[Illustration: SPARTA WITH TAYGETOS IN THE BACKGROUND]
Taygetos is the highest mountain in Peloponnesus, outranking Kyllene by somewhat more than a hundred feet, and falling only a hundred feet short of eight thousand. Since Sparta is only slightly above the sea-level, the task before us was arduous, and when our forces were united, we decided to make a part of the ascent before evening. An acquaintance in Sparta gave me a letter of introduction to a leading man of Anavryti, a village three hours up the mountain. When we reached his house at dusk, in the middle of a village that resounded with flowing streams, this letter opened his doors and his heart. It opened the doors so wide that the neighbors came streaming in to see us, to such an extent that he was at last glad to avail himself of the help of a gendarme with his whip to clear out the younger portion of his self-invited guests. He then set to work, in the manner of Greek hosts, to kill us with kindness, making us eat and drink for about two hours. After this came those futile attempts to sleep which those who have travelled much in the interior of Greece know too well. At half-past two we were only too ready to stop the fight with the small enemy and address ourselves to the overcoming of Taygetos. For the first two hours we went on by the light of a lantern, guided by the son of our host, over a difficult path which gave us an occasional fall. After that came the gorgeous sunrise and the increasing reward in the ever more extended outlook, which made us almost forget that we had not slept. It was owing, however, largely to this lack of sleep that one of our number gave out a thousand feet below the summit, while another was with some difficulty coached over the last five hundred feet.
When we were at last on the summit at half-past ten, the reward was a perfect view--the first absolutely perfect view which I had ever had out of many mountain ascents in Greece. We had, fortunately, taken the rare moment when, after four days of cloudy and rainy weather, the sky had just cleared, and for half a day a perfectly cloudless ether was diffused over everything. We saw the valley of the Eurotas winding down from the mountains to the sea, where it empties near Helos, the "marsh town," which is said to have given its name to the whole remnant of the Achæan people, who were reduced to a galling bondage under the Dorian spearmen from the north. Sparta looked so near that we were almost lured into the attempt to throw stones into it. Kythera was surprisingly near, and even Crete--troubled and troublesome Crete--seemed so near that annexation to Greece appeared to be a most obvious lot for it. The southern islands of the Ægean, Melos and its neighbors, were conspicuous to the east; while on the west it seemed as if we could almost slide down into the Messenian Gulf. But, while all these objects caught our attention time and again, it was still to the north that our gaze was mainly directed; for there lay the whole Peloponnesus, with its peaks and ridges, which compose the greater part of it, spread out before us like a raised map, closed in on the north by the big three, Kyllene, Aroania, and Erymanthos. Compared with these, the three Attic mountains to the extreme left, and somewhat distant, looked small, though distinct. It was a place and a scene that one must needs be reluctant to leave. Had we brought food with us we should have been tempted to stay and spend the night in the substantial "tabernacle for Elias," which crowns this summit, according to the usual practice in Greece. But evening brought us to Sparta, a good many stone's-throws distant, as we felt in our knees and in our appetites. Two suggestions force themselves upon one visiting this region: the first is that the Spartans showed wonderful energy in breaking through the wall of Taygetos, and conquering their Dorian neighbors in Messenia, and in crushing them again when they made a desperate attempt to throw off the yoke; the second is that the difference between these two branches of Dorians could not be due to the Messenians having, as is sometimes alleged, settled in a fatally fertile and enervating plain. If rich fields could enervate a people, the Spartans surely did not lack that invitation, for the valley of the Eurotas must have been in antiquity, as now, a garden.