The Magus, A Revised Version (39 page)

She fished in her bag and produced a
small note, and held it out to
the boy and pointed to him and the girl. They were to share it. The boy hesitated, then took it.

‘
Please take a photo.
’

I went impatiently to the car, got her camera, and took a photo. The boy insisted that we take his address; he wanted a copy, to remember.

We started back for the car with the little girl beside us. Now she seemed unable to stop smiling
–
that beaming smile all Greek peasant children have hidden behind their solemn shyness. Alison bent and kissed her, and as we drove
off
, turned and waved. And waved again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her bright face turn to me, then take in my expression. She settled back.

‘
Sorry. I didn
’
t realize we were in such a hurry.
’

I shrugged; and didn
’
t argue.

I knew exactly what she had been trying to tell me. Perhaps not all of it had been put on for me; but some of it had. We drove for a mile or two in silence. She said nothing until we got to Livadia. We had to talk then, because there was food to buy.

It should have cast a shadow over the day. But it didn
’
t, perhaps be-because it was a beautiful day and the landscape we came into one of the greatest in the world; what we were doing began to loom, like the precipitous blue shadow of Parnassus itself, over what we were. We wound up the high hills and glens and had a picnic lunch in a meadow dense with clover and broom and wild bees. Afterwards we passed the crossroad where Oedipus is reputed to have killed his father. We stopped and stood among the sere thistles by a drystone wall; an anonymous upland place, exorcized by solitude. All the way in the car up to Arachova, prompted by Alison, I talked about my own father, and perhaps for the first time in my life without bitterness or blame; rather in the way that Conchis talked about
his
life. And then as I glanced sideways at Alison, who was against the door, half-turned towards me, it came to me that she was the only person in the world that I could have been talking like that to; that without noticing it I had slipped back into something of our old
relationship …
too close to need each other s names.
I looked back to the
road, but her eyes were still on me, and I had to speak.

‘
A penny for them.
’

‘
How well you look.
’

‘
You haven
’
t been listening.
’

‘
Yes, I have.
’

‘
Staring at me. It makes me nervous.
’

‘
Can
’
t sisters look at their brothers?
’

‘
Not incestuously.
’

She sat back obediently against the seat, and craned up at the colossal grey cliffs we were winding under.

‘
Just a walk.
’

‘
I know. I
’
m having second thoughts.
’

‘
For me or for you?
’

‘
Mainly for you.
’

‘
We
’
ll see who drops first.
’

Arachova was a romantic shoulder of pink and terracotta houses, a mountain village perched high over the Delphi valley. I made an inquiry and was sent to a cottage near the church. An old woman came to the door; beyond her in the shadows stood a carpet-loom, a dark-red carpet half-finished on it. A few minutes
’
talk with her confirmed what the mountain had made obvious.

Alison looked at me.
‘
What
’
s she say?
’

‘
She says it
’
s about six hours
’
walk. Hard walk.
’

‘
But that
’
s fine. It
’
s what Baedeker says. One must be there at sundown.
’
I looked up at the huge grey mountainside. The old woman unhooked a key from behind the door.
‘
What
’
s she saying?
’

‘
There
’
s some kind of hut up there.
’

‘
Then what are we worrying about?
’

‘
She says it will be damn cold.
’
But it was difficult to believe, in the blazing midday heat. Alison put her hands on her hips.

‘
You promised me an adventure. I want an adventure.
’

I looked at the old woman and then back at Alison. She whisked her dark glasses
off
and gave me a hard, sideways, tough-woman
’
s stare; and although it was half-joking I could see the hint of suspicion in her eyes. If she once began to guess that I was anxious not to spend the night in the same room with her, she would also begin to guess that my halo was made of plaster.

At that moment a man led a mul
e past and the old woman called
to him
.
He
was going to fetch wood down from near the refuge.
Alison
could ride on the packsaddle.

‘
Ask her if I can go in and change into my jeans.
’

It was destined.

The long path zigzagged up a cliff-face, and leaving the lower world behind, we came over the top into the upper Parnassus. A vernally cool wind blew across two or three miles of meadowland. Beyond, sombre black firwoods and grey buttresses of rock climbed, arched and finally disappeared into fleecy white clouds. Alison dismounted and we walked over the turf beside the muleteer. He was about forty, with a fierce moustache under a broken nose and a fine air of independence about him. He told us about the shepherd life; a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars and chilling winds, endless silences broken only by bells, alarms against wolves and eagles; a life unchanged in the last six thousand years. I translated for Alison. She warmed to him at once, establishing a half-sexual, half-philanthropic rapport across the language barrier.

He said he had worked in Athens for a time, but
then hyparchi
esychia,
there was no silent peace there. Alison liked the word:
esych
ì
a,
esych
ì
a,
she kept on repeating. He laughed and corrected her pronunciation; stopping and conducting her, as if she were an orchestra. Her eyes flicked defiantly at me, to see if she was behaving properly in my eyes. I kept a neutral face; but I liked the man, one of those fine rural Greeks who constitute the least servile and most likeable peasantry in Europe, and I couldn
’
t help liking Alison for liking him back.

On the far side of the grassland we came to two
kalyvia,
rough stone huts, by a spring. Our muleteer was taking another path from then on. Alison fished impulsively in her red Greek shoulder-bag, and pressed on him two packets of airline cigarettes.
‘
Esychia,
’
the muleteer said. He and Alison stood interminably shaking hands, while I took their photo.

‘
Esychia, esychia.
Tell him I know what he means.
’

‘
He knows you know. That
’
s why he likes you.
’

At last we set
off
through the firs.

‘
You think I
’
m just sentimental.
’

‘
No, I don
’
t. But one packet would have been enough.
’

‘
No, it wouldn
’
t. I felt two packets fond of him.
’

Later she said,
‘
That beautiful word.
’

‘
It
’
s doomed.
’

We climbed a little way.
‘
Listen.
’

We stopped on the stony track and listened and there was nothing but silence,
esychia,
the breeze in the fir-branches. She took my hand and we walked on.

The path mounted interminably through the trees, through clearings alive with butterflies, over rocky stretches where we several times lost the path. As we came higher, it grew cooler, and the mountain ahead, a damp polar grey, disappeared completely into the cloud. We spoke very little because we seldom had breath to speak. But the solitude, the effort, the need I had continually to take her hand to help her when the path became, as it frequently did, a rough staircase rather than a path
–
all this broke some of the physical reserve between us; instituted a sort of sexless camaraderie that we both accepted as the form.

It was about six when we came to the refuge. It was tucked away above the tree-line in a goyal, a minute windowless building with a barrel-vaulted roof and a chimney. The door was of rusty iron, perforated with jagged bullet-holes from some battle with the Communist
andarte
during the Civil War: we saw four bunks, a pile of old red blankets, a stove, a lamp, a saw and an axe, even a pair of skis. But it looked as if no one had stayed there for years.

I said,
‘
I
’
m game to call it a day here.
’
But she didn
’
t even answer; simply pulled on a jumper.

The clouds canopied us, it began to drizzle, and as we turned up over a crest, the wind cut like January in England. Then suddenly the clouds were all around us, a swirling mist that cut visibility down to thirty yards or less. I turned to look at Alison. Her nose had gone red and she looked very cold. But she pointed up the next boulder-strewn slope.

At the top of it we came to a col and miraculously, as if the mist and the cold had been a small test, the
sky began to clear. The clouds
thinned, were perfused by oblique sunlight, then burst open into great pools of serene blue. Soon we were walking in sunshine again. Before us lay a wide basin of green turf, ringed with peaks and festooned by streaks of snow still clinging to the screes and hollows of the steeper slopes. Everywhere there were flowers
–
harebells, gentians, deep magenta-red alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage. They burst out of every cranny in the rocks, they enamelled every stretch of turf. It was like stepping back a season. Alison ran on ahead, wildly, and turned, grinning, her arms held out, like a bird about to take wing; then ran on again, dark-blue and jeans-blue, in absurd childish swoops.

Lykeri, the highest peak, was too steep to be climbed quickly. We had to scramble up, using our hands, resting frequently. Near the top we came on beds of violets in bloom, huge purple flowers that had a delicate scent; and then at last, hand in hand, we struggled up the last few yards and stood on the little platform with its crowning cairn.

Alison said,
‘
Oh my God, oh my God.
’

On the far side a huge chasm plunged down two thousand feet of shadowy air. The westering sun was still just above the horizon, but the clouds had vanished. The sky was a pale, absolutely dustless, absolutely pure, azure. There were no other mountains near to crowd the distances out. We seemed to stand immeasurably high, where land and substance drew up to a narrow zenith, remote from all towns, all society, all drought and defect. Purged.

Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colours. There were deep-blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-coloured earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters
ÖÙÓ
–‘
light
’
. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light. It didn
’
t touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.