At the time of our visit Lake Pheneos was most impressive. Five hundred feet higher than Lake Stymphalus, it was surrounded by grander mountains, the steep slopes of which were thickly wooded on their lower parts. It had as fine a setting as a lake could have. When I was approaching it five years later from the south, I kept saying to my companions, “Now I will show you one of the finest sights in Greece.” But as we advanced and more and more of the plain came into view, I began to wonder what had become of the lake. It soon transpired that it had repeated its old trick and slipped away again, leaving some fertile territory, but a larger area of sand; and, what seemed sadder than all else, converting a beautiful bit of scenery into a dry valley, not altogether unlovely it must be confessed. I was, however, much chagrined to be cheated out of my function as showman. Thus it will ever be with these lakes. When the water rises so high as to have weight enough to force out the obstruction which first produced the lake, the lake seeks the sea; and the process of stopping and opening will be repeated to the end of time.
In that part of Arcadia traversed by us there are no hotels and no carriage-roads. Most of the nights we slept on rugs spread on the floor of very plain houses. One night only did we have beds, in a so-called inn at Kalavryta, our farthest point to the north. These beds—bad success to them!—reminded us of the ancient conundrum, “When is a bed not a bed?” They kept the promise to the ear and broke it to the heart. We were more contented with the frank statement of the demarch (mayor, if one may call him so) of a little village, in whose house we spent our first night out: “You are very welcome to my house, but you will have bugs.” The prophecy was amply fulfilled before morning. In no night of the whole journey were we spared this affliction. But the exaltation of spirit in such a country is great enough to make one speedily forget the annoyance to the flesh. Of course, a good deal of this annoyance might have been avoided by taking along our own beds, which would have involved only the paying for an extra horse. This plan I have subsequently followed.
There was a sameness in our meals. So soon as we arrived at our night’s lodging we ordered four chickens, two for dinner and two to carry along the next day in our saddle-bags for luncheon. This with bread and unlimited grapes, without money and without price, provided us with two meals a day, and in Greece one never thinks of taking anything more in the early morning than a little coffee with bread. The grape season is the favorable time to travel in Greece. Grapes are even more than bread the staff of life; they assuage thirst as well as serve for food.
Our route was a long circuit which brought us back to Argos again through Mantineia, Orchomenos, Kleitor, Kalavryta, Megaspeleon, Styx, Pheneos, Stymphalus, Phlius, Nemea. It may be interesting to add that the whole outlay was less than ten dollars apiece, of which more than half went to the payment for horses. It is difficult to procure anywhere so much pleasure at so little expense. How different is this from the experience of the man who complained that he had spent years in wandering about Europe paying a dollar for every fifty cents’ worth of pleasure!
AN UNUSUAL APPROACH TO EPIDAUROS
Perhaps the best way to study thoroughly a country, as well as to enjoy it, is to do what we do at home, namely, to wander over it at leisure, letting impressions settle in on us without making efforts to gather information. Unfortunately, we seldom have time to do this in a foreign country. I count it, therefore, as a privilege that during two successive summers a residence, once on the island of Kalauria, now called Poros, and once on the mainland opposite to it, in the territory of Troezen, furnished me an opportunity to become acquainted in this delightful way with a most interesting part of Greece. Not only did I pay frequent visits to the temple on the island, where Demosthenes committed suicide—a temple at that time being excavated by Swedish archæologists, but I also made several excursions to Troezen, Methana, and Ægina, and once, breaking through the high mountain which opposite Poros approaches the sea, I worked my way over it across the eastern prong of plane-tree-leaf-shaped Peloponnesus to the old Dryopian town of Hermione, which, in its beautiful situation at the innermost recess of a deep bay, rivals Troezen.
For several weeks during one of these summers Mr. Kabbadias, the Greek Ephor-General of Antiquities, was our next neighbor; and subsequently, when he was excavating at Epidauros, where he worked for five years after his brilliant success on the Athenian acropolis, an invitation from him was the occasion of my making a still longer excursion. My companion was a Greek neighbor. As it was summer, we made an early start, sailing along two hours to the harbor of Troezen, where we took horses which had preceded us. At five o’clock we were in the saddle. For an hour or more we skirted the shore as far as the nature of the land (if we may call bare rocks land) would allow it, passing in the rear of Methana, that jagged sierra which from Athens forms an impressive background for Ægina, and is itself projected against the higher mountains of the mainland. Then coming to a point where these mountains fall sheer into the sea some fifteen hundred feet, we were obliged to turn inland. The path, foreseeing the jumping-off place, took the turn betimes by climbing up with many a zigzag a face of the mountain which was not quite perpendicular. After a long pull we passed on our right a village called Lower Phanari, which looked so much like an eyrie that one might think “Lower” was added in jest. But when with still more toil we reached another village called Upper Phanari, and looked down upon the other, we recognized the seriousness of the distinction. There it lay, with its fifty-one houses, so far below us that it seemed almost level with the sea.
Why anybody should ever choose to live so high up on the rocks as Upper Phanari was not at first apparent. But after a halt here for luncheon (brought with us, of course, for no traveller counts on living on such a region), and after two hours of refreshing sleep on wooden benches, we moved downward and inland, and in a quarter of an hour came upon one of those little plains which supported so many villages in ancient Greece. In this case an ancient village, the name of which we may never know, and which occupied the site of Upper Phanari, where it has left substantial traces of itself in the shape of walls, must have got a scanty support from this little plain. Both ancients and moderns, rather than live in the plain, preferred to live on the rocks above, although it entailed carrying the produce and drinking water a mile, that they might live in sight of the beloved sea. Our downward turn was soon exchanged for another upward one, our course being all the time northward and parallel to the shore. Once a great gap in the range separating us from the sea revealed not only the sea, but the whole of Methana, which, with all its height, was so low that we looked over its peaks down into the sea. About four o’clock, refusing a turn into a broad mountain valley to the left, we turned sharply to the right and broke through the mountains by a narrow gorge, and were again on the outside with the whole Saronic Gulf before us. It was such a display of beauty that one shrinks from enumerating its details. What immediately arrested our attention was that which lay at our feet. Here the mountains receded a little, giving place to a paradise of vines and trees, which made a marked contrast to the brown mountains on the one hand, and the blue sea on the other. The boundary lines of each color were very sharp. A large opening, very little of which we could see, ran back into the mountain to the left of the plain. Through this opening a stream came down, flowing even in the summer, a rare thing in Eastern Greece.