XII. ELEUTHERAE.—From Eleusis the road to Eleutherae, which is at the same time the highway from Athens to Thebes, goes north-west across the plain. The olive-trees begin to appear soon after we have left Eleusis, and the road runs for three miles through thick groves of them to the large village of Mandra situated on a small height at the entrance to a valley; for here the mountains which bound the plain of Eleusis begin. The native rock crops up among the houses and streets of the village. The hills that rise on both sides of the valley are wooded with pine. Beyond the village the valley contracts, and the road ascends for a long time through the stillness and solitude of the pine-forest. A little wayside inn (the khan of Palaio-Koundoura) is passed in a lonely dale; and then, after a further ascent, the prospect opens up somewhat, and the tops of Hymettus and Pentelicus are seen away to the east, appearing above a nearer range of hills. Soon afterwards the road descends into a cultivated and fertile little plain or valley watered by the chief arm of the Eleusinian Cephisus, and bounded on the north by the principal range of Cithaeron, on the south by the lower outlying chain which we have just crossed. This no doubt is the plain in which stood the temple of Dionysus mentioned by Pausanias. At the northern end of the valley or plain there is now a police-barrack on the right of the road, and near it a public-house, the khan of Kasa. Here the pass over Cithaeron, in the strict sense, begins. It is a narrow rocky defile, up which the road winds tortuously between high pine-clad slopes on either hand. In the very mouth of the pass, immediately beyond the barrack, a steep, conical, nearly isolated hill rises up as if to bar the road. Its summit is crowned with the grey walls and towers of Eleutherae.