LIX. THE LAKE OF PHENEUS.—The lake of Pheneus (for what was a plain in the time of Pausanias is now a lake) is a broad and beautiful sheet of greenish-blue water encircled by lofty mountains which descend in rocky declivities or sheer precipices to the water’s edge, their upper slopes clothed with black pine-woods and their summits capped with snow for many months of the year. Right above the lake on the north-east towers the mighty cone of Cyllene, the loftiest mountain but one in Peloponnese; while on the north-west Dourdouvana rears its long serrated crest, culminating in a sharp bare peak of grey rock, at the foot of which, embowered in trees and gardens, nestles the village of Phonia, the representative of the ancient Pheneus. Here on the north, between the village and the lake, is the only stretch of level ground that breaks the mountain ring, and the luxuriant green of its vineyards and maize-fields contrasts pleasingly with the sombre hue of the pine-forests all around. The first sight of this blue lake embosomed among forest-clad mountains takes the traveller by surprise, so unlike is it to anything else in Greece; and he feels as if suddenly transported from the arid hills and the parched plains of Greece to a northern land—from the land of the olive, the vine, and the orange, to the land of the pine, the mountain, and the lake. So completely is the lake fenced in by mountains on all sides that no stream can issue from it above ground, and the water escapes only by two subterranean emissaries or _Katavothras_, as they are called by the Greeks, at the south-eastern and south-western ends of the lake. Through the latter emissary the water passes under the mountain, and issuing on the other side, about six miles from the lake and eight hundred feet below its level, forms the source of the Ladon. On the state of these emissaries it depends whether the great mountain-basin of Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. From antiquity down to the present century the periods in which the basin has been completely drained have alternated with periods in which it has been occupied by a lake. In the time of Theophrastus (the fourth century B.C.) the bottom of the valley seems to have been generally dry land, for he mentions that once, when the emissaries had got choked up, the water rose and flooded the plain, drowning the willows, firs, and pines, which, however, reappeared the following year when the flood subsided. In the following century part of the valley at least would seem to have been a lake, for the geographer Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo, informs us that the river Anias formed in front of the city of Pheneus a lake which was drained by subterranean passages, and that when these passages were closed the water rose over the plain, but that when they were opened again it was discharged into the Ladon and hence into the Alpheus in such volume that the sacred precinct at Olympia was flooded, while the lake on the other hand shrank.