The modern name of the defile is Dervenaki. The railway from Corinth to Argos runs through it. Towards the northern end of the pass the khan of Dervenaki stands in a little glade overshadowed by tall poplars, cypresses, and mulberry-trees, beside a murmuring spring. At the southern outlet of the pass the whole plain of Argos, with the mountains on either hand and the sea in the distance, bursts suddenly on the view. On the left, nestling at the foot of the hills, are Mycenae and Tiryns, with Nauplia and its towering acropolis rising from the sea and bounding the plain on this side. On the right is Argos with its mountain citadel, and beyond it the Lernaean lake glimmers faintly in the distance. In the centre of the picture, beyond the long foreground of level plain, stretches the blue line of the Argolic Gulf. XXIII. MYCENAE.—Passing southwards through the pass of the Tretus, we see the spacious plain of Argolis stretched out before us. Mycenae lies to our left at the roots of the mountains which bound the eastern side of the plain, not far from the point where the pass of the Tretus opens out on it. The Argolic plain may be roughly described as a great triangle, the base of which, on the south, is formed by the Argolic Gulf, while the eastern and western sides are enclosed by the ranges of mountains which converge northwards till they meet in Mount Tretus. The length of the plain from north to south is about twelve miles, the greatest breadth from east to west perhaps not much less. The mountains which shut it in are barren and rocky, the highest being those on the west which form the boundary between Argolis and Arcadia. The whole expanse appears to have been once a bay of the sea, which has been gradually filled up by the deposits brought down from the surrounding mountains. The Gulf of Argolis, a broad and beautiful sheet of water winding between mountains, must originally, before its upper waters were expelled by the alluvial deposit, have resembled still more closely, what it still recalls, a fine Scotch sea-loch or a Norwegian fiord.