LIV. Pellene.—

The scanty and insignificant ruins of Pellene are situated on the summit of a mountain which rises on the western side of the river of Trikala (the ancient Sythas), near the small hamlet of Zougra. It is a ride of two hours and a half from Xylokastro, the little town at the mouth of the river, to Zougra. We cross the river by a large stone bridge not far from its mouth, and then ascend the valley on the western bank of the stream. The bottom of the valley is fruitful; vineyards and fine groves of olives occupy the greater part of it, and tall cypresses rise here and there, like dark spires, above the greener foliage. The hills which enclose the valley on the east and west are not very high, but they are gashed and tortured by great scaurs and precipices of white and whity-brown earth. On the western side of the valley in particular a long line of high white precipices runs almost unbroken along the brow of the hills. The white, probably argillaceous, earth, which is thus cleft and gouged into precipices, is the same which forms the great precipices on the eastern side of Sicyon. Indeed it prevails nearly all the way along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth from Sicyon to Derveni, near Aegira. This chalky earth forms a plateau of varying height, separated from the shore by a stretch of level plain which averages perhaps a mile in width. The seaward face of the plateau is steep, high, and white; its edges are sharp as if cut with a knife, and ragged like the edge of a saw. Every here and there it is rent by a stream or torrent which has scooped a deep bed for itself out of the friable soil. The valley of the Sythas, up which we go to Pellene, is nothing but one of these water-worn rifts on a gigantic scale. As we ascend it through vineyards and olive-groves, between the rugged broken hills with their long lines of white precipices, the massive Cyllene, with its high, bare, pointed summit, looms in front of us at no great distance, blocking the southern end of the valley. After riding up the valley for an hour or more along a road which, for Greece, is excellent, we begin to climb a mountain on the western side of the river. A long, toilsome, winding, dusty, or, in rainy weather, muddy ascent, impeded rather than facilitated by a Turkish paved road of the usual execrable description, brings us in time to the little hamlet of Zougra. As we rise up the steep slope, our fatigue is to some extent compensated by the fine prospect that opens up behind us to the Corinthian Gulf and the mountains beyond it.