It was two o'clock in the morning when we got to Meraca, utterly tired out, and with our lodging still to seek. We were directed to a tower in which lived an Albanian aga. The entrance was at the top of a staircase running up the side of the house and ending in a drawbridge which led to the door on the first floor. Once inside we went up two other flights of stairs to a room in which we found two Albanians, by whom we were kindly received. When they heard how tired we were they offered us some rasky. Besides that there was some miserable bread, but no coffee or meat to refresh us. We had to lie down and go to sleep without. There are few visible remains of the once famous Olympia,[26] and not a trace of stadium or theatre that I could make out. The general opinion is that the Alpheus has silted up and buried many of the buildings to a depth of 8 or 10 feet, and our small researches point in the same direction. We dug in the temple, but what we could do amounted to next to nothing. To do it completely would be a work for a king. I had had some difficulty with the Greek labourers at Ægina, but the Turks here were much worse. In the first place, instead of one piastre apiece per day they asked 2½, and in the next they had no proper tools. The earth was as hard as brick, and when with extreme difficulty it had been broken up they had no proper shovels; and when the earth, which they piled along the trench as they dug it out, ran into the hole again, they scooped it out with their hands. The thing was too ludicrous. Worst of all, as soon as we turned our backs for a moment they either did nothing or went away. This happened when we left them to cross the river and try for a better view of the place. We got over in a caique, which the aga himself, from the village across the water, punted over to us; but the view over there was disappointing, and we came back to find, as I say, our workmen all idling. The long and short of our excavations was that we measured the columns of the temple to be 7 feet in diameter, and we found some attached columns and other fragments of marble from the interior, the whole of which I suppose was of marble, that of the pavement being of various colours. Such stone as is used is of a rough kind, made up entirely of small shells and covered with a very white and fine plaster. And that is about all the information we got for a largish outlay.