Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

by James George Frazer

Ten or twelve minutes beyond the mill the horses are left and the traveller sets forward on foot. As we advance the glen grows wilder and more desolate, but for the first half-mile or so it is fairly open, the track keeps close to the bed of the stream, and there is no particular difficulty. A deep glen now joins the glen of the Styx from the south-east. Here we begin to ascend the slope and cross an artificial channel which brings down water to the mill. All pretence of a path now ceases, and henceforward till we reach the foot of the waterfall there is nothing for it but to scramble over rocks and to creep along slopes often so steep and precipitous that to find a foothold or handhold on them is not easy, and stretching away into such depths below that it is best not to look down them but to keep the eyes fixed on the ground at one’s feet. A stone set rolling down one of these slopes will be heard rumbling for a long time, and the sound is echoed and prolonged by the cliffs with such startling distinctness that at first it sounds as if a rock were coming thundering down upon the wayfarer from above. In the worst places the guides point out to the traveller where to plant his feet and hold him up if he begins to slip. Shrubs, tough grass, and here and there a stunted pine-tree give a welcome hold, but on the steepest slopes they are wanting. The last slope up to the foot of the cliff—a very long and steep declivity of loose gravel which gives way at every step—is most fatiguing. As I was struggling slowly up it with the guides, we heard the furious barking of dogs away up the mountains on the opposite side of the glen. The barking came nearer and nearer, and being echoed by the cliffs had a weird impressive sound that suited well with the scene, as if hell-hounds were baying at the strangers who dared to approach the infernal water. However, the dogs came no nearer than the foot of the slope up which we were clambering, and some shouts and volleys of stones served to keep them at bay.

At the head of this long slope of loose gravel we reach the foot of the waterfall. The water, as I have indicated, descends the smooth face of a huge cliff, said to be over six hundred feet high. It comes largely from the snow-fields on the summit of Mount Chelmos, and hence its volume varies with the season. When I visited the fall early in October, after the long drought of summer, the water merely trickled down the black streak on the face of the cliff, its presence being shown only by the glistening appearance which it communicated to the dark surface of the rock. At the foot of the cliff it formed a small stream, flowing down a very steep rocky bed into the bottom of the glen far below. The water was clear and not excessively cold. Even when, through the melting of the snows, the body of the water is considerable, it is said to be all dissolved into spray by falling through such a height and to reach the ground in the form of fine rain. Only the lower part of the cliff is visible from the foot of the waterfall, probably because the cliff overhangs somewhat. Certainly the cliffs a little to the right of the waterfall overhang considerably. With these enormous beetling crags of grey rock rising on three sides, the scene is one of sublime but wild and desolate grandeur. I have seen nothing to equal it anywhere. On the third side, looking down the glen and away over the nearer hills, we see the blue mountains of Acarnania across the Gulf of Corinth; my guide said these mountains were in Roumelia. In the face of the rock, a few yards to the right of the waterfall, are carved the names or initials of persons who have visited the spot, with the dates of their visits. Among the names is that of King Otho, with the date 1847.

LXII. The Valley of the Aroanius.—After traversing the upland plain of Soudena in a broad stony bed, which in autumn is dry, the river enters a defile at the south-eastern corner of the plain. Through this defile, formed on the east by the slopes of Mount Chelmos and on the west by the hills that close the plain of Soudena on the south, the Aroanius and the road to Clitor run side by side. At first the space between the hills is broad and level, dotted here and there with trees. Soon, however, the valley contracts and begins to descend, affording a beautiful prospect of range behind range of mountains in the south, shading away according to the distance from dark purple to pale blue. The path runs at first on the east bank of the river-bed, which was dry when I saw it early in October. But after being joined by a tributary, which comes down from Mount Chelmos in a deeply-excavated bed between slopes of red earth, the river attained the dimensions of a good-sized Scotch burn. Gradually as the mountains close in on either side the valley becomes a glen, through which the stream flows among plane-trees in a prettily-wooded bed. Here the path crosses to the right or west bank, which it follows henceforward. Farther on the glen contracts into a deep rocky gorge between steep mountains, but only to expand again and allow the river to flow, with a pleasing murmur, in its wooded bed through a stretch of cultivated ground. Thus gradually the valley opens out into the plain of Clitor. Vineyards and maize-fields occupy its lower reaches. It was the time of the vintage when I traversed this beautiful valley. Bunches of ripe grapes lay as offerings before the holy pictures in the little wayside shrines; we met strings of donkeys laden with swelling wine-skins or with panniers of grapes; and in the vineyards as we passed the peasants were at work pressing the purple clusters, with which they insisted on loading, for nothing, the aprons of our muleteers.

LXIII. The Springs of the Ladon.—The Ladon of Arcadia, the greatest of the tributaries of the Alpheus, rises in the middle of a valley on the western side of Mount Saita, the ancient Oryxis. The valley is of some breadth, and its bottom is furrowed on both sides by the dry beds of two watercourses. Between the two watercourses there rises in the midst of the valley a low hill of reddish rock, which ends on the south in a precipitous face some hundred and fifty feet high. At the foot of this red precipitous rock lies a large still pool of opaque dark-blue water, fringed by sharp-pointed grasses and other water plants, while a few stunted willows, holly-oaks, and plane-trees grow among the rocks beside it. This pool is the source of the Ladon, which rushes from it in a brawling impetuous stream of dark-blue water, its margin fringed with willows. The water enters the pool, not from the rocks above, but from a deep chasm in the earth which is only visible when, as sometimes happens, the source dries up. A peasant, who was beside the pool when I visited it in 1895, told my dragoman that three years before, after a violent earthquake, the water ceased to flow for three hours, and the chasm in the bottom of the pool was exposed, and fish were seen lying on the dry ground. After three hours the spring began to flow a little, and three days later there was a loud explosion and the water burst forth in immense volume. Mr. Philippson was informed on the spot of a like event which had taken place in 1880. Similar sudden eruptions of water at the source of the Ladon have been reported earlier in the present century and in antiquity. The stoppage of the water and its abrupt reappearance are doubtless due to the alternate obstruction and clearance of the subterranean passages by which the Lake of Pheneus is drained. For the ancients were right in supposing that the water which rises at the source of the Ladon comes directly underground from the Lake of Pheneus. It has the same deep greenish-blue tinge as the water of the lake, and is flat and tepid to the taste like standing water, not cold and fresh like the water of a mountain spring. The source is distant only about five miles from the lake, from which it is divided by the high range of Mount Saita. The hills on the opposite or western side of the valley are much lower; their slopes of reddish rock are partly covered with low green bushes. Numbers of peasant women may be seen washing clothes beside the pool in the usual Greek fashion; after soaking the clothes in water they beat them with a sort of broad paddle in a wooden trough.

LXIV. The Gorge of the Ladon.—The path from the village of Stretzova leads across bushy and rocky slopes, and then through bare stony fields to the northern bank of the river. Indian corn is here grown in the valley of the Ladon; wooded mountains rise from its southern bank, and higher mountains of imposing contour close the view on the south-east. At the point where we strike the river two springs gush from under rocks and form a pool shaded by fine spreading plane-trees, whence a stream flows into the Ladon after a course of a few yards. From this point to the bridge of Spathari, a ride of about five hours, the scenery is unsurpassed in Greece. The river here forces its way along the bottom of a profound gorge hemmed in by high wooded mountains, which in places descend in immense precipices, feathered with trees and bushes in their crevices, to the brink of the rapid stream. The narrow path runs high up on the right or northern side of the gorge, sometimes overhung by beetling crags, and affording views, now grand now almost appalling, down into the depths of the tremendous gorge, and across it to the high wooded slopes or precipices on the farther side.

The gorge may be said to be divided in two at the village of Divritsa, where the mountains recede a little from the river, and the scenery of the two parts is somewhat different. In the first half, ending a little above the village of Divritsa, the river sweeps round the base of high steep mountains, which on the south side of the gorge are wooded to their summits and broken every now and then by a profound glen, the sides of which are also wooded from top to bottom. The mountains on the north side are in general not wooded, but bare or overgrown with bushes. This would detract from the beauty of the scenery if the path ran on the south side of the gorge, from which the barer slopes of the mountains on the north would be visible. As it is, the path runs along the steep sides of the mountains on the north side, and the eye rests continually on the mighty wall of verdure that rises on the other side of the river. I had the good fortune to traverse this wonderful gorge on a bright October day, when the beautiful woods were just touched here and there with the first tints of autumn. Far below the river was seen and heard rushing along, now as a smooth swirling stream of opaque green water with a murmurous sound, now tumbling, with a mighty roar, down great rocks and boulders in sheets of greenish-white foam.

Below Divritsa the grandeur of the gorge increases to the point of being almost overpowering. Wooded mountains rising steeply from the river have now given place to enormous perpendicular or beetling crags tufted with trees and bushes in their crevices wherever a tree or a bush can find a footing, and overhanging the ravine till there is hardly room to pass under them, and they seem as if they would shut out the sky and meet above the river. Add to this that the path is narrow and runs high above the stream along the brink of precipices where a slip or a stumble of the horse might precipitate his rider into the dreadful depths below. We seem therefore to breathe more freely when, a little above the bridge of Spathari, we at last issue from the gorge and see a great free expanse of sky above us, lower hills, and the river winding between them through woodland scenery of a pretty but commonplace type.

LXV. Aliphera.—From the citadel, and indeed from the whole summit of the ridge, there is a glorious prospect over the valley of the Alpheus for miles and miles. All the mountains of northern Arcadia are spread out like a panorama; and through the broad valley that intervenes between them and the height on which we stand, the Alpheus is seen winding far away and far below. The air blows fresh and sweet on the height, and the peacefulness, the stillness, the remoteness from the world of this little mountain-citadel remind one irresistibly of Keats’s lines in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,