The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 1, July, 1862Various
History
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 1, July, 1862
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- 19th century -- Periodicals
candles, all came from that mysterious basket which rode on the
pack-horse with the baggage. Were I visiting Greece again, I would
eschew all these vanities--carry nothing but a _Reisesack_, or
travel-bag, as the Germans are wont to call every variety of knapsack--a
shawl, and a copy of _Pausanias_, and live among the Greeks as the
Greeks do; but I was inexperienced then.
So we set out with great pomp and circumstance, each on his
beast--_alogon_, the Unreasonable Thing, is the word for horse--while a
fifth, with two drivers, carried our goods. A ride of about three
hours--passing the silent and deserted Tiryus--brought us to the village
of Charváti, the modern representative of the 'rich Mycenae.' Here,
while Dehmetri prepared our breakfast, we followed a villager, who led
us by rapid strides up the rocky hill toward the angle formed by two
mountains. As we rose over one elevation after another, he plucked his
hands full of dry grass and brush, and then leading us into a hole in
the side of the hill, informed us in good classic Greek that it was the
tomb of Agamemnon. It is a large, round apartment, rising to the hight
of forty-nine feet, and of about the same width, the layers of masonry
gradually approaching one another until a single stone caps the whole;
not conical in shape, however, but like a beehive. A single monstrous
stone, twenty-seven feet long and twenty wide, is placed over the
doorway. The whole is buried with earth, and covered with a growth of
grass and shrubs, and a passage leads from it into a smaller chamber
hewn in the solid rock, in which our guide lighted the fuel he had
gathered. The gloomy walls were lighted up for a moment, then when the
fire died away, we returned to the open air. A little further on is the
famous gateway with two lionesses carved in relief above--the armorial
bearings, we may call it, of the city--and in every direction are seen
massive walls, foundation-stones, ruins of gates and of subterraneous
chambers like the first we visited, conical hillocks, probably
containing others in equally good preservation, and other marks of the
busy hand of man--'_Spuren ordnender Menschenhand unter dem Gesträuch_.'
Sidney Smith says: 'It is impossible to feel affection beyond
seventy-eight degrees or below twenty degrees of Fahrenheit.... Man only
lives to shiver or to perspire.' I think it is so with the sublime and
beautiful, and deeply as I felt in the abstract the privilege I enjoyed
in standing on the citadel of Agamemnon, and seeing the most venerable
ruins that Europe can boast, that keen March wind was too much for me,
and I was not sorry to return to the khan, where, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, we ate with our fingers a roast chicken dissected with the
one knife of the family, and drank a bumper of resinous wine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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