A QUIET CORNER OF THE ALPS. 253 There are, besides, scarcely any sources of public instruction, and the only books found in the hands of the people are religious works. The official language is French, which is pretty familiar to the inhabitants of the valley, but the popular dialect is a patois differing con- siderably from the French. It is an Alpine patois, of which there are two varieties, both very different from the patois spoken on the plains and those spoken in the Jura. It is distinguished by the frequent use of liquid consonants, as also by the pronunciation of the letters s and z, which have the sound of th in the words teeth and leather respectively. The other peculiarity of pronunciation is the use of the sound w, as, for instance, in the word iwi, water, in which it is pronounced like w in weapon. A great many words of this patois are only corrupted from the French. Many more interesting particulars might be given of the people of the Vieze valley, their popular sayings and folklore, their numerous superstitions, their omens and auguries, their ancient usages in selling and buying, their simple municipal administration, and so on, but these have no very direct connection with geography. I shall now conclude with the wish that many British tourists who come yearly to Switzerland would cast a glance at the calm and beautiful valley that extends along the foot of the Dent du Midi. DODONA, OLYMPOS, AND SAMOTHRACE. A NARRATIVE OP PERSONAL EXPLORATIONS. By J. S. STUART-GLENNIE, M.A. (Abstract of a Paper read before the Society, March 1894.) DURING the eighteen months of my explorations in Albania and Epirus, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, these provinces were—ras, with the ex- ception of Thessaly, they still are—in a state of almost complete anarchy, overrun by brigands and the frequent scene of insurrectionary move- ments. It was confidently predicted, therefore, that my proposed explo- rations would be found altogether impossible. Dodona I should certainly be unable to reach; and I might think myself lucky if I got safely even to Ioannina by the direct highroad from its seaport, Prevesa. I accomplished the journey, however, and by the most interesting route— through the country of the Acherusian Plain, the groves of Persephone, the rivers Pyriphlegethon or Kokytos, and the Oracle of the Dead at the Gate of Hades. Still Dodona appeared as far off as ever. But, during my stay at Joannina, I made the acquaintance of an old Turk, Djemal ed-Din Agha, who was the chief landowner in the mountain-country round Dodona, and the Agha procured me an escort and assured me of hospitable entertainment in his castles and in the houses of his tenants. Hiding forth on a beautiful autumn morning, and leaving behind that rocky peninsula jutting out into the lake of Ioannina which Colonel Leake, British Consul here in the beginning of this century, regarded as 254 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE. the most probable site of the temple of Dodoua, we travelled for two or three miles over the plain of Hellopia, the Ancient Hellas of Aristotle, and then ascended a ridge opposite the hill of Kastritza, and were fitly reminded by a clump of fine oaks that we were about to descend to the sanctuary of the Dodonsean Zeus, to whom the oak was sacred. By a long, steep, winding descent, ending in a rocky staircase of the most remote antiquity, we made our way down into a retired east-and-west-running glen, divided, by a hill jutting out from its northern side, into an upper and narrower, and a lower and wider, part. And it was on this eminence that we found the ruins which mark the site of the temple. The glen is studded with oak copses still. To the north, the direction from which we came, the hills are low, but above them rise in the dis- tance the summits ofPindus; while to the south the great mass of Olytsika, identified with the ancient Tomaros or Tmaros, towers up 4000 or 5000 feet above the level of the glen, which is itself some 1500 feet above the level of the sea. Along the lower slopes of this grand moun- tain are four or five villages. Above these is a belt of primeval oak forest, and still higher a long range of precipitous heights. The ancient lake, like the ancient forest of the Sanctuary, has left only traces of its existence. The walls, at which we dismounted, form an irregular square; only a few courses of large stones, carefully fitted together without cement, are still standing. These may be the walls of a small town or, more probably, of an acropolis. At the south-west corner is the theatre, scooped out of the face of the hill and overlooking the glen. This is the finest of the ruins, and, indeed, is the best preserved of ancient Hellenic theatres. To the east of the theatre and acropolis are traces of the temple of Zeus, and of the cathedral of the Pantokr&tor into which it was transformed. But it must be confessed that the ruins of Dodona, with the exception of the theatre, are wanting in grandeur, and are not to be compared with those of any of the ancient cities within a day's journey of, and apparently built with reference to, this Sanctuary, as their centre-point. Dodona impresses one very much less by its ruins than by the grandeur of its surroundings, and the associations connected with a spot which was a revered and awe-inspiring Sanctuary from remote ages down to, at least, the sixth century of the Christian era. # . On recalling all that I had seen during my explorations in and around Dodona, I was struck with the fact that Dodona was no isolated temple and oracle, but the chief of a system of Holy Places. It was to be remarked also that in the history of Dodona, and in the discoveries recently made there, we find memorials of the whole history of Religion, from the simple worship of the Sacred Oak down to that of the Crucified Christ; and that probably the most characteristic and the longest lived was the Chthonian worship, or worship of the Powers of the Earth and of the Under-World. And lastly, one noted that around the Dodonajan system of Holy Places were built a number of cities, of which the Archaean or so-called Cyclopean ruins testify not only to a powerfully organised civilisation, but to a civilisation similar to that of Tiryns, Mycense, and Argos, which was probably non-Hellenic and pre-Hellenic. DODONA, OLYMPOS, AND SAMOTHRACE. 255 These facts have not hitherto, I believe, been duly pointed out in their mutual relations. But it is only the recognition of these facts that will enable us in some degree truly to understand how it was that Dodona, or rather the Dodonsean region, became the scene of popular legends and poetic fictions so innumerable connected with the Heroic Age of Greece; and how it was, therefore, that this mere corner of the mainland came to be distinctively named "H7retpo?. With an escort of some thirty Turkish troopers—Albanians, Osmanlis, and Circassians—I had a glorious two days' ride from Trikkala, Trikka, the Homeric city of Asklepios, to the ford of the Peneios, and shortly after to a rocky eminence from the summit of which, not only the snowy peaks, but the whole range of Olympos, with Ossa and Pelion, came into view, and under the pyramid of Ossa the many minareted capital of Thessaly, Larissa of the Pelasgians. The western or upper plain of Thessaly is one vast, perfectly flat, unbroken expanse of corn and pasture land. But it derives a wonderful beauty and grandeur from the blue serrated mountains bounding it on the south. Still grander is the environment of the eastern Thessalian plains. To the north-east is the vast range of the Lower and Higher Olympos, the snows of the latter towering nearly 10,000 feet into the nsually cloudless azure. From Olympos run north-westward the Kam- bunian hills; the range of Ossa and Pelion forms the eastern boundary of the plains; and on the southern side lie the mountains of Othrys. In these Thessalian plains I had found myself riding through those Homeric kingdoms which we are generally, perhaps, too much inclined to regard as mere poetic fictions. When I began to re-study, with the new interest thus naturally excited, the mythical tales of the Heroic Age of Greece, I found that almost all were directly, and that those few which were not directly were indirectly, connected with these Thessalian plains, and especially with that eastward division of them in which Larissa is situated. And I found also that these mythical tales—the tales of that Ancient Hellas which both Homer and Aristotle localised in these northern provinces of Greece—presented, when put together in due sequence, a magnificent epic unity. A conflict both of races and of religions seemed clearly to be indicated by these legends. But how were these races to be named, and what were their ethnological relations ? It was at Larissa that the clew seemed put into my hand that might lead to a verifiable solution of this question, and hence to a verifiable solution of the problem of Greek Origins. For it was at Larissa that I remarked that not only is the Larissa of the Pelasgian Argos as closely connected with the Pelasgians as Dodona itself, but that this name, wherever it occurs, is always apparently connected with the same people; and that a broad band of Larissas connects this Larissa on the Peneios (Larsa, as it appears in the Greek Folksongs) with a Larissa (or Larsa, as it appears in the cunei- form inscriptions) on the Tigris, near Ur of the Chaldees.