Excellency, I know now why he delays.
I left early, at sunrise, dressed as I had been on that earlier occasion when I watched them among the rocks. I am not used to walking, and progress was slow, once I had gone up from the shore into the foothills. The sun was high over the sea when I reached the side of the gorge, and fiercely hot on my back as I climbed. This gorge, narrow and very deep, lies at a right angle to the line of the shore. It rises higher on the far side, then tilts down in a long gradual line to form the promontory. The ruins that Mister Bowles is so interested in lie beyond this, on the reverse slope. To reach them from here it was necessary to work round the neck of the gorge through tangles of rock and scrub. I had calculated that this route would bring me out more or less directly above the ruins. If I proceeded cautiously I should be able to approach without attracting the attention of anyone already there.
It was intensely hot. The pulsing of the cicadas was almost intolerably loud, drowning all other sounds. Wavering clouds of tortoiseshell butterflies rose around me, disturbed from their feeding on the origen flowers. Already I was feeling exhausted. I was paying the penalty for years of sedentary living. My legs ached, I was perspiring freely. Thoughts of serpents and scorpions came unbidden to my mind. Once I stumbled and fell, bruising my shin. Nevertheless I persisted. I took off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. I pushed back the headcloth from my sweating brow. The desire to have my uncertainties removed increased with every step. In fact, so totally was I prey to this ardour that my physical discomforts ceased to trouble me, rather they began to be welcomed as a sort of earnest of success. Suffering, too, is a kind of portent. (Let me take this opportunity of saying that I have always wished to suffer, all my life – though it is only recently that I have fully realised this. That is why Mehmet Bey found such a willing instrument in me: not because I wanted to betray, but because I wanted to suffer. That is why I became a writer of reports, Excellency. Otherwise why would I wrestle with words, go on wrestling, when every bout ends with me thudding to the canvas? Easier to stay down, make the submission sign. I see I have used the same word as Mister Bowles. Instrument. An odd word for him to use.)
With undimmed ardour, then, I worked my way round the side of the gorge to the long spur of the headland. Now I was in sight of the sea again, glimpsed its far blue through tangles of broom and holly oak. Below me I could see the beginnings of the ruins, traces of walls here and there, discernible as lines and angles rather than structures, signs of a human intention among the otherwise haphazard accumulations of nature. I paused at this point, and it was fortunate I did so, because in this pause I heard voices, higher up, to my right. Moving very slowly, and keeping well below the line of the spur, I made my way towards this sound, and after no more than a hundred metres I saw them, saw the drab olive of their uniforms, two soldiers sitting on a narrow level backed by rock, in the shade of a low pine tree. One sat against the rock, the other was further forward, looking out towards the sea. I could not see their faces clearly, but their heads were young-looking, close-cropped – they were not wearing their kepis. There is room there, as far as I could judge, for bedding and a fire. A good place for surveillance, because although they cannot overlook the actual site itself, they can watch all approaches to it from above, from the interior. I suspect that Mahmoud Pasha has posted at least two more men below the site, on the shoreward side.
They showed no sign of being aware of my existence. With utmost circumspection, using declivities, thin folds in the hills, rocks, bushes, anything that afforded cover, I made my way down towards the ruins. Further down, concealment was easier as the vegetation grew more thickly, there were trees among the scrub, wild almonds, gnarled abandoned olives, umbrella pines, even some chestnut trees, all this due to the presence of water here, just below ground.
I paused again here, grateful for the shade. Far below I could see the long irregular swathe of green where vegetation clothed the shallow ravine of the water-course running down to the shore. Beyond this, and appearing like a continuation of it, the ancient jetty pushed into the sea, the water greening over the massive blocks below the surface. The shapes of marble, untarnished by centuries of immersion, glimmered in this light, at this distance, like limbs of some gigantic marine deity sprawling there. Somewhere below me, though I heard no sound, somewhere amidst this denser foliage, if I was right, was Mister Bowles.
I descended, following the green tracery of the spring, scrambling over rock and scrub, clumsy, fearful-yes, I was beginning to feel afraid, Excellency, as if Mister Bowles might suddenly manifest himself, confront me, rise up from among the rocks. I experienced that ancient fear of the watcher or tracker when he suddenly feels that he himself may be the quarry. Vigilance in pursuer or pursued breeds terror.
Nevertheless I persevered, hearing the sounds of my own exertion, hearing too the faint but all-pervasive sound of running water. The going was easier now, I was following a cracked, uneven pavement, partly grassed over. On one side of me circular bases of pillars formed the rough pattern of a colonnade; on the other the ground had slipped and fallen away, there were hummocks of rubble softened by grass and ground ivy. The pavement led to a tholos, perhaps marking the inner sanctuary of the temple. Beyond this the ground was again heaped and broken.
I took a path between thickets of arbutus, or what at first seemed a path – in fact it was merely a level cleft between outcrops of rock, and led me into another, but much narrower and steeper ravine.
As I moved slowly forward through this defile, my sense of desolation grew, the constriction in my heart tightened. No longer the ardour of discovery. Now I felt only doubt of surviving in this fearful undergrowth. Perhaps Mister Bowles was not there at all. Why should I have thought that he was? Why was I there myself, what chimera had lured me? Reason dimmed in me, all purpose left me. I was reduced to my own solitary inexplicable existence, an unwieldy, sweating person, uttering intermittent grunts, his life wasted behind him, his prospects minimal. In search of what? I stopped, stood still, and fear at my existence settled round me, closely, intimately. In full summer, in the middle hours of the day, we should avoid lonely, enclosed places, Excellency. Existence is intensified in us, to the point of dread. There was dread in the beating of my heart, in the shrilling of cicadas, the wavering flight of butterflies, the leaps of grasshoppers sustained beyond expectation. Pan's time, when every creature realises itself, the weak in fear, the strong in power.
I had some moments of swoon there, Excellency. Then, with an effort, I went on, clambered out of this 'well of eternity', literally clambered, as the gully had become impassable. I scrambled up one side, clinging to the roots of cistus and sage, on to a more gradual upward slope facing away from the sea. Before me, on the left, were further ruins, low walls, the ground plan of a house. A fig tree grew against the arch of a doorway. To my right, the slope continued, bare, ochreous, scattered with small rocks. Along the crest of the slope a few straggling thorn bushes. As I stood there, looking up, I heard, or thought I heard, a voice, a human voice, male, in trailing snatches of song. I at once began to climb the rise, setting my feet sideways, caution and the effort of climbing keeping my body low. The singing carried to me again. I lay flat, with my breast against the last few feet of the slope. Very carefully I worked my way upwards until by raising my head I was able to see what lay on the other side of the slope. What I saw was so extraordinary that I almost despair of making it credible to Your Excellency.