acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

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36 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
whole group doing likewise, with broken legs and
necks as the inevitable result. But the irksome
tether broken the beast is satisfied at once, and
goes forward without faltering in his lurching stride.
Beside a pool somewhere in this gorge I had one of
those instantaneous glimpses, like through a narrow
window in passing, which seem to be into the ancient
past. It was over in a second or two, but in that
time I saw what the Greek sculptors saw and were
able to arrest in statuary. A man, naked except for
a pair of thin white cotton " shorts," had been netting
fish in the pool.
He had just waded out of the water
and was standing on the bank. He was young,
brown-skinned, sunburnt, and black-haired : not big,
but exceedingly well - formed and muscular, — the
muscles of his arms and chest and legs seemed to
creep as he moved. Presently he gathered the net
loosely into one hand and began whirling it round
his head—to dry it, I supposed—and so doing fell
into a natural and unconscious pose which had in it
the very spirit of Greek sculpture. He stood erect
his legs parted, yet not too widely—his head thrown
back ; one arm swung the rapidly whirling net, the
other was thrown out with easy grace for balance.
He was in sunlight ; behind him water ; behind the
water bushes and rocks on a climbing hillside. Such
chance visions the old sculptors saw, too, from time to
time. They saw and carried in mind, and with striving
and adequate craftsmanship endowed their work with
the spirit they had so caught. And the beings, male
and female, who provided these rare transitory visions,
were the product of their environment—that favoured
and peculiar combination of sea and mountain and
island, and warm pellucid atmosphere, and sunshine
and sky and colour, and rock and stream and wood,
which is found in and around the -^gean Sea, and
nowhere else.
I knew that this man must be a Greek, but asked
him in order to make sure ; hoping to find, also, that
he called himself Alcibiades, or Pericles, or Homeros,