as I said, the mists gather again; but the winds of God have favored us, and our work is done."
Even as he spoke a long tongue of mist shot up from the valley below, and came licking up the hill like the spent water of a wave on a level beach, and Mitsos ran down quickly in order to find his pony in case it had strayed even thirty or forty yards, before the clouds swallowed them up again. But he found it where he had left it, browsing contentedly on the spicy tufts of thyme and sweet mountain grass, and for a couple of minutes more, before the earth and sky were blotted out, he stared amazedly at the tall gray ruins which stood there crowning the silence and strength of the hills, still unknown to all but a few travellers and to the shepherds that fed their flocks in summer on the hill-tops—a memorial of the life and death of the worship of beauty, and the god of sunlight and health and imperishable youth.