Nonakris was in ruins when Pausanias visited it, but past it flowed the river Styx, the name of which is probably better known than any other Arcadian name. It was a painful and somewhat dangerous toil of about three hours from the nearest of the half-dozen villages which represent the ancient Nonakris to the foot of the famous waterfall from which the river comes down. I use the word "toil" rather than ascent, for, it being impossible to force our way up the bed of the stream, we had to climb down about half as much as up; in fact, it was, taken in the heat of noonday, a more toilsome climb than the ascent of Aroania, which we had made on the same day before daybreak. [Illustration: THE STYGIAN POOL] When, after all, we stood face to face with the fall our feeling was one of disappointment. It was nearly the middle of September, and though Aroania, holding snow in its gorges all the year round, may be called with more propriety than Ætna "the nurse of snow," there was little water falling, and we saw none of the rainbow effects mentioned by some travellers. Still, as Herodotus speaks of a _little_ water, and both he and Homer speak of this as _trickling_, we ought to be content. After climbing down to the black pool at the foot of the last rock over which the water poured, we took time to let the whole setting of the Styx make its impression, which it could not fail to do. It is the setting rather than the fall which has always made the impression. Where Aroania is broken off on the east end so abruptly that one can only think of it as cut off by some gigantic cleaver, down over this front comes the Styx, not with a shoot, but hugging the rock and deflected several times along its face. Pausanias says that the precipice is the highest that he ever remembers to have seen, and its height is recorded as upward of six thousand feet. As the mountain throws out arms to the right and left of the fall, we have a place fitted to throw a potent spell over the mind on a moonlight night or at morning or evening twilight. It was here that the exiled Cleomenes, the gifted but mad King of Sparta, made the chiefs of the Arcadians swear to support him in his attempt to secure a return to Sparta by force of arms. He doubtless took advantage of the knowledge that the Arcadians had from remote times regarded this awful place as imparting an especial sanctity to oaths, and that here particularly the warrior's oath (_sacramentum_) was taken. It is no wonder that the lively imagination of the Greek transferred the earthly Styx to Hades, and represented the most awful and binding oath of the gods, by which they pledged their immortality, as that one which they swore by this hated and deadly water.