Our party being free after luncheon, Laura and I engaged Lykabettos on our own account and drove out to the Bay of Salamis, where Xerxes made his great mistake in the matter of fleets.
Perhaps Lykabettos had taken a fancy to us, for he engaged a carriage that had been awarded a prize last year in the games, he said, and the team with it. We believed Lykabettos--anybody would--and anyway it was a beautiful outfit, and we cantered away over a fine road, past wayside shrines, past little huts and houses, past a little memorial that marks the place on a hill where Xerxes placed his silver-footed throne so that he might sit comfortably and watch the enemy's ships go down. Only, the programme didn't work out that way, Lykabettos said:
"Zen Xerxes he pretty soon see zat it was not ze Greek ship zat sink, and he mus' run pretty quick or he will be capture; and hees ship zay try to escape, and he not take away hees army from zat little island you see over zere; zay stay zere and are all massacre by ze Greek--by ze men and ze women, too, who have watch ze battle from here and go over and kill zem."
The little island Lykabettos pointed out was Psyttalleia, and the flower of Persia perished there. It was a tiny bit of barren land then, and it is to-day. The hills around Salamis are barren, too, covered only with a gray weed like the sage-brush of Nevada, and stunted groves of scrubby pine and ground cedar--referred to by Lykabettos as "ze forest."
We came to the tiny hamlet on the water's side, a collection of two or three huts, and Lykabettos engaged a lateen-sailed lugger (I should call it that, though its name was probably something else), and with a fresh wind half-ahead we billowed over the blue waters of Salamis, where twenty-five hundred years ago the Persian ships went down. It was a cloudy afternoon and there was a stormy feeling in the sky. It seemed just the time to be there, and there was nothing to dispel the illusion of imminent battle that was in the air.
I was perfectly sure, and so was Laura, that the Persian fleet was likely at any moment to round the point and land troops on Pysttalleia; also that the Greek fleet was hiding somewhere in the Bay of Eleusis, and that there were going to be very disagreeable happenings there in a few minutes. There was a hut where we landed on the Island of Salamis and a girl making lace at the front door. She might have been there twenty-five hundred years ago, as well as not--perhaps was--and saw the great victory.