A MONASTERY AT THE FOOT OF HYMETTUS
The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches I saw in Greece, is very small, but it is tremendously solid and has a tall belfry. The exterior, stained by weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the cupola is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look very ancient, and are blackened in many places by the fingers of Time. Made more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a very large head of a Christ ("Christos Pantokrator"), which looks as if it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but expressive. There are several other mosaics, of the apostles, of episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of angels. None of them seemed to me beautiful, though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Christos, which dominates the whole church. Until comparatively recent times there were monks attached to this convent, but now they are gone.
I passed through a doorway and came into a sort of tiny cloister, shaded by a huge and evidently very ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here I found the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I returned to the dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind me with a large key, handed to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed growing in the loggia, and bade me "Addio!" And soon the sound of the goat-bells died away from my ears as I went on my way back to Eleusis.
There is nothing mysterious about this road which leads to the site of the Temple of the Mysteries. It winds down through the pine-woods and rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and well-cultivated Thriasian plain, whence across a brilliant-blue stretch of water, which looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong to a factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road passes between the sea and a little salt lake, which latter seems to be prevented from submerging it only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this lake is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the mountainous and rocky island of Salamis.
When I reached the village, I found it a cheery little place of small white, yellow, and rose-colored houses, among which a few cypress-trees grow. Although one of the most ancient places in Greece, it now looks very modern. And it is difficult to believe, as one glances at the chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend, it was here that she came, disguised as an old hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that she taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to reap the first harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward for the hospitable welcome given to her by his father Celeus.
The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordinary traveler, though interesting to the archæologist. They have none of the pathetic romance which, notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar persons set forth in a certain visitors' book, broods gently over poetic Olympia. Above the village is a vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, bits of wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen medallions, vaults, propylæa, substructures, scraps of architraves carved with inscriptions, and subterranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the processional way, by which the chariots came up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic débâcle to remain wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time and humanity have wrought here creates emotion, when one remembers that here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and Plato; that here they worshiped and adored under cover of the darkness of night; that here, seeking, they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to sustain them when, the august festival over, they took their way back into the ordinary world along the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no longer beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no longer mysterious. A successful man is making a fortune out of soap there. But it is a place one cannot easily forget. And just above the ruins there is a small museum which contains several very interesting things, and one thing that is superb.
This last is the enormous and noble upper part of the statue of a woman wearing ear-rings. I do not know its history, though some one assured me that it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, and the color of it is akin to that of the earth. The roughly undulating hair is parted in the middle of a majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this great work of art, were the expression of the face, and the deep bosom, as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, as this nameless woman shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierceness that may sometimes leap up in an imperial nature. Are there not royal angers which flame out of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman seems to me to be the present glory of Eleusis.
