Although the poet has not made any use of this incident in description, the actual experience which it gave him of what despair is, could not but enrich his metaphysical store, and increase his knowledge of terrible feelings; of the workings of the darkest and dreadest anticipations—slow famishing death—cannibalism and the rage of self-devouring hunger.

CHAPTER XVIII

Table of Contents

Proceed from Keratéa to Cape Colonna—Associations connected with the Spot—Second-hearing of the Albanians—Journey to Marathon—Effect of his Adventures on the Mind of the Poet—Return to Athens—I join the Travellers there—Maid of Athens

From Keratéa the travellers proceeded to Cape Colonna, by the way of Katapheke.  The road was wild and rude, but the distant view of the ruins of the temple of Minerva, standing on the loneliness of the promontory, would have repaid them for the trouble, had the road been even rougher.

This once elegant edifice was of the Doric order, a hexastyle, the columns twenty-seven feet in height.  It was built entirely of white marble, and esteemed one of the finest specimens of architecture.  The rocks on which the remains stand are celebrated alike by the English and the Grecian muses; for it was amid them that Falconer laid the scene of his Shipwreck; and the unequalled description of the climate of Greece, in The Giaour, was probably inspired there, although the poem was written in London.  It was also here, but not on this occasion, that the poet first became acquainted with the Albanian belief in second-hearing, to which he alludes in the same poem:

Deep in whose darkly-boding ear
   The death-shot peal’d of murder near.

“This superstition of a second-hearing,” says Lord Byron, “fell once under my own observation.  On my third journey to Cape Colonna, as we passed through the defile that leads from the hamlet between Keratéa and Colonna, I observed Dervish Tahiri (one of his Albanian servants) riding rather out of the path, and leaning his head upon his hand as if in pain.  I rode up and inquired.  ‘We are in peril!’ he answered.  ‘What peril? we are not now in Albania, nor in the passes to Ephesus, Missolonghi, or Lepanto; there are plenty of us well armed, and the Choriotes have not courage to be thieves.’—‘True, Affendi; but, nevertheless, the shot is ringing in my ears.’—‘The shot! not a tophaike has been fired this morning.’—‘I hear it, notwithstanding—bom—bom—as plainly as I hear your voice.’—‘Bah.’—‘As you please, Affendi; if it is written, so will it be.’