278 



Sierra Club Bulletin 



MT. PARNASSUS 



By Aristides E. Phoutrides 



To one who has seen the wonderful revel of light and 

 color that takes place day after day over mountain and sea 

 in the central region of Greece, and heard the murmurs of 

 the waves mingling in everlasting melodies with the whis- 

 pers of the silvery olive groves, it cannot seem strange that 

 the ancient Greeks should have thought of light and music 

 as having the shining Sun-god for their common source, 

 or that they should have considered the mountain which 

 commands the whole of the Corinthian Gulf and overlooks 

 most of central and southern Greece as his proper mansion. 



As we traveled along the northern coast of the Pelopon- 

 nesus one day last April and beheld Mt. Parnassus, crowned 

 with glittering snow, towering majestically across the blue 

 waters of the Corinthian Gulf, such thoughts must have 

 inevitably suggested themselves to us, even if we had not 

 been acquainted with the history of the region. And a 

 week later, as we saw it again from the little steamer that 

 took us from Piraeus through the Corinthian Canal to the 

 little harbor of Itea, we were once more imbued with the 

 spirit of light and music and poetry. 



To climb Mt. Parnassus was part of a plan that we had 

 conceived in the summer of 1912 in the heart of the High 

 Sierra of California. In this month of April, 1914, my com- 

 panion, Francis P. Farquhar, coming from America, and I 

 from Egypt, met at Patras, almost within sight of the peaks 

 of Parnassus. It was very early in the season for moun- 

 taineering in Greece, but we who had been on the peaks 

 of the Sierra, were not so much alarmed at the prospect of 

 snow as the good people of the neighborhood seemed to 

 think we should be. Accordingly it was with light hearts 

 that we disembarked at Itea and set out on foot, in the soft 

 light of late afternoon, for Delphi. We walked through 

 the fertile plain of Crissa, up the first foothills of Parnas- 



