The Vintage by E.F. Benson — Read

From the village of Leondari, held in a half-circle of the foothills of Helmos, where was to be the second link in the chain of beacons, it was impossible to see Andritsaena; but the mass of Mount Lycaon stood up fine and clear behind where Andritsaena was, and a series of smaller peaks a little to the west would prove, so Mitsos hoped, to be the hills above the temple. He and his host climbed the beacon-hill and took very sedulous note of these, and next morning the lad set off at daybreak to Andritsaena, which he reached in a day and a half. The country through which he travelled, an unkind and naked tract, was not suspected by the Turks to be tinged with any disaffection to their benignant rule, and his going was made without difficulty or accident.

He found welcome at the house of the priest to whom Germanos had given him a letter, and after dinner the two rode off, on a fair, cloudless afternoon, to the hills above the temple, to verify its visibility from Taygetus on the south and the crag of Helmos on the north. An Englishman, whom the priest described as a "tall man covered with straps and machines," had been there a year or two before making wonderful drawings of the place, and had told them it was a temple to Apollo, and that the ancient Greek name for it was Bassae. "Yet I like not the place," said Father Zervas.