XCIV. The Acheron.—

The Acheron is the river now known as the Suliotiko or Phanariotiko which comes down from the mountains of the once famous Suli and winds, a sluggish, turbid, and weedy stream, through the wide plain of Phanari, traversing some swamps or meres before it reaches the sea. These swamps, which extend nearly to the sea, and never dry up though they shrink in summer, are the Acherusian lake. The plain, where it is not too marshy, is covered with fields of maize and rice and meadows where herds of buffaloes browse. A few plane-trees and low tamarisks fringe the margin of the winding river. Otherwise the plain is mostly treeless. On its eastern side rise, like a huge grey wall, the wild and barren mountains of Suli.

Before entering the plain, on its passage from these rugged highlands, the Acheron flows through a profound and gloomy gorge, one of the darkest and deepest of the glens of Greece. On either side precipices rise sheer from the water’s edge to a height of hundreds of feet, their ledges and crannies tufted with dwarf oaks and shrubs. Higher up, where the sides of the glen recede from the perpendicular, the mountains rise to a height of over three thousand feet, the black pine-woods which cling to their precipitous sides adding to the sombre magnificence of the scene. A precarious footpath leads along a perilous ledge high up on the mountain-side, from which the traveller gazes down into the depths of the tremendous ravine, where the deep and rapid river may be seen rushing and foaming along, often plunging in a cascade into a dark abyss, but so far below him that even the roar of the waterfall is lost in mid-air before it can reach his ear.

At the point where the river emerges from the defile into the plain, there are a few cottages with some ruins of a church and fortress on the right bank. The place is called Glyky. The church seems to have occupied the site of an ancient temple; some fragments of granite columns and pieces of a white marble cornice, adorned with a pattern of acanthus leaves, may be seen lying about. Here, perhaps, was the seat of that Oracle of the Dead where the envoys of Periander, tyrant of Corinth, summoned up the ghost of his murdered wife Melissa, and where Orpheus vainly sought to bring back his lost Eurydice from the world of shades.