When we were there the Greek School of Archæology was engaged in digging near the great temple of the god, the foundations of which have now been completely explored to a considerable depth, and it was interesting to see the primitive way in which the excavation was being carried on. Men with curiously shaped picks and shovels were loosening the earth and tossing it into baskets of wicker stuff, which in turn were borne on the heads of women to a distance and there dumped. It was slow work, and apparently nothing very exciting was discovered. Certainly nothing was unearthed while we were watching this laborious toil.
CHAPTER XI. IN ARCADIA
With the benison of the landlord, who promised to send our luncheon over to the station “in a little boy,” we departed from Nauplia on a train toward noontime, headed for the interior of the Peloponnesus by way of Arcadia. The journey that we had mapped out for ourselves was somewhat off the beaten path, and it is not improbable that it always will be so, at least for those travelers who insist on railway lines and hotels as conditions precedent to an inland voyage, and who prefer to avoid the primitive towns and the small comforts of peasants’ houses. Indeed our own feelings verged on the apprehensive at the time, although when it was all over we wondered not a little at the fact. Our plan was to leave the line of the railway, which now entirely encircles the Peloponnesus, at a point about midway in the eastern side, and to strike boldly across the middle of the Peloponnesus to the western coast at Olympia, visiting on the way the towns of Megalopolis and Andhritsæna, and the temple at Bassæ. This meant a long day’s ride in a carriage and two days of horseback riding over mountain trails; and as none of us, including the two ladies, was accustomed to equestrian exercises, the apprehensions that attended our departure from the Nauplia station were perhaps not unnatural.
It had been necessary to secure the services of a dragoman for the trip, as none of us spoke more than Greek enough to get eggs and such common necessaries of life, and we knew absolutely nothing of the country into the heart of which we were about to venture. The dragoman on such a trip takes entire charge of you. Your one duty is to provide the costs. He attends to everything else—wires ahead for carriages, secures horses, guides, and muleteers, provides all the food, hotel accommodation, tips, railway tickets, and even afternoon tea. This comprehensive service is to be secured at the stated sum of ten dollars a day per person, and in our case it included not only the above things, but beds and bedding and our own private and especial cook. To those accustomed to traveling in luxury, ten dollars a day does not seem a high traveling average. To those like ourselves accustomed to seeing the world on a daily expenditure of something like half that sum, it is likely to seem at first a trifle extravagant. However, let it be added with all becoming haste, it is the only way to see the interior of Greece with any comfort at all, and the comfort which it does enable is easily worth the cost that it entails.
From the moment we left Nauplia we were devoid of any care whatever. We placed ourselves unreservedly in the keeping of an accomplished young Athenian bearing the name of Spyros Apostolis, who came to us well recommended by those we had known in the city, and who contracted to furnish us with every reasonable comfort and transportation as hereinbefore set forth, and also to supply all the mythology, archæology, geography, history, and so forth that we should happen to require. For Spyros, as we learned to call him, was versed not only in various languages, including a very excellent brand of English, but boasted not a little technical archæological lore and a command of ancient history that came in very aptly in traversing famous ground. It came to pass in a very few days that we regarded Spyros in the light of an old friend, and appealed to him as the supreme arbiter of every conceivable question, from that of proper wearing apparel to the name of a distant peak.
It was in the comfortable knowledge that for the next few days we had absolutely no bargaining to do and that for the present Spyros, who was somewhere in the train, had first-class tickets for our transportation, that we settled back on the cushions and watched the receding landscape and the diminishing bulk of the Nauplia cliffs. The train religiously stopped at the station of Tiryns—think of a station provided for a deserted acropolis!—and then jogged comfortably along to Argos, where we were to change cars. It was here that we bought our shepherd pipes; and we were practicing assiduously on them with no result save that of convulsing the gathered populace on the platform, when an urchin of the village spied a puff of steam up the line and set all agog by the classic exclamation, “ἔρχεται,” equivalent to the New England lad’s "she’s comin'!"
The comfort of being handed into that train by Spyros and seeing our baggage set in after us without a qualm over the proper fee for the facchini can only be realized by those who have experienced it. And, by the way, the baggage was reduced to the minimum for the journey, consisting of a suit case apiece. Our party was composed of those who habitually “travel light,” even on the regular lines of traffic; but for the occasion we had curtailed even our usual amount of impedimenta by sending two of our grips around to the other end of our route by the northern rail. Nobody would care to essay this cross-country jaunt with needless luggage, where every extra tends to multiply the number of pack mules.
The train, which was fresh from Athens and bound for the southern port of Kalamata, soon turned aside from the Ægean coast and began a laborious ascent along the sides of deep valleys, the line making immense horseshoes as it picked its way along, with frequent rocky cuts but never a tunnel. I do not recall that we passed through a single tunnel in all Greece. The views from the windows, which were frequently superb as the train panted slowly and painfully up the long grades, nevertheless were of the traditional rocky character—all rugged hills devoid of greenery, barren valleys where no water was, often suggesting nothing so much as the rocky heights of Colorado. It tended to make the contrast the sharper when the train, attaining the heights at last, shot through a pass which led us out of the barren rocks and into the heart of the broad plain of Arcady. It was the real Arcadia of the poets and painters, utterly different from the gray country which we had been sojourning in and had come to regard as typical of all Greece. It was the Arcadia of our dreams—a broad, peaceful, fertile plain, green and smiling, peopled with pastoral folk, tillers of the fields, shepherds, and doubtless poets, pipers, and nymphs. There is grandeur and beauty in the rugged hills and narrow valleys of the north, but it would be wrong to assume that Greece is simply that and nothing more. At least a portion of Arcadia is exactly what the poets sing. The hills retreated suddenly to the remote distance and left the railway running along a level plain dotted with farms. Water ran rejoicing through. Trees waved on the banks of the brooks. Far off to the south the rugged bulk of Taÿgetos marked from afar the site of Sparta, the long ridge of the mountain still covered with a field of gleaming snow.