LIII. ON THE COAST OF ACHAIA.—Pausanias continues to move eastward along the coast of Achaia. Beyond the Buraicus river, where it issues from its romantic gorge, the strip of fertile plain which has skirted the coast all the way from Aegium comes to an end. The mountains now advance to the shore, and the road runs for a short distance along the summit of cliffs that border the coast. Then the mountains again retreat from the shore, leaving at their base a small maritime plain clothed with olive-groves. A stream, the river of Diakopton, crosses the plain and flows into the sea. It comes down from a wild and magnificent gorge, thickly wooded with tall firs and shut in by stupendous precipices of naked rock. Seen at nightfall under a lowering sky, with wreaths of white mist drooping low on the black mountains, the entrance to this gloomy gorge might pass for the mouth of hell; one could fancy Dante and his guide wending their way into it in the darkness. Eastward of this little plain the mountains, covered with pine forests, again rise in precipices from the sea, hemming in the railway at their foot. A line of fine crags runs along the face of the mountains for a long way, their crests tufted with pine-woods, and the lower slopes at their feet also clothed in the same mantle of sombre green. LIV. PELLENE.—The scanty and insignificant ruins of Pellene are situated on the summit of a mountain which rises on the western side of the river of Trikala (the ancient Sythas), near the small hamlet of Zougra. It is a ride of two hours and a half from Xylokastro, the little town at the mouth of the river, to Zougra. We cross the river by a large stone bridge not far from its mouth, and then ascend the valley on the western bank of the stream. The bottom of the valley is fruitful; vineyards and fine groves of olives occupy the greater part of it, and tall cypresses rise here and there, like dark spires, above the greener foliage. The hills which enclose the valley on the east and west are not very high, but they are gashed and tortured by great scaurs and precipices of white and whity-brown earth. On the western side of the valley in particular a long line of high white precipices runs almost unbroken along the brow of the hills. The white, probably argillaceous, earth, which is thus cleft and gouged into precipices, is the same which forms the great precipices on the eastern side of Sicyon. Indeed it prevails nearly all the way along the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth from Sicyon to Derveni, near Aegira. This chalky earth forms a plateau of varying height, separated from the shore by a stretch of level plain which averages perhaps a mile in width. The seaward face of the plateau is steep, high, and white; its edges are sharp as if cut with a knife, and ragged like the edge of a saw. Every here and there it is rent by a stream or torrent which has scooped a deep bed for itself out of the friable soil.