Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/228

216 through branch canals into the several katabothra along the east shore. Indeed, the details of the system are much more complicated than are indicated by this brief description, and comprise, in addition to the main canals, many smaller subsidiary ones both for feeding and for draining them. When we take into consideration the difficulties attending excavation in so marshy a soil, and of transporting across it the heavy stones for the embankments, and note the immensity of the plan and the thoroughness and solidity of its execution, we are moved to admiration for the engineers who conceived and built the great works which rendered this part of Bœotia habitable before the dawn of history.

The system involved, too, the clearing and the keeping open of the katabothra, which were liable to become obstructed and sometimes to be entirely closed by the caving of the soil and rocks, and there are many evidences of ancient efforts to enlarge and deepen them. That these efforts were not always successful is proved by the traditions of early inundations, referred to before, caused probably by earthquakes, but which were attributed to the efforts of Hercules when he espoused the cause of his native Thebes against Orchomenus. To guard against the recurrence of a similar catastrophe, the ancient engineers planned several cuttings and tunnels through the hills, which, if they had been carried to completion, would have rounded out the original design and accomplished what the Greek Government is to-day trying to effect—the thorough reclamation of the basin and its protection from any contingency of flood. On the southeast shore of the lake are vestiges of an immense cutting, thirty metres deep, through the Hill of Carditza toward Lake Hylicus, and beyond that traces of works to ponnect Hylicus with Paralimni, and the latter with the sea. Across the Hill of Carditza, too, are a series of excavated shafts marking the line of a tunnel through the hill constructed with an object similar to that of the cutting to convey the waters to the sea through the smaller lakes; but the shafts are now filled up and there are no indications that the work was ever completed.

This route is the one adopted by the modern engineers, who, by a tunnel through the Hill of Carditza, not far from the line of the ancient tunnel, seek to carry the waters into Lake Hylicus, thence into Paralimni, and finally through another tunnel into the sea. There is also a plan to deflect a portion of the waters for use in irrigating the plain of Thebes.

A still more ambitious undertaking of the ancient engineers was an attempt to penetrate the Hill of Kephalari at the northeast end of the lake by a tunnel more than a mile and a quarter long. This hill, a depression on the flank of Mount Ptoum, has a maximum height of one hundred and forty-seven metres above