All these remarks are even more strongly exemplified by the beautiful country which lies between Pentelicus and Hymettus, and which is now covered with forest and brushwood. We passed through this vale one sunny morning on our way to visit Marathon. There is, indeed, a road for some miles—the road to the quarries of Pentelicus—but a very different one from what the Athenians must have had. It is now a mere broad track, cut by wheels and hoofs in the sward; and wherever the ruts become too deep the driver turns aside, and makes a parallel track for his own convenience. In summer days, the dust produced by this sort of road is something beyond description; and the soil being very red earth, we have an atmosphere which accounts to some extent for the remarkable color of the old buildings of Athens. The way, after turning round the steep Lycabettus, which, like Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh, commands the town close by, passes up the right side of the undulating plain of Attica, with the stony but variegated slopes of Hymettus upon the right, and Pentelicus almost straight ahead. As soon as the suburbs are passed we meet but one or two country seats, surrounded with dark cypress and pepper trees; but outside the sombre green is a tall, dazzling, white wall, which gives a peculiarly Oriental character to the landscape. There is cultivation visible when you look to the westward, where the village of Kephissia lies, among the groves which accompany the Kephissus on its course; but up toward Pentelicus, along the track which must once have been crowded with carts, and heavy teams, and shouting drivers, when all the blocks of the Parthenon were being hurried from their quarry to adorn the Acropolis—along this famous track there is hardly a sign of culture. Occasionally, a rough stubble field showed that a little corn had been cut—an occasional station, with a couple of soldiers, shows why more had not been sown. The fear of brigands had paralyzed industry, and even driven out the scanty rural population. [Illustration: Mount Lycabettus, Athens] It strikes me, when speaking of this road, that the Greek roads cannot have been at all so well constructed as the Roman, many of which are still to be seen in England. Though I went upon the track of many of them, I but once noticed the vestige of an old Greek road. There are here and there wretched remains of Turkish roads—rough angular stones laid down across the hills, in a close irregular pavement; but of the great builders of the Parthenon and of Phyle, of Eleutheræ and of Eleusis, hardly a patch of road-work has, so far as I know, remained.