As his eyes wandered over the scene—the strange stern crags, the nearer fields broidered with currant-bushes, the girdling coast steeped in the wild poignant beauty of an Ionian October—they turned with a darker meaning to the town, quiet enough now, though at sunset it had blazed with Mussulman festivity, while its Greek citizens huddled in shops and houses behind barred doors. It was the feast of Ramazan—a time for the Turks of daily abstinence and nightly carousal, a long fast for lovers, whose infractions were punished rigorously with bastinado and with the fatal sack. Till the midnight tolled from the mosques the shouts and muskets of the faithful had blasted the solitude. And this land was the genius-mother of the world, in the grip of her Turkish conqueror, who defiled her cities with his Moslem feasts and her waters with the bodies of his drowned victims!
Would it always be so? Gordon thought of a roll of manuscript in his saddle-bag—verses written on the slopes of those mountains and in the fiery shade of these shores. Into the pages he had woven all that old love for this shackled nation which had been one of the pure enthusiasms of his youth and had grown and deepened with his present sojourn. Would the old spirit of Marathon ever rearise?
He went back to the sandy beach, sat down, and drawing paper from his pocket, began to write, using his knee for a desk. The spell of the place and hour was upon him. Lines flowed from his pencil:
“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,—
Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The mountains look on Marathon—