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Updated: May 28, 2025
Greece is richly provided with good building stone. At many points there are inexhaustible stores of white marble. The island of Paros, one of the Cyclades, and Mount Pentelicus in Attica to name only the two best and most famous quarries are simply masses of white marble, suitable as well for the builder as the sculptor.
A fish near by leaped from the water, splashing loudly. Then for an instant the clouds broke. Selene uncovered her face. The silvery flash quickly come, more quickly flying, showed him the headlands of that Attica now in Xerxes’s hands. He saw Pentelicus and Hymettus, Parnes and Cithæron, the hills he had wandered over in glad boyhood, the hills where rested his ancestors’ dust. It was no dream.
To the left was Hymettus the Shaggy, to right the long crest of Daphni, behind them rose Pentelicus, home of the marble that should take the shape of the gods. With one voice they fell to praising Athens and Hellas, wisely or foolishly, according to their wit. Only Hermione and Glaucon kept silence, hand within hand, and speaking fast,—not with their lips,—but with their eyes.
The beautiful but barren Hymettus the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, etc., etc. are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth.
From its summit you may survey, here, the mountains of Hymettus, Pentelicus, and, far away, "the silver-bearing Laurium;" below, the wide plain of Attica, broken by rocky hills there, the islands of Salamis and Aegina, with the opposite shores of Argolis, rising above the waters of the Saronic Bay.
I have seen the goats on Mount Pentelicus scatter at the approach of a stranger, climb to the sharp points of projecting rocks, and attitudinize in the most self-conscious manner, striking at once those picturesque postures against the sky with which Oriental pictures have made us and them familiar. But the whole proceeding was theatrical.
And that and other earthquakes, by heating the rocks from the fires below, may have helped to change them from soft coral into hard crystalline marble as you see them now, just as volcanic heat has hardened and purified the beautiful white marbles of Pentelicus and Paros in Greece, and Carrara in Italy, from which statues are carved unto this day.
The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis, the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania "the greyhounds of their tribe," Rosamund loved to call them were changing almost from moment to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting.
Hymettus and Pentelicus; at Patras, the cellae of the temple of Jupiter and Hercules, which are brick, although on the outside the entablature and columns of the temple are of stone; in Italy, at Arezzo, an ancient wall excellently built; at Tralles, the house built for the kings of the dynasty of Attalus, which is now always granted to the man who holds the state priesthood.
"This sort of thing" being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness one wishes almost that the thing would stop it is getting more and more beyond what is possible "If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to cope with it but if some one else were seeing it at the same time Bonamy is stuffed in his room in Lincoln's Inn oh, I say, damn it all, I say," the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in one's eyes, is thus oppressive.
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