When we come to examine the substance of his book we quickly perceive that his interests were mainly antiquarian and religious, and that though he professes to describe the whole of Greece or, more literally, all things Greek, what he does describe is little more than the antiquities of the country and the religious traditions and ritual of the people. He interested himself neither in the natural beauties of Greece nor in the ordinary life of his contemporaries. For all the notice he takes of the one or the other, Greece might almost have been a wilderness and its cities uninhabited or peopled only at rare intervals by a motley throng who suddenly appeared as by magic, moved singing through the streets in gay procession with flaring torches and waving censers, dyed the marble pavements of the temples with the blood of victims, filled the air with the smoke and savour of their burning flesh, and then melted away as mysteriously as they had come, leaving the deserted streets and temples to echo only to the footstep of some solitary traveller who explored with awe and wonder the monuments of a vanished race. Yet as his work proceeded Pausanias seems to have wakened up now and then to a dim consciousness that men and women were still living and toiling around him, that fields were still ploughed and harvests reaped, that the vine and the olive still yielded their fruit, though Theseus and Agamemnon, Cimon and Pericles, Philip and Alexander were no more. To this awakening consciousness or, to speak more correctly, to this gradual widening of his interests, we owe the few peeps which in his later books Pausanias affords us at his contemporaries in their daily life. Thus he lets us see the tall and stalwart highlanders of Daulis; the handsome and industrious women of Patrae weaving with deft fingers the fine flax of their native fields into head-dresses and other feminine finery; the fishermen of Bulis putting out to fish the purple shell in the Gulf of Corinth; the potters of Aulis turning their wheels in the little seaside town from which Agamemnon sailed for Troy; and the apothecaries of Chaeronea distilling a fragrant and healing balm from roses and lilies, from irises and narcissuses culled in peaceful gardens on the battlefield where Athens and Thebes, side by side, had made the last stand for the freedom of Greece. [Sidenote: His descriptions of religious rites.]