Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/51

 Methley reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks, in beginning their wall, had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods; and so, after the fall of Troy, Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida, and sent them flooding over the wall till all the beach was smooth, and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. It is true, I see now, on looking to the passage, that Neptune, when the work of destruction was done, turned back the rivers to their ancient ways;

but their old channels passing through that light pervious soil would have been lost in the nine days' flood, and perhaps the god, when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may have done his work but ill; it is easier, they say, to destroy than to restore.

We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very plain between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a line at some distance from the shore. Whether it was that the lay of the ground hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all intent upon Ida, or whether my mind was in vacancy, or whether, as is most like, I had strayed from the Dardan plains, all back to gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was—not quite suddenly indeed, but rather as it were, in the swelling and falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that eternal coast-line—that fixed horizon—those island rocks must have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian warriors by the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege! conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches with which a whole army of imagining men must have told their weariness, and how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that daily, daily scene with their deep Ionian curses!

And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful surprise. Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had pored over the map together; we agreed that whatever may