The chatter of the women died as we got out of the car. Kotiadis said something to them in Greek and the music of their laughter mingled with the tinkling noise of water running over stones. "Now we walk." And he led the way along the path, which followed the stream. Old olive trees twined gnarled branches over our heads, their trunks dark against the green of close-cropped grass, the white of cyclamens. In the distance, goat bells tinkled, and in a clearing ahead, a glint of orange marked the camp.
There were three small sleeping tents, all orange, and one blue mess tent. Some clothes hung on a line and smoke drifted up from a stone fireplace with a blackened iron pot on it. It was such a beautiful, peaceful place, with the sun dappling the grass through the grey leaves of the olives and the cool sound of the water, that it was difficult to imagine two men coming to blows here. I thought I saw a movement in the mess tent, a figure standing in the shadows. But Kotiadis went straight past the camp and I followed him, wondering why she was here, what her brother would have told her.
The olive trees ceased and we could see the valley then with the hills on either side running back to a blue vista of
distant peaks. We were walking on a carpet of thyme, oleanders by the water and the slope above us patched with a bright pattern of early spring flowers. The air was full of an unbelievable scent.
Kotiadis pointed to a gaping brown wound in the hillside ahead. "That is where they dig." He halted suddenly. I thought it was to get his breath, but then he said, "Why does a man attack his assistant when they are already together almost one whole month? Have you thought of that? Why not the day before, or the week before?" He was staring up at the brown gash. "I tell you why." He turned and faced me. "Because that night Cartwright is telephoning to Athens from the taverna,"
"What about?"
He shrugged. "That is for you to discover. Some friend of his, an archaeologist. That is what he says. Myself, I think it is then he discovered that Dr. Van der Voort is a Communist."
If his long face hadn't looked so serious I would have thought he was joking. "You've got Communism on the brain," I said angrily. I was thinking of all he had told me, how the old man had walked this area of Greece alone, going out to the island of Levkas again and again. And before that in the Sicilian islands, in Pantelleria and North Africa. For four years, since 1965, he had been searching, desperately searching, using up every penny he possessed, and all Kotiadis could think of was Communism. "If he were a Communist, why the hell do you think he'd want to bury himself up here in this lonely valley?"
He turned on me then. "What sort of a world are you living in?" He caught hold of my arm and swung me round. "Re-gardez! There is Albania." He flung out his arm in a broad gesture. "That one is Mao-Communist. And there is Yugoslavia." He pointed to the north. "Tito-Communist. A third frontier is with the Bulgars-Russian puppets." He almost spat. "We are ringed with Communist enemies. Their armies are on our north-eastern frontier, their fleet among our islands, and beyond the Aegean we are face-en-face with Turkey. The smell of war is in the air and you wonder we are sensitive?"
And when I reminded him again that this was just an anthropological dig, he said, "That is good cover for a man who wishes to travel the villages of my country."
It was no good arguing with him, and we walked on, climbing the final slope to the cave. A young corporal in olive-green uniform came to meet us and Kotiadis talked with him for a moment. Then we had reached the dig, where Cart-wright waited for us, stripped to the waist and wearing a pair of over-long khaki shorts. Behind him, Hans Winters was standing in the trench they had dug. He reminded me of Sonia, the same features, but rounder and heavier. He, too, was stripped to the waist, and his long fair hair, bleached almost white by the sun, hung over his eyes, limp with sweat.
They already knew Kotiadis. It was I who was the stranger, and their eyes fastened on me, waiting to know who I was- and Kotiadis let them wait, watching them both, a cigarette in his mouth, his sleepy-lidded eyes half closed.
My gaze had fastened on Cartwright. He was about my own age, tall and thin, his ribs showing through the tight-stretched skin of his torso, his stomach fiat and hard with muscle. But the shoulders were sloped, the head small. He had a little sandy moustache and high colouring; and the round steel spectacles he wore gave him a studious, rather than an athletic appearance. His left arm was in a sling.
He blinked when I told him who I was. "I didn't expect you'd. ." He hesitated. "He never m-mentioned you." He was on the defensive, his nervousness showing in a slight stutter. His eyes shifted to Kotiadis, owl-like behind the thick lenses. "Any news of Dr. Van der Voort?"
"Ohi." Kotiadis shook his head.
He was glad. I sensed it immediately; it probably gave him a glow of importance to have the dig to himself. "I suppose you're in charge here now?"
"Yes."
I looked beyond him, along the line of the trench into the
shadowed interior of the cave. It wasn't really a cave at all, more of a scooped-out hollow in the hillside, as though a great piece of it had been prised out and let fall into the valley below. And it was large. Even where we stood the overhang protruded above our heads. The height of it must have been a good 50 feet, and the cave itself about 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep. Stones had been piled on the far side, and at the back, where they had erected a little blue terylene shelter on an aluminium frame, the curve of the rock wall was black, and so smooth it might have been glazed. "How old is this cave?" I asked him. He hadn't expected that, and I was thinking of the letter from Gilmore lying on the desk in the house in Amsterdam. "Does it go back thirty-five thousand years?"
"I've no idea."
"But it's important?" It had to be important, otherwise there was no sense in the old man's behaviour.
"It's a cave-shelter," he said. "But how long it's been a cave-shelter. ." He gave a shrug. "That we'll only know when we've dug down through the layers."
"But you must have some idea what you're going to find. You're not digging here just for the fun of it."
"It's worth a try. That's all one can say at the moment."
"But what did my father think?"
"Dr. Van der Voort?"
"Yes, what did he say about it?"
He hesitated. "You've got to remember we'd been walking steadily, mostly in bitter cold, all the way down through Macedonia and a bit of Montenegro-about two hundred miles of territory we'd covered-and apart from a few artefacts, all quite recent, we'd found nothing." And he added, "Everything's relative on an expedition like this. In the end, you've got to justify it somehow. Our finances limit us to three months' work."
"In other words, it's a shot in the dark?"
"If you like."
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that the old man would have gone out in winter with such desperate urgency
to work on something he didn't believe in. "You hadn't much confidence in him, had you?"
"I didn't disagree with him, if that's what you mean."
"That's not what I meant at all," I answered. "It's just that I want to know how this fits in to the pattern of his discoveries."
"The pattern?" He seemed puzzled.
"You must have realized that he was working to some sort of an overall pattern-a framework if you like. You know very well he was out here last year, that he covered the whole area from here to the coast and out to the islands. Didn't he tell you? Didn't anybody tell you what he was aiming at?"