Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/128

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his baggage to be transported to a spot which was at a distance from all buildings, where in the course of two hours he counted nearly twenty shocks, some of which were exceedingly terrible. The whole scene was tremendous. A multitude of human beings standing in darkness, fearful that the earth would open beneath their feet and ingulf them; not daring to fly, lest they should tumble into chasms already formed around them; incapable of aiding each other; a prey to every terrible idea, to every horrible foreboding. But at length the earth became still, and while the inhabitants were preparing to bury their dead, our traveller obtained horses and fled away from the city.

Crossing the ancient Sperchius, the stream to which Achilles had vowed his golden hair, and proceeding along the shore of the Maliac Gulf, he soon discovered in the distance the famous pass of Thermopylæ,—a spot which men will tread with a holy pride and triumph so long as a sympathy for heroic valour and patriotism shall remain upon earth. Such are the places to which men should go in pilgrimage,—places sanctified by the dust of the glorious and the great, whose names are rendered eternal by Providence, that even in the basest and most degenerate times mankind might never be reduced to a disbelief of virtue.

From Thermopylæ Pococke proceeded through the country of the Opuntian Locrians to the Euripus, into which Aristotle is absurdly reported by vulgar tradition to have thrown himself, from a despair of discovering the cause of its manifold tides. The ancients relate that the tide here ebbs and flows seven times in the day; but our traveller learned that the motions of the Euripus are irregular, sometimes ebbing and flowing as often as fourteen times in the day, and at others not more than twice. He next directed his course to the shores of the Copaic Lake, the eels of which Aristophanes seems to have so passionately