[Illustration]
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.
Arcadia boasts two of these large, oval plains, the one dominated by
Tripolis and the other by Megalopolis. Into the first-mentioned the
train trundled early in the afternoon and came to a halt amid a shouting
crowd of carriage drivers clamoring for passengers to alight and make
the drive down to Sparta. The road is said to be an excellent one, and
that we had not planned to lengthen our journey to that point, and
thence westward by the Langada Pass to the country which we later saw,
has always been one of the regrets which mark our Hellenic memories.
Sparta has made little appeal to the modern visitor through any
surviving remains of her ancient greatness, and has fallen into exactly
the state that Thucydides predicted for her. For he sagely remarked, in
comparing the city with Athens, that future ages were certain to
underestimate Sparta’s size and power because of the paucity of enduring
monuments, whereas the buildings at Athens would be likely to inspire
the beholder with the idea that she was greater than she really was.
That is exactly true to-day, although the enterprising British school
has lately undertaken the task of exploring the site of the ancient
Lacedæmonian city and has already uncovered remains that are interesting
archæologically, whatever may be true of their comparison with Athenian
monuments for beauty. In any event, Sparta, with her stern discipline,
rude ideals, and martial rather than intellectual virtues, can never
hope to appeal to modern civilization as Athens has done, although her
ultimate overwhelming of the Athenian state entitles her to historical
interest. Sparta lies hard by the mountain Taÿgetos, and to this day
they show you a ravine on the mountain-side where it is claimed the
deformed and weakly Spartan children were cast, to remove them from
among a race which prized bodily vigor above every other consideration.
It is a pity that Sparta, which played so vast a part in early history,
should have left so little to recall her material existence. If she was
not elegant or cultured, she was strong; and her ultimate triumph went
to prove that the land where wealth accumulates and men decay has a less
sure grip on life than the ruder, sterner nations.
So it was that we passed Sparta by on the other side and journeyed on
from the smiling plain of Tripolis to the equally smiling one of
Megalopolis, entering thoroughly into the spirit of Arcadia and vainly
seeking the while to bring from those shepherd pipes melody fit to voice
the joy of the occasion. It was apparent now that we had crossed the
main watershed of Hellas, for the train was on a downward grade and the
brakes shrieked and squealed shrilly as we ground into a tiny junction
where stood the little branch-line train for Megalopolis. And in the
cool of the afternoon we found ourselves in that misnamed town, in the
very heart of Arcadia, the late afternoon light falling obliquely from
the westering sun as it sank behind an imposing row of serrated
mountains, far away.
To one even remotely acquainted with Greek roots, the name Megalopolis
must signify a large city. As a matter of fact, it once was so. It was
erected deliberately with the intention of making a large city, founded
by three neighboring states, as a make-weight against the increasing
power of the Lacedæmonians; but, like most places built on mere fiat, it
dwindled away, until to-day it is a village that might more
appropriately be called Mikropolis—if, indeed, it is entitled to be
called a “polis” of any sort. The railway station, as usual, lay far
outside the village, and in the station yard the one carriage of the
town was awaiting us. Into it we were thrust; Spyros mounted beside the
driver, a swarthy native; and with a rattle that recalled the famous
Deadwood coach we whirled out of the inclosure and off to the town. The
village itself proved to be but a sorry hole, to put it in the mildest
form. It was made up of a fringe of buildings around a vacant common,
level as a floor and sparsely carpeted with grass and weeds. As we
passed house after house without turning in, hope grew, along with
thankfulness, that we had at least escaped spending the night in any
hovel hitherto seen. Nevertheless we did eventually stop before a dingy
abode, and were directed to alight and enter there. Under a dark stone
archway and over a muddy floor of stone pavement we picked our gingerly
way, emerging in a sort of inner court, which Spyros pointed out was a
"direct survival of the hypæthral megaron of the ancient Mycenæan
house"—a glorified ancestry indeed for a dirty area around which were
grouped the apartments of the family pig, cow, and sundry other
household appurtenances and attachés. It was an unpromising prelude for
a night’s lodging, but it made surprise all the greater when we emerged,
by means of a flight of rickety stairs, on a little balcony above, and
beheld adjoining it the apartments destined for our use. They had been
swept and garnished, and the floors had been scrubbed until they shone.
The collapsible iron beds had been erected and the bedding spread upon
them, while near by stood the dinner table already laid for the evening
meal; and presiding over it all stood the cook, to whose energy all
these preparations were due, smiling genially through a forest of
mustache, and duly presented to us as “Stathi.”
In the twilight we whetted our appetites for dinner by a brisk walk out
of the village, perhaps half a mile away, to the site of the few and
meagre ruins that Megalopolis has to show. Our progress thither was
attended with pomp and pageantry furnished by the rabble of small boys
and girls whose presence was at first undesirable enough, but who later
proved useful as directing us to the lane that led to the ruins and as
guards in stoning off sundry sheep dogs that disputed the way with us.
The usual disbursement of leptá ensued, and we were left to inspect the
remains of ancient greatness in peace. Those remains were few and
grass-grown. They included little more than a theatre, once one of the
greatest in Greece, with the structures behind the orchestra still
largely visible, and a few foundations of buildings behind these, on the
bank of a winding river. Aside from these the old Megalopolis is no
more.
That night we sat down to a dinner such as few hotels in Athens could
have bettered. The candlesticks on the table were of polished silver,
which bore the monogram of the ancestors of Spyros. Our tablecloth and
napkins were embroidered. Our dishes were all of a pattern, and we
afterwards discovered that every piece of our household equipment, from
soup plates to the humblest “crockery” of the family supply, bore the
same tasteful decoration. Many a time we have laughed at the incongruity
between our surroundings and the culinary panorama that Stathi conjured
up from his primitive kitchen outside and served with such elegance. It
was a masterpiece of the chef’s art, six courses following each other in
rapid succession, all produced in the narrow oven where a charcoal fire
blazed in answer to the energetic fanning of a corn broom. Soup gave
place to macaroni; macaroni to lamb chops and green peas; chickens
followed, flanked by beans and new potatoes from the gardens of the
neighborhood; German pancakes wound up the repast; and coffee was served
in an adjoining coffee-house afterward—the whole accompanied by copious
draughts of the water of Andros, which cheers without inebriating, and
beakers of the red wine of Solon, which I suspect is capable of doing
both. A very modern-looking oil lamp helped furnish heat as well as
light, for we were high above the sea and the night was chilly. Even to
this remote district the product of the Rockefeller industry has
penetrated, and no sight is more common than the characteristic square
oil cans, with a wooden bar across the centre for carrying, which the
peasants use for water buckets when the original oil is exhausted. They
are useful, of course—more so than the old-fashioned earthen amphorae.
But they are not as picturesque.
My companion, whom it will be convenient to call the Professor, and I
adjourned to the coffee-house below for our after-dinner smoke, and
demanded coffee in our best modern Greek, only to evoke the hearty
response, “Sure,” from our host. It seemed he had lived in New York,
where he maintained an oyster bar; and, like all who have ever tasted
the joys of Bowery life, he could not be happy anywhere else, but
yearned to hear the latest news from that land of his heart’s desire. We
tarried long over our cups, and had to force payment on him. Thence we
retired through the low-browed arch that led to our abode, barred and
locked it with ponderous fastenings that might have graced the Lion Gate
itself, and lay down to repose on our collapsible beds, which happily
did not collapse until Spyros and Stathi prepared them for the next
day’s ride. This they did while we breakfasted. The morning meal came
into the bedrooms bodily on a table propelled by our faithful servitors,
the food having been prepared outside; and as we ate, the chamber work
progressed merrily at our table side, so that in short order we were
ready for the road. The carriage for the journey stood without the main
gate, manned by a dangerous-looking but actually affable native, and
behind it lay a spring cart of two wheels, wherein were disposed our
beds, cooking utensils, and other impedimenta. The word of command was
given, and the caravan set out blithely for the western mountains, bowed
out of town by the beaming face of the man who had kept an oyster bar.
The road had an easy time of it for many a level mile. It ran through a
fertile plain, watered by the sources of the famous Alpheios River,
which we skirted for hours, the hills steadily converging upon us until
at last they formed a narrow gorge through which the river forced its
way, brawling over rocks, to the Elian plains beyond. Beside the way was
an old and dismantled winepress, which we alighted long enough to visit.
Disused as it was, it was easy to imagine the barefooted maidens of the
neighborhood treading out the juices of the grapes in the upper loft,
the liquid flowing down through the loose flooring into the vats
beneath. It is the poetic way of preparing wine; but having seen one
night of peasant life already, we were forced to admit that modern
methods of extracting the juice seem rather to be preferred.
Just ahead lay the gateway of Arcadia, guarded by a conspicuous conical
hill set in the midst of the narrowing plain between two mountain chains
and bearing aloft a red-roofed town named Karytæna. Time was too brief
and the sun too hot to permit us to ascend thereto, but even from the
highway below it proved an immensely attractive place, recalling the
famous hill towns of Italy. Behind it lay the broadening plain of
Megalopolis and before the narrow ravine of the Alpheios, walled in by
two mighty hills. Karytæna seems like an inland Gibraltar, and must in
the old days have been an almost impregnable defense of the Arcadian
country on its western side, set as it is in the very centre of a
constricted pass. But for some reason, possibly because the enemies of
Greece came chiefly from the east, it seems not to have figured
prominently as a fortress in history. Below the town the road wound down
to the river’s edge and crossed the stream on a quaint six-arched
bridge, against one pier of which some thankful persons had erected a
shrine of Our Lady. And beyond the road began a steady ascent. We had
left the plain for good, it appeared. Before us lay the deep and
tortuous defile through which the river flows to the western seas, the
roar of its rushing waters growing fainter and fainter below as the
panting horses clambered upward with their burdens, until at last only a
confused murmuring of the river was heard mingling with the rustle of
the wind through the leaves of the wayside trees. The road was not
provided with parapets save in a few unusually dangerous corners, and
the thought of a plunge down that steep incline to the river so far
below was not at all pleasant. Fortunately on only one occasion did we
meet another wagon, and on that one occasion our party incontinently
dismounted and watched the careful passage of the two with mingled
feelings. It was accomplished safely and easily enough, but we felt much
more comfortable to be on the ground and see the wheels graze the edge
of the unprotected outside rim of the highway.
[Illustration: AN OUTPOST OF ARCADY]
Every now and then a cross ravine demanded an abrupt descent of the road
from its airy height, and down we would go to the bottom of a narrow
valley, the driver unconcernedly cracking his whip, the bells of our
steeds jangling merrily, and our party hanging on and trying hard to
enjoy the view in a nervous and apprehensive way, although increasingly
mindful of the exposed right-hand edge of the shelf. It bothered Stathi,
the cook, not at all. He was riding behind on the baggage cart which
followed steadily after, and at the steepest of the descent he was
swaying from side to side on the narrow seat, his cigarette hanging
neglected from his lips—sound asleep.
These occasional ravines appeared to be due to centuries of water
action, and their banks, which were well covered with woods, were marked
here and there by tiny threads of cascades which sang pleasantly down
the cliffs from above, crossed the road, and disappeared into the wooded
depths of the river valley below. Bædeker had mentioned a huge plane
tree and a gushing spring of water as a desirable place to lunch, but we
looked for them in vain. Instead we took our midday meal beside a stone
khan lying deserted by the roadside, in which on the open hearth Stathi
kindled a fire and produced another of his culinary miracles, which we
ate in the open air by the road, under a plane tree that was anything
but gigantic. We have never quite forgiven Bædeker that “gushing
spring.” When one has lived for a month or more on bottled waters, the
expectation of drinking at nature’s fount is not lightly to be regarded.
[Illustration: THE GORGE OF THE ALPHEIOS]
The remainder of the ride was a steady climb to Andhritsæna, varied by
few descents, although this is hardly to be deemed a drawback. The
knowledge that one has two thousand feet to climb before the goal is
reached does not conduce to welcome of a sudden loss of all the height
one has by an hour’s hard climb attained. The tedium of the hours of
riding was easily broken by descending to walk, the better thus to enjoy
the view which slowly opened out to the westward. We were in the midst
of the mountains of the Peloponnesus now, and they billowed all around.
It was a deserted country. Distant sheep bells and occasional pipes
testified that there was life somewhere near, but the only person we met
was a woman who came down from a hill to ask the driver to get a doctor
for her sick son when he should reach Andhritsæna. At last, well toward
evening, the drivers pointed to a narrow cut in the top of the hill
which we were slowly ascending by long sweeping turns of road and
announced the top of the pass. And the view that greeted us as we
entered the defile was one not easy to forget. Through the narrow
passage in the summit lay a new and different country, and in the midst
of it, nestling against the mountain-side, lay Andhritsæna, red roofed
and white walled, and punctuated here and there by pointed cypress
trees. Below the town, the hills swept sharply away to the valleys
beneath, filled with green trees, while above the rocks of the
mountain-side rose steeply toward the evening sky. In the western
distance we saw for the first time Erymanthus and his gigantic
neighbors, the mountains that hem in the plain about Olympia, the taller
ones snow-clad and capped with evening clouds. We straightened in our
seats. Stathi came out of his doze. The whips cracked and we dashed into
the town with the smartness of gait and poise that seem to be demanded
by every arrival of coach and four from Greece to Seattle. And thus they
deposited us in the main square of Andhritsæna, under a huge plane tree,
whose branches swept over the entire village street, and whose trunk
lost itself in the buildings at its side. The carriage labored away. The
dragoman and his faithful attendant sought our lodging house to set it
in order. And in the meantime we stretched our cramped limbs in a walk
around the town, attended as usual by the entire idle population of
youths and maidens, to see the village from end to end before the sun
went down.
I should, perhaps, add the remark that in my spelling of “Andhritsæna” I
have done conscious violence to the word as it stands on the map—the
added “h” representing a possibly needless attempt to give the local
pronunciation of the name. It is accented on the second syllable.
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