Before reaching the hills at the west gate, the river takes a bend slightly northwards of its former course, and passes the end of this promontory of the range at a distance of about one-third of a mile. After passing underneath the Lamia-Thermopylæ-Atalanta road, it falls into the Spercheios a few hundred yards below the Alamana bridge. Any consideration as to the exact position of its mouth in former times is so much dependent on considerations connected with the Spercheios, that they had better be left until the conjectural former course of that river is described. This may, however, be said:—that the present course of the Asopos seems to resemble to a great extent its course in the time of Herodotus, though it must, in the interval, have passed through many modifications. Of the Spercheios Herodotus tells us, unfortunately, very little. I venture, however, to think that it entered the gulf in those days at a point farther west than is represented in the modern maps which have conjecturally depicted the state of this region 500 years before Christ. The description of Herodotus in Chapters 198 and 199 seems to be almost certainly of the nature of a verbal map. He is describing what he saw when travelling along a route from the north; and he begins his description, as it is his intention to describe Thermopylæ, at the Spercheios river. Whether the route he had traversed was that by Thaumaki or that by Thebes in Phthiotis, he must have passed by way of Lamia; for we know from Livy that that town blocked both those roads; in fact, the physical characteristics of the region were such as to render it practically certain that both must have passed that way. His knowledge of Macedonian history and also of the Vale of Tempe and of the sanctuary at Halos render it possible that he saw Thermopylæ in the course of a journey from Macedonia to Greece; he expressly says in Chapter 198 that he is describing the road from the point of view “of a traveller from Achaia.” His route map of the region seems to have been somewhat as follows:—