Chapter II
IN AND NEAR ATHENS
What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen, and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of the summer, and many said to me, "You should come in spring, when it is green."
Greece must be very different then, but can it be much more beautiful?
Disembark at the Piræus at dawn, take a carriage, and drive by Phalerum, the bathing-place of the Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer, and though for just six months no rain has fallen, you will enter a bath of dew. The road is dry and dusty, but there is no wind, and the dust lies still. The atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at Ismailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when they are talking quite naturally, if they speak of Europe, always speak of it as a continent in which Greece is not included. They talk of "going to Europe." They say to the English stranger, "You come to us fresh from Europe." And as you drive toward Athens you understand.
This country is part of the East, although the Greeks were the people who saved Europe from being dominated by the races of Asia. All about you—you have not yet reached Phalerum—you see country that looks like the beginning of a desert, that holds a fascination of the desert. The few trees stand up like carved things. The small, Eastern-looking houses, many of them with flat roofs, earth-colored, white, or tinted with mauve and pale colors, scattered casually and apparently without any plan over the absolutely bare and tawny ground, look from a distance as if they, too, were carved, as if they were actually a part of the substance of their environment, not imposed upon it by an outside force. The moving figure of a man, wearing the white fustanella, has the strange beauty of an Arab moving alone in the vast sands. And yet there is something here that is certainly not of Europe, but that is not wholly of the East—something very delicate, very pure, very sensitive, very individual, free from the Eastern drowsiness, from the heavy Eastern perfume which disposes the soul of man to inertia.
THE ACROPOLIS, WITH A VIEW OF THE AREOPAGUS AND MOUNT HYMETTUS, FROM THE WEST
It is the exquisite, vital, one might almost say intellectual, freshness of Greece which, between Europe and Asia, preserves its eternal dewdrops—those dewdrops which still make it the land of the early morning.