But a good many other excursionists have landed there, and most of them have told about it, in one way and another. Now it is my turn, but I shall wait. I have already waited a long time for Athens-- I do not need to begin the story just yet. Instead I have come out here on deck to look across to Peloponnesus, which has risen out of the sea, a long gray shore, our first sight of the mainland where heroes battled and mythology was born.
I expected the shores of Greece would look like that--bleak, barren, and forbidding. I don't know why, but that was my thought--perhaps because the nation itself has lost the glory of its ancient days. The Music-Master is looking at it too. It means more to him than to most of us, I imagine. As he looks over to that gray shore he is seeing in his vision a land where there was once a Golden Age, when the groves sang with Orpheus and the reeds with Pan, while nymphs sported in hidden pools or tripped lightly in the dappled shade.
To-morrow he will go mad, I think, for we shall anchor at Athens, in the Bay of Phaleron.
There were low voices on the deck, just outside my port-hole. I realized that it was morning then; also that the light was coming in and that we were lying at anchor. I was up by that time. It was just at the first sunrising, and the stretch of water between the ship and the shore had turned a pinkish hue. Beyond it were some buildings, and above the buildings, catching the first glint of day on its structured heights, rose a stately hill.
The Amiable Girl (I have mentioned her before, I believe) and a companion were leaning over the ship's rail, trying to distinguish outlines, blended in the vague morning light. The Amiable Girl was peering through a binocular, and I caught the words "Parthenon" and "Caryatides"; then to her companion, "Take the glass."
Which the other girl did, and, after gazing steadily for a moment, said:
"Yes! Oh yes, indeed-- I can see them now, quite distinctly!"
And then, even with my naked eye, I could make out certain details of that historic summit we have travelled so far to see. Three miles away, perhaps, the Acropolis arose directly in front of us--its columned crown beginning to glow and burn in answer to the old, old friend that has awakened it to glory, morning after morning, century after century, for a full twenty-three hundred years.
