An hour or so after their departure, fleecy clouds began to spin themselves in the sky, and as they went higher they found themselves involved in the folds of a white fabric of mist, which lay as thick as a blanket over the hill-side, and through which the sun seemed to hang white and unluminous, like a china plate. This promised but ill for the profit of their ride, but Zervas said it was worth while to push on; those mists would be scattered in a moment if the wind got up; he had seen them roll away as the housewife rolls up the bed-linen. But as they got higher the mist seemed to thicken, and the sun was expunged, and when, by the priest's computation, they must be near the temple, they could scarcely see ten yards before them, and the gaunt, contorted oak-trees marched swiftly into their narrow field of vision, and out again, like ghosts in torment. Shoulder after shoulder of gray hill-side sank beneath them, dripping with the cold, thick mist, and unutterably waste, when, after moving ten minutes or more across a featureless flank of hill, gigantic shadows peered at them from in front, a great range of columns faced them, and they were there. Mitsos' pony, tired with the four days' journey, was lagging behind, and Mitsos had got off to relieve it on the steeper part of the ascent, when suddenly there came from out of the chill, blank fog a scream like that of a lost soul. For one moment a superstitious fear clutched at the boy, and his pony, startled, went off at a nimbler pace to join the other, and Mitsos had to break into a run to keep up. Then suddenly the sun stared whitely through the mists, and in five seconds more the wind, which had screamed so shrilly, was upon them. In a moment the hill-side was covered with flying wreaths of vapor, which the wind tore smaller and smaller till there was nothing left of them; it ripped off ribbons from the skirts of the larger clouds, which it drove like herded sheep down the valleys, and as Mitsos gained the ridge where the temple stood, a brilliant sun sat in cloudless blue, looking down upon the great gray columns. At their feet in every direction new valleys, a moment before muffled in mist, were being carved out among the hill-sides, and already far to the south the plain of Kalamata, rimmed with a dim, dark sea, sparkled green through thirty miles of crisp air. Down in the valley through which they had come some conflicting current of air tilted the mist up in a tall column of whirling vapor, as if from some great stewing-pot below, and as it streamed up into the higher air it melted and dissolved away, and in five minutes the whole land--north, south, east, and west--was naked to the incomparable blue. Mitsos gazed in wonder at the gray columns, which seemed more to have grown out of the hill than to have been built by the hands of men; but the priest hurried him on.