Author of “The Spell of Egypt,” “The Holy Land,” “The Garden of Allah,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY JULES GUÉRIN (SEE FRONTISPIECE) AND PHOTOGRAPHS
THERE are two ways of going from Athens to Delphi: by sea from the Piræus to Itea and thence by carriage or by motor. Despite the rough surfaces of the roads and the terrors of dust, I chose the latter; and I was well rewarded. For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monument which many travelers miss—the Lion of Chæronea, which gazes across a vast plain in a solitary place between Thebes and Delphi.
Leaving Athens early one morning, I followed the Via Sacra, left Eleusis behind me, traversed the Thriasian plain, the heights of Mount Geraneia, and the rich cultivated plain of Bœotia, passed through the village of Kriekouki, and arrived at Thebes. There I halted for an hour. After leaving Thebes, the journey became continually more and more interesting as I drew near to Parnassus: over the plain of Livadia, through the village and khan of Gravia, where one hundred and eighty Greeks fought heroically against three thousand Turks in 1821, over the magnificent Pass of Amblema, across the delightful olive-covered plain of Krissa, and up the mountain to Delphi.
Throughout this wonderful journey, during which I saw country alternately intimate and wild, genial and majestic, and at one point almost savage, I had only one deception: that was on the Pass of Amblema, which rises to more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. Delphi, I felt, ought to be there. Delphi, I believed, must be there, hidden somewhere among the rocks and the fir-woods, where wolves lurk, and where the eagle circles and swoops above peaks which are cold and austere. Only when we began to descend in serpentine curves, when I saw far below me great masses of olive-trees, and, beyond, the shining of the sea, did I realize that I was mistaken, and that Delphi lay far beyond, in a region less tragically wild, more rustic, even more tender.
During this journey of, I believe, about three hundred kilometers or more, I realized fully the loneliness that happily shadows a great part of Greece. We seemed to be almost perpetually in the midst of a delightful desolation, gloriously alone with nature, now far up on bare flanks of the hills, now traveling through deserted pine-woods or olive-groves, now upon plains which extended to shadowy ranges of mountains, and which here and there reminded me of the plains of Palestine. Strange it seemed to come upon an occasional village of Greeks or Albanians, strayed, surely, and lost and forgotten in the wilderness; stranger still to see now and then some tiny Byzantine church, perhaps with a few cypresses about it, perched on a mountain height that looked as if it never had been trodden by foot of man. The breezes that met us were alive with a tingling purity of hilltop and sea, or sweet and wholesome with the resinous odor of pine. And the light that lay over the face of the land made nearly all things magical.
From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood
VIEW OF MOUNT PARNASSUS
Again we met Turkish Gipsies. In Greece they have made the wild life their own. No longer one hears of brigands, though only a few years ago these highways were dangerous, and men traversed them armed and at their own peril. Now the Gipsies are in happy possession, and travel from place to place in small caravans, with their mules, donkeys, and dogs, and their tiny peaked tents, telling the bonne aventure to the superstitious, and, so the Greeks declare, stealing whatever they can lay their dark hands on. They look wild and smiling, crafty rather than ferocious; and they greet you with loud cries in an unknown tongue, and with gestures expressive of the perpetual desire to receive which seems inherent in all true vagabonds. They pitch their tents usually on the outskirts of the villages, staying for days or weeks, as the luck serves them. And, so far as I could judge, people receive them with good nature, perhaps grateful for the excitement they bring into lives that know little variation as season follows season and year glides into year. Just outside Thebes I found eleven of their tents set upon some rough ground, the beasts tethered, the dogs on guard, the babies toddling and sprawling, while their mothers were cooking some mysterious compound, and the men were away perhaps on some nefarious errand among the excited Thebans. For that day Greek officers were visiting the town, and in front of the café, among the trees, and above the waterside, where we stopped to lunch, there was a parade of horses, mules, and donkeys from all the neighborhood. War was taking its toll of the live-stock, and the whole population was abroad to see the fun.