Now that Athens is rapidly growing, its authorities are at their wits' ends to find a proper supply of water for the pressing needs of so large a city. All sorts of temporary expedients have been resorted to to increase the regular supply from Pentelicus. But none of them are adequate; and the minds of the far-seeing ones contemplate the necessity of bringing water from Stymphalus. Certainly if Athens is to grow at its present rate, and become a city with a population of two hundred thousand or more, something as radical as this must be adopted. The operations of Lake Pheneus are really more interesting and important than those of Lake Stymphalus, owing to its greater size. It has been, as is seen by the marks on the surrounding rocks, at one time some one hundred feet higher than in 1895, when it was a modest lake of about three miles in diameter. In antiquity Heracles was called in even here to make a long canal, traces of which have been noted by modern travellers, straight through the plain to the katabothra at the southern end. This canal was out of repair even in Pausanias's time, and the river had reverted to its original tortuous bed. Here also the stoppage of the katabothra has been fruitful of mischief. In ancient times the strong city of Pheneos was forced to surrender by a general who stopped the katabothra, imitating the tactics by which Agesipolis took Mantineia. Once also in modern times a natural stoppage caused a general desertion of the plain, and the water gradually rose until it began to seem as if it would ultimately flow over the mountain-pass to the south, and discharge itself into the plain of Orchomenos, which already has its hands full with its own katabothra. But at the very time of the arrival in Greece of the young King Otto, the accumulated water forced the katabothra, and laid bare a tract of most richly fertilized land, an event which was regarded as a blessing bestowed upon the advent of the king. At the same time a great swelling of the Ladon and the Alpheios, resulting in an overflow of Olympia, proved conclusively, what the ancients appear to have known, that the water of Pheneos flowed into the Ladon. Since the Alpheios proper, the southern fork of the river to which the Ladon is the still greater tributary, disappears twice before it achieves an uninterrupted course, it is little wonder that the fancy of the Greek could picture it as reappearing, even after a course under the sea, at the fountain of Arethusa in Syracuse.