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It is difficult for me to remember a railway junction in which there was nothing to do; but perhaps Pyrgos, in Greece, comes nearest to this description. At this point, you change cars on your way from Patras to Olympia. The town is made of mud: that is to say, the single-storied houses are built of unbaked clay. There is nothing to see in Pyrgos.
The heat was much greater than it had been in Athens. Enormous aloes hedged gardens from which came scents that seemed warm. The sandy soil, turned up by the horses' feet, was hot to the touch. The air quivered, and was shot with a music of insects faint but pervasive. Pyrgos was suffocating and noisy, but Rosamund was amused by democracy at close quarters, showing its naked love of liberty.
Behind the villa lies, somewhat higher up the mountain, a little village of white-washed, small, den-like houses, and a yet whiter church; and still higher up than the village, a square tower Pyrgos in the style of the Middle Ages.
"We've been two nights on the way, Patras and Pyrgos. That gave plenty of time to the magician to work the spell. Come along." This time she did not hold him back. Her eagerness was as great as his. Certainly it was a very ordinary camp, scarcely, in fact, a camp at all.
We found their most natural lope and, pausing to drink and to water them sparingly at the loneliest springs we descried, we pressed on through or past the Towers, Pyrgos, and Castrum Novum to Centumcellae.
She had understood that on the Acropolis, and her "farewell" had been an act of submission to his will not wholly unselfish. Her curiosity was awake. What was the secret of Olympia? They had gone by train to Patras, slept there, and thence rode on horseback to Pyrgos through the vast vineyards of the Peloponnesus vineyards that stretched down to the sea and were dotted with sentinel cypresses.
Is it I have often wondered so difficult as people think, to be happy in an hour "spent waiting at a railway junction"?... The kingdom of happiness is within us; or else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of man is free: and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in Amalfi the loveliest of all the places I have ever seen cannot also manage to be happy in Pyrgos or in Essex Junction and to communicate his happiness to his responsive fellow-travelers.
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