As we rode up the slopes of Mount Mænalus, which separates the plain of Tegea from that of Megalopolis, we often turned to admire the splendid view beneath, and count the numerous villages now as of old under the headship of the _great town_. The most striking feature was doubtless the snowy ridge of Taygetus, which reaches southward, and showed us the course of the Eurotas on its eastern side, along which a twelve hours’ ride brings the traveller to Sparta. The country into which we passed was wild and barren in the extreme, and, like most so-called mountains in Greece, consisted of a series of parallel and of intersecting ridges, with short valleys or high plateaus between them. This journey, perhaps the bleakest in all Peloponnesus, until it approaches the plain of Tegea, is through Mount Mænalus, the ancestral seat of the worship of Pan, and therefore more than any other tract of Arcadia endowed with pastoral richness and beauty by the poets. There may be more fertile tracts farther north in these mountains. There may in ancient times have been forest or verdure where all is now bare. But in the present day there is no bleaker and more barren tract than these slopes and summits of Mænalus, which are wholly different from the richly wooded and well carpeted mountains through which we had passed on the way from Elis. Even the asphodel, which covers all the barer and stonier tracts with its fields of bloom, was here scarce and poor. Dull tortoises, and quick-glancing hoopoes, with their beautiful head-dresses, were the only tenants of this solitude. There was here and there a spring of delicious water where we stopped. At one of them the best of our ponies, an unusually spirited animal, escaped up the mountain, with one of our royal-looking young friends, who had accompanied us in full costume, for want of other amusement, in hot pursuit of him. We thought the chase utterly hopeless, as the pony knew his way perfectly, and would not let any one approach him on the bare hillsides; so we consolidated our baggage, and left them to their fate. But about two hours afterward the young Greek came galloping after us on the pony, which he had caught—he had accomplished the apparently impossible feat.