168 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



What a sight to see, when all this lovely plain 

 was crowded with men in bright apparel, coming, 

 come in chariots, some on foot, from the sea on the 

 west, from the highlands of Elis on the north and of 

 Arcadia in the east ! How must the sun, which now 

 sheds its radiance over the relics of departed glory, 

 have then lighted up with triumphant gleam that 

 wondrous mass of temples and altars and statues, glit- 

 tering with red and "blue and gold, in the days when 

 the mighty temple of Olympian Zeus still stood in 

 all its beauty, fit habitation for the masterpiece of 

 Phidias ! 



" States fall, arts fade, but Nature doth not die." 



No ! We see the plain, no doubt, very much as 

 Pericles, as Alexander, must have seen it. Still is 

 the ground carpeted with gay flowers, with luxuriant 

 shrubs and grasses. Man's work alone has wellnigh 

 perished. Mere fragments of it are but now being 

 unearthed and restored to the light of day. Should 

 we seek the causes that have wrought this change, we 

 should find that man and nature have been working 

 together ; that earthquake and river have carried on 

 the work begun by the hand of the barbarian, till the 

 German expedition which entered upon the labours 

 of excavation two years ago, found nothing in this 

 famous spot but an unbroken expanse of waving 

 grass. 



On reaching the scene of the diggings, we were 



