"And you think he's there?"
"I don't know. . it's just a feeling." She was no more than a shadow in the starlight, standing staring towards the steel ribbon of the water. "That place was terribly important to him. He writes very factually, you know, not at all interestingly, except to experts. But this passage was different. It had a compelling sense of excitement." She hesitated, and then said, "You'd have to read it, I think, to understand. I can only give the facts-the geophysical facts and they're quite extraordinary. What he says is that during the last and most severe stage of the Wiirm glaciation the sea level of the Mediterranean was up to four hundred feet lower than it is at present. Violent winds from the south picked up the sand from the exposed North African coast and carried it to the Balkan peninsula. Greece was buried under that sand to a depth of two or three hundred feet. It's all gone now. You can see traces of red here and there in the soil, but twenty thousand years of erosion have washed the great blanket of sand away-except in this one place."
She looked at me and her hand touched my arm, holding it. "Will you go there-tomorrow? Will you see if he's there?"
And without waiting for me to reply, she went on, her words comina: in a rush: "If he is there … it scares me to think of it. Alone in that place all this time. It made such a deep impression on him-the atmosphere of it. It seemed to fascinate him. You see, ever since those great dust storms, there's been life there, human life-Bronze Age, Neolithic, the old Stone Age, risht back to Mousterian Man. There's chert in the area and they knapped it like flint-chipped sharp slivers off to make their implements. . knives, arrowheads, all their weapons, and the chippings aren't buried as they are in a cave-dwelling. Because of erosion, the evidence is lying there on the surface, so that he didn't have to dig-he could just read the w^hole story as he wandered about. He said it was a dead place, a sort of cemetery of continual human occupation." And she added with sudden intensity, "It's not healthy for him to be there alone." Her fingers tightened on my arm. "Will you go-please? Not in the Land-Rover. It's too conspicuous. There's a bus leaves the village about seven and you could hitch-hike (m from Jannina."
That was how I came to find myself wandering alone next day in the lunar landscape of the red dunes near Ayios Giorgios. Sonia had produced food for me, which she had stowed in his old rucksack, and by ten that morning I was in the cab of a cattle truck driving south out of Jannina. We called at two villages on the way, and it was a little after eleven-thirty that we came to the valley, the road snaking down between the hills, and that hole in the rock showing like a watchful eye above us. The aqueduct came into view, its ancient arches spanning the river, and beyond it the reservoir gleamed like a mirror in the sunshine. "Endaksi-Ayios Giorgios." The truck slowed to a stop where the road to the village turned off to the left. I thanked the driver and climbed out. "Herete." I waved him goodbye and he drove off, leaving me standing alone in the dust on the verge, the sun warm on my face. As soon as the truck was out of sight, I started down the
road which had been blasted out of the hillside above the reservoir. There was no breeze and already it was hot, an early spring heat-wave. Patches of red earth showed on the far side, and high in the sky a bird wheeled and hovered. At the far end of the reservoir the sloping face of the dam was white with the water pouring down it. And on the other side of the road, the aqueduct tunnel was a shadowed slit in the naked rock. There was no difficulty in reaching it. You could even walk in it without stooping, for it was built to the height of a man, tapered at the top like the entrance to a catacomb. It was so narrow that my body blocked the light and I probed ahead with her torch only to find that she had been right-the cleft was blocked by a rock fall about 25 or 30 yards from the entrance.
I switched the torch off and stood in the semi-darkness, thinking for a moment of those Romans hacking their way into the mountainside nearly 2,000 years ago. It must have been quite an engineering feat in those days. I wondered what the old man had been thinking when he had stood where I stood now. Had the rock walls told him what he would find on the top of the hill inside which he stood? It seemed unlikely. I had no idea what chert looked like then, but the walls were smooth, except for the marks of Roman tools. It appeared to be a fairly soft rock, volcanic probably, and no doubt an earthquake had caused the rock fall.
I walked slowly back towards the slit of brightness that marked the entrance, and when I reached it and stood again in the sunshine, I found my mind had moved far enough back into the past for the road itself to seem an intrusion. I followed the road, moving almost automatically, and where it curved round the shoulder of a hill, I found a goat track leading steeply up. It was not a very long climb, but the track zigzagged to a bluff, so that I had no view of what lay ahead of me until I topped the last rise and it burst upon me with all its strange unearthly beauty. Here, suddenly stretched out before me, was a world that was out of time, completely apart from the landscape in which it lay. Instead of grass and rock and the Greek flowers of mountains in springtime, here was nothing but desert-red, desiccated dunes, so bare of anything that a withered, stunted bush was like the prospect of an oasis.
I hesitated, shocked by the transformation. And when I finally started forward again, that red world, with its extraordinary timeless atmosphere, seemed to swallow me completely. The colour of the sand absorbed the sun's heat. The place was like an oven, and so deathly still that it seemed all life had ceased here long, long ago. I felt my nerves tingle and the hair of my neck stiffen. I glanced quickly up at the blue vault of the sky. Nothing stirred, no sign of that eagle, or whatever it had been, hovering; the sky was empty, as empty as the red dune world into which I was slowly advancing. And when I looked back, there was no sign of any other world behind me, only the scuff of my feet in the loose sand to show the way I had come.
It was a confusing place, for the dunes were a series of humps and hollows without any regular pattern. The sun was little help, for it was almost overhead, but as I topped a rise, I came upon something I could use as a guideline. At first I did not understand what it was. I was looking across a steep ravine of sand, and on the far side, the smooth red surface of the next dune was broken by a spill of stones. These stones built up like a cone to a point on the dune-top where they stood proud by at least the height of a man, as though a great cairn had been erected there. What puzzled me was where the stones had come from.
Standing there, looking around me, I saw that there were other points where stone showed through the sand. But these were all quite different, for there was no spill of stone and nothing had collapsed; here the rains and strong winds had eroded the sand overlay to expose the rock below. And since in every case the rock had been shattered as by a giant hammer, it was clear that this could only have been caused by ice. I realized then that the rock I was seeing exposed in the twentieth century a.d. was rock that had not seen the light of day since its shattering by the deadly cold of the last Ice Age.
But that did not explain the spill of stones on the far dune. I slithered down into the ravine. The floor was packed hard, but the soft sides made it difficult to claw my way up. When I finally reached the top, I found that the pile of stones had the form of a collapsed circle. There was a distinct hollow in the middle. It was like the shaft of an old well exposed by erosion of the surrounding soil until it stood like a column above the ground, finally falling in upon itself and spilling down the slope.