Greek Fire by Winston Graham Page B

limped down the steps to meet them.
    They had lunch out of doors on the terrace behind the house, while eagles swooped and circled overhead. Everything here was dwarfed by the great precipice behind them, which both protected and threatened from three sides. But on the fourth the ground fell away in an avalanche of forest and olive groves stretching five miles and dropping two thousand feet to the shining rim of the sea.
    Over luncheon Michaelis was talkative, Gene as conversational as was necessary, Anya silent. But it was not a bored or a disdainful silence. For all her assumptions of arrogance Gene saw perfectly well that she would look with the same contempt upon herself as upon anyone else who pretended to knowledge they didn’t have. The old man wore an embroidered smock like an artist’s coat, with buttons to the neck and a white linen collar. On his head was a little black cap shaped like a beret and worn on the slant. He had no family and his wife had been dead some years, but the three small children of his housekeeper kept popping on and off the verandah like puppies for tit-bits that he took from his own plate to give them.
    He said: “I never go down into Athens. The skies of the mind so quickly become overcast. Here in Delphi I think perhaps we can still see.…
    â€œOf course I am not a poet. I write songs. They are songs which I hope people sing, and some day may even dance to. Because they deal with elemental things it does not make them great; only truth is great—and for that one digs for ever in one‘s own soul. Perhaps enlightenment comes in death—the supreme moment of all-knowing—or is there just a blank end and candles burning and the thud of a spade? More grapes, Aristide! Man’s mind works always to conceive a unity, and enlightenment would complete it, but that alas does not prove the epiphenomenalists wrong.…
    â€œHow beautiful you are, Miss Stonaris. Beauty I think is so much more than skin deep: on that most poets are wrong, deriving from a puritan tradition which fortunately never rooted deep in Greece; beauty’s an outward expression of an inner grace. I think of Apuleius’s description of Isis: ‘her nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below.’ It is pleasant to be an old man because one can express oneself without fear of misunderstanding.…
    â€œYes, from 600 B . C . and before, the pilgrims used to come here, by sea chiefly, disembarking down there in Itea and making the long climb up to the Oracle. The people of Delphi had a bad reputation in those days—they lived off the pilgrims and often robbed them. They murdered Aesop, you know .”
    â€œI didn’t know,” said Gene. “More names.”
    â€œWell, yes, we are full of them. Croesus sent money for rebuilding the temple when it was destroyed by an earthquake. Nero robbed it. Domitian restored it. Plutarch was a priest here. So it goes on.”
    â€œSo it no longer goes on.”
    â€œNo.… Nowadays our temporary Hitlers call and stare but learn nothing from their visits.”
    After lunch Gene had a few minutes’ business talk with Michaelis and then they took their leave and walked up to explore the ruins.
    â€œWell?” Gene said.
    She stopped to finger a stone out of the side of her shoe. “I think he understands women.”
    They were climbing towards the temple of Apollo, and for a few steps they went on in silence. He said: “If I can believe my own eyes, you were as impressed by him as I was.”
    â€œWell, so if I was impressed by him? What then?”
    â€œOh, nothing.”
    She said: “Perhaps I would rather marry Michaelis than any man I have ever met. Does that satisfy you?”
    â€œAt sixty-nine?”
    She shrugged. “It would solve some problems. Life would be less complex.”
    â€œIf one could live and think like