From the village of Leondari, held in a half-circle of the foothills of Helmos, where was to be the second link in the chain of beacons, it was impossible to see Andritsaena; but the mass of Mount Lycaon stood up fine and clear behind where Andritsaena was, and a series of smaller peaks a little to the west would prove, so Mitsos hoped, to be the hills above the temple. He and his host climbed the beacon-hill and took very sedulous note of these, and next morning the lad set off at daybreak to Andritsaena, which he reached in a day and a half. The country through which he travelled, an unkind and naked tract, was not suspected by the Turks to be tinged with any disaffection to their benignant rule, and his going was made without difficulty or accident. He found welcome at the house of the priest to whom Germanos had given him a letter, and after dinner the two rode off, on a fair, cloudless afternoon, to the hills above the temple, to verify its visibility from Taygetus on the south and the crag of Helmos on the north. An Englishman, whom the priest described as a "tall man covered with straps and machines," had been there a year or two before making wonderful drawings of the place, and had told them it was a temple to Apollo, and that the ancient Greek name for it was Bassae. "Yet I like not the place," said Father Zervas.
An hour or so after their departure, fleecy clouds began to spin themselves in the sky, and as they went higher they found themselves involved in the folds of a white fabric of mist, which lay as thick as a blanket over the hill-side, and through which the sun seemed to hang white and unluminous, like a china plate. This promised but ill for the profit of their ride, but Zervas said it was worth while to push on; those mists would be scattered in a moment if the wind got up; he had seen them roll away as the housewife rolls up the bed-linen. But as they got higher the mist seemed to thicken, and the sun was expunged, and when, by the priest's computation, they must be near the temple, they could scarcely see ten yards before them, and the gaunt, contorted oak-trees marched swiftly into their narrow field of vision, and out again, like ghosts in torment. Shoulder after shoulder of gray hill-side sank beneath them, dripping with the cold, thick mist, and unutterably waste, when, after moving ten minutes or more across a featureless flank of hill, gigantic shadows peered at them from in front, a great range of columns faced them, and they were there.