Part 13

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 though 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.

The mountainous island of Salamis, long and calm, with gray and orange rocks, lies like a sentinel keeping guard over the harbor of the Piræus. It is so near to the mainland that the sea between the two shores looks like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called “the throne of Xerxes” standing out characteristically behind the low-lying bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did really watch the famous battle from a throne placed on the hill with which his name is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers like to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are quite ready to stiffen their credulity.

The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are wild. The water is wonderfully clear, and is shot with all sorts of exquisite colors. The strip of mainland, against which the liquid maze of greens and blues and purples seems to lie motionless, like a painted marvel, is a tangle of wild myrtle and dwarf shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you coast along in a fisherman’s boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has little sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall not easily forget the expression that came into his face when, in reply to his question, “What did you come here for?” I said, “To visit the scene of the celebrated battle.” A weary incredulity made him suddenly look very old; and I believe it was then that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of his report about me that I was “a very suspicious person.”

It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away from Salamis; but if you care for smiling wild places where the sea is, where its breath gives a vivid sense of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and turquoise.

Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height. And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire. And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece.

In going to Sunium I passed through the famous mining district of Laurium, where now many convicts work out their sentences. In ancient times slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens who had hereditary leases granted by the state. They worked the mines for silver, but now lead is the principal product. It happened that just as we were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, where the miners and their families dwell, for only some of them are convicts, a tire of the motor burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to see something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had heard that they were a fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I could not understand what they said, and all they could understand was that I came from London, a circumstance which seemed greatly to impress them, for they called it out from one to another up the street. We carried on intercourse mainly by facial expression and elaborate gesture, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. And when I got into the car to go we were all the best of friends. The machine made the usual irritable noises, but from the good people of Laurium came only cries of good-will, among them that pleasant admonition which one hears often in Greece: “Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself!”

When Laurium was left behind, we were soon in wild and deserted country. Now and then we passed an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a shepherd watching his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be very few. As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble columns of the Temple of Sunium.

Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with gold and red gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea, exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the contrary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which is lacking both in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. They do not move you to awe or overwhelm you; they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of sea and sky on the white and gray platform, there is something that allures.

Upon one of the columns I found the name of Byron carved in bold letters. But I looked in vain for the name of Turner. Byron loved the Cape of Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to make it less wonderful since his time. It is true that fewer columns are standing to bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and all the winds of the hills--winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from crested Eubœa, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia. And it seems as though all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in golden fire, as though there could be none left over for the rest of the world. The coasts of Greece stretch away beneath you into far distances, curving in bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny and volcanic, there gray and quietly sober in color, but never cold or dreary. White sails, but only two or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of Poseidon’s kingdom--white sails of mariners who are bound for the isles of Greece. Poets have sung of those isles. Who has not thought of them with emotion? Now, between the white marble columns, you can see their mountain ranges, you can see their rocky shores.

Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. I got up and looked. And there on a slab of white marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were echoed not only by the mariner’s sails, but by tiny Albanian villages inland, seen over miles of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where the pines would not be denied.

There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in the atmosphere, of Greece. No other land that I know possesses an exactly similar spell. Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing wildness with a calm that is full of romance. There the wilderness is indeed a haven to long after, and there the solitudes call you as though with the voices of friends.

As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon’s white marble ruin, a one-armed man came up to me, and in English told me that he was the guardian of the temple.

“But where do you live?” I asked him, looking over the vast solitude.

Smiling, he led the way down to a low whitewashed bungalow at a little distance. There, in a rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby among some small pots of flowers. Remote from the world, with only the marble columns for neighbors, with no voice but the sea’s to speak to them, dwell these four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he has come home and entered the sea-god’s service. Pittsburgh and the Hellenic wilderness--what a contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it philosophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his stump, and says, “I guess I couldn’t go on there like this, so I had to quit, and they put me here.”

They put him “here,” on Cape Sunium, and on Cape Sunium he has built himself a house and made for himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he intends to remain because, unfortunately, having lost an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh.

I gave him some money, accepted the baby’s wavering but insistent hand, and left him to his good or ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness.

(To be continued)

[Illustration]

THE TACHYPOMP[8]

A MATHEMATICAL DEMONSTRATION

(NOTEWORTHY STORIES OF THE LAST GENERATION)

BY EDWARD P. MITCHELL

WITH A PORTRAIT, AND NEW DRAWINGS BY REGINALD BIRCH

There was nothing mysterious about Professor Surd’s dislike for me. I was the only poor mathematician in an exceptionally mathematical class. The old gentleman sought the lecture-room every morning with eagerness, and left reluctantly. For was it not a thing of joy to find seventy young men who, individually and collectively, preferred _x_ to XX; who had rather differentiate than dissipate; and for whom the limbs of the heavenly bodies had more attractions than those of earthly stars upon the spectacular stage?

So affairs went on swimmingly between the professor of mathematics and the junior class at Polyp University. In every man of the seventy the sage saw the logarithm of a possible La Place, of a Sturm, or of a Newton. It was a delightful task for him to lead them through the pleasant valleys of conic sections, and beside the still waters of the integral calculus. Figuratively speaking, his problem was not a hard one. He had only to manipulate and eliminate and to raise to a higher power, and the triumphant result of examination day was assured.

But I was a disturbing element, a perplexing unknown quantity, which had somehow crept into the work, and which seriously threatened to impair the accuracy of his calculations. It was a touching sight to behold the venerable mathematician as he pleaded with me not so utterly to disregard precedent in the use of cotangents; or as he urged, with eyes almost tearful, that ordinates were dangerous things to trifle with. All in vain. More theorems went on to my cuff than into my head. Never did chalk do so much work to so little purpose. And, therefore, it came that Furnace Second was reduced to zero in Professor Surd’s estimation. He looked upon me with all the horror which an unalgebraic nature could inspire. I have seen the professor walk around an entire square rather than meet the man who had no mathematics in his soul.

For Furnace Second were no invitations to Professor Surd’s house. Seventy of the class supped in delegations around the periphery of the professor’s tea-table. The seventy-first knew nothing of the charms of that perfect ellipse, with its twin bunches of fuchsias and geraniums in gorgeous precision at the two foci.

This, unfortunately enough, was no trifling deprivation. Not that I longed especially for segments of Mrs. Surd’s justly celebrated lemon pies; not that the spheroidal damsons of her excellent preserving had any marked allurements; not even that I yearned to hear the professor’s jocose table-talk about binomials, and chatty illustrations of abstruse paradoxes. The explanation is far different. Professor Surd had a daughter. Twenty years before, he made a proposition of marriage to the present Mrs. S. He added a little corollary to his proposition not long after. The corollary was a girl.

Abscissa Surd was as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto’s circle, and as pure withal as the mathematics her father taught. It was just when spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation that I fell in love with the corollary. That she herself was not indifferent I soon had reason to regard as a self-evident truth.

The sagacious reader will already recognize nearly all the elements necessary to a well-ordered plot. We have introduced a heroine, inferred a hero, and constructed a hostile parent after the most approved model. A movement for the story, a _deus ex machina_, is alone lacking. With considerable satisfaction I can promise a perfect novelty in this line, a _deus ex machina_ never before offered to the public.

It would be discounting ordinary intelligence to say that I sought with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father’s good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meager reward. Then I engaged a private tutor. His instructions met with no better success.

My tutor’s name was Jean-Marie Rivarol. He was a unique Alsatian, though Gallic in name, thoroughly Teuton in nature; by birth a Frenchman, by education a German. His age was thirty; his profession, omniscience; the wolf at his door, poverty; the skeleton in his closet, a consuming but unrequited passion. The most recondite principles of practical science were his toys; the deepest intricacies of abstract science, his diversions. Problems which were foreordained mysteries to me were to him as clear as Tahoe water. Perhaps this very fact will explain our lack of success in the relation of tutor and pupil; perhaps the failure is alone due to my own unmitigated stupidity. Rivarol had hung about the skirts of the university for several years, supplying his few wants by writing for scientific journals or by giving assistance to students who, like myself, were characterized by a plethora of purse and a paucity of ideas; cooking, studying, and sleeping in his attic lodgings; and prosecuting queer experiments all by himself.

We were not long discovering that even this eccentric genius could not transplant brains into my deficient skull. I gave over the struggle in despair. An unhappy year dragged its slow length around. A gloomy year it was, brightened only by occasional interviews with Abscissa, the Abbie of my thoughts and dreams.

Commencement day was coming on apace. I was soon to go forth, with the rest of my class, to astonish and delight a waiting world. The professor seemed to avoid me more than ever. Nothing but the conventionalities, I think, kept him from shaping his treatment of me on the basis of unconcealed disgust.

At last, in the very recklessness of despair, I resolved to see him, plead with him, threaten him if need be, and risk all my fortunes on one desperate chance. I wrote him a somewhat defiant letter, stating my aspirations, and, as I flattered myself, shrewdly giving him a week to get over the first shock of horrified surprise. Then I was to call and learn my fate.

During the week of suspense I nearly worried myself into a fever. It was first crazy hope, and then saner despair. On Friday evening, when I presented myself at the professor’s door, I was such a haggard, sleepy, dragged-out specter that even Miss Jocasta, the harsh-favored maiden sister of the Surds, admitted me with commiserate regard, and suggested pennyroyal tea.

Professor Surd was at a faculty meeting. Would I wait?

Yes, till all was blue, if need be. Miss Abbie?

Abscissa had gone to Wheelborough to visit a school-friend. The aged maiden hoped I would make myself comfortable, and departed to the unknown haunts which knew Jocasta’s daily walk.

Comfortable! But I settled myself in a great uneasy chair, and waited with the contradictory spirit common to such junctures, dreading every step lest it should herald the man whom, of all men, I wished to see.

I had been there at least an hour and was growing right drowsy.