TRAVELLING IN STYLE : EXCELLENT ADVENTURES : LAST STOP : Stealing the Acropolis : Nothing was going to keep our hero from a close-up look at the glory that was Greece

IN 1867, A YOUNG and not yet very well-known journalist named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who signed himself Mark Twain, set sail from New York on a ship called the Quaker City for a grand tour of Europe and the Holy Land. His account of the journey, based on newspaper dispatches he had filed en route, was published in 1869 under the title “The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims Progress.”

Notwithstanding his flippant asides and his pointed satire on the behavior of his fellow Americans abroad, Twain made it clear that travel in those times was, perforce, adventure indeed--in the course of which the tourist, however genteel, was apt to encounter not mere purse snatchers or lost reservations but brigands, civil wars and plagues. One of Twain’s more daring exploits on the trip, in fact, was inspired by his discovery, when the ship arrived in the port of Piraeus, that Athens was under rigid quarantine for some disease or other and that the passengers thus wouldn’t be allowed ashore. He had encountered earlier quarantines on the voyage, but this time Twain was distraught--”To lie a whole day in sight of the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without visiting Athens!” he wrote. “Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word. . . .” In the best can-do American spirit, though, Twain and three of his shipmates decided to sneak ashore anyway. This is an abbreviated account of their exploits. AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT, WHEN MOST of the ship’s company were abed, four of us stole softly ashore in a small boat, a clouded moon favoring the enterprise, and started two and two, and far apart, over a low hill, intending to go clear around the Piraeus, out of the range of its police. Picking our way so stealthily over that rocky, nettle-grown eminence made me feel a good deal as if I were on my way somewhere to steal something. . . .

We made the entire circuit of the town without seeing anybody but one man, who stared at us curiously but said nothing, and a dozen persons asleep on the ground before their doors, whom we walked among and never woke, but we woke up dogs enough, in all conscience--we always had one or two barking at our heels, and several times we had as many as 10 or 12 at once. They made such a preposterous din that persons aboard our ship said they could tell how we were progressing for a long time and where we were by the barking of the dogs. The clouded moon still favored us. When we had made the whole circuit, and were passing among the houses on the further side of the town, the moon came out splendidly, but we no longer feared the light.

Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant Acropolis for a mark and steered straight for it over all obstructions. Part of the way it was covered with small, loose stones--we trod on six at a time and they all rolled. Another part of it was dry, loose, newly plowed ground. Still another part of it was a long stretch of low grapevines, which were tanglesome and troublesome, and which we took to be brambles.

In the neighborhood of one o’clock in the morning, when we were heated with fast walking and parched with thirst, Denny exclaimed, “Why, these weeds are grapevines!” And in five minutes we had a score of bunches of large, white, delicious grapes, and were reaching down for more when a dark shape rose mysteriously up out of the shadows beside us and said, “Ho!” And so we left. . . .

Soon we passed around the shoulder of the hill, and the citadel, in all its ruined magnificence, burst upon us! We hurried across the ravine and up a winding road and stood on the old Acropolis, with the prodigious walls of the citadel towering above our heads. We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood upon a pavement of purest white marble, deeply worn by footprints. Before us in the flooding moonlight rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon--the Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules and the grand Parthenon. . . .

As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length of this stately temple, the scene about us was strangely impressive. Here and there in lavish profusion were gleaming white statues of men and women, propped against blocks of marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others headless--but all looking mournful in the moonlight and startlingly human!

We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the Parthenon. The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens now. We sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty battlements of the citadel and looked down--a vision! And such a vision! Athens by moonlight! We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window, every clinging vine, every projection, was as distinct and sharply marked as if the time were noonday; and yet there was no glare, no glitter, nothing harsh or repulsive--the noiseless city was flooded with the mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber. Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in their ruin--underfoot the dreaming city--in the distance the silver sea--not on the broad earth is there another picture half so beautiful!

It occurred to us after a while that if we wanted to get home before daylight betrayed us, we had better be moving. So we hurried away. . . .

Just as the earliest tinges of dawn flushed the eastern sky and turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, roundabout marching and emerged upon the seashore abreast with the ships. Shortly our own boat issued from the gloom and took us aboard. We rowed noiselessly away, and were safe at home once more.

“The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims Progress” is available in paperback from Signet/NAL, Airmont and Hippocrene and in a hardcover edition, combined with “Roughing It,” from Library of America.