Levkas Man by Hammond; Innes Page B

of Missolonghi. ‘Do you read your poet Byron in England now?’ Kotiadis asked.
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    â€˜Not at school?’ He shook his head at me sadly. ‘Here in Missolonghi he has his headquarters for the struggle to liberate Greece from the Turks. Here he dies. He never saw the liberation. But in Greece we remember Byron. Why do you not remember him?’
    I had no answer to that, and Missolonghi looked a miserable place. The road swung north to Agrinion and then down to the shores of the great inland sea that I remembered from the chart—the Gulf of Amvrakikos. And all the time, slices of history mingled with questions, and the sun getting hotter. As we swung away from the gulf we came to a road junction signposted Preveza to the left, Arta and Jannina to the right. We turned right, climbing again, and there were peasants on the road and in the fields.
    â€˜Beyond Jannina we shall be very near the frontier with Albánia.’ He said it with strong emphasis on the second ‘a’ as though he hated the place. ‘Albánia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria—all the north of our country is a border with Communist territory and it is from these Communist territories Dr Van der Voort comes with his expedition. You know the Red Army is holding manœuvres in Bulgaria, all the Warsaw Pact forces? And their fleet is in our waters, in the Aegean.’ He was staring at me, his cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘Don’t you think it strange that he should come into our country from Macedonia at this exact moment?’
    â€˜I doubt whether he gave it a thought.’
    â€˜You think he does not know there is trouble coming again between the Arabs and the Jews?’
    â€˜Another Israeli-Egyptian war?’
    â€˜You do not read the papers—listen to the radio?’
    â€˜I don’t speak Greek,’ I reminded him.
    â€˜But Dr Van der Voort does.’
    â€˜He wouldn’t be interested.’
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜A mind like his,’ I said, ‘dedicated to the work that has been his whole life—’
    â€˜Phui! He is trained by the Russians and he has been in Greece before.’
    We were still climbing, the road snaking through bare hills with a great deal of rock. With every mile we were driving deeper and deeper into the heart of Greece, and further away from Preveza and the sea.
    â€˜When is he in Greece before, do you know?’
    â€˜I’ve no idea.’
    He nodded. ‘Of course, you do not see him for eight years. So how can you know he was here last year. He arrived on 4th April, in Kérkira—what you call Corfu.’ He sounded his horn and thrust past a truck loaded with reeds, a blind bend just ahead. ‘Last year he is alone, and for three months he is wandering by himself in the Ionian islands, particularly Levkas, and he is on Meganisi, where he lives for some days at the village of Vatahori. He has a tent with him and a rucksack, and then for almost two weeks there is no trace of him. Next I find him at limáni Levkas—the port, you understand—and afterwards he walks from Preveza towards Jannina, along the way we are driving now, talking to people, climbing to the tops of the hills, wandering down dry river beds as though he is looking for gold, and all the time he is making notes and drawing little plans. Why, if he is not an agent?’
    â€˜He’s a palæontologist,’ I said wearily. ‘He was looking for bones.’
    â€˜Bones?’ He stared at me, his eyebrows lifted, and I found myself in the difficult position of trying to explain my father’s work. If I had said old Greek coins, or bronze statuettes, he would probably have understood, but searching for bones and worked flints, for traces of early man, was beyond his comprehension. ‘The only proper study in my country is the great civilization of Ancient Greece. Nothing else is important.’ And he went on to say that