The last light had been shut out by the lower ranges of mountains behind them as they wound their way through the valleys to the greater peaks which, unseen in the mist and darkness, they knew lay towering to the skies towards the east. Deep ruts in the track, where mountain torrents cut it in winter cascading downwards to the lower levels, made the way hideously uneven. The car jolted and bounded, skidding violently from time to time, loose shale and pebbles rocketing from its back tyres as it took the dangerous bends.
In the back Richard, Marie Lou and Simon lurched, swayed, and bumped each other as they crouched in silent misery, their teeth chattering with the cold of the chill night that was now about them in those lofty regions….
They were in a room, a strange, low-ceilinged, eastern room, with a great, heavy, wooden door, under which they could see the fog wreathing upwards in the light of a solitary oil lamp set upon a rough-hewn table. Bunches of onions and strips of dried meat hung from the low rafters. The earthen floor of the place was cold under foot. On a deep window recess, in a thick wall stood a crude earthenware jug, and a platter with a loaf of coarse bread upon it, which was covered by a bead-edged piece of muslin.
Marie Lou roused to find herself drinking coarse, red wine out of a thick, glass tumbler. She saw Rex sitting on a wooden bench against the wall, staring before him with unseeing eyes at the grimy window. The others stood talking round a lop-sided table. A peasant woman, with a scarf about her head, whose face she could not see, appeared to be arguing with them. Marie Lou had an idea that it was about money, since De Richleau held a small pile of notes in his hand. Then the peasant woman was gone and the others were talking together again. She caught a few words here and there.
‘I thought it was a ruin … inhabited still … they beg us not to go there … not of an official order or anything to do with the Greek Church. They look on them as heathens here … associates of Mocata’s?–– No, more like a community of outlaws who have taken refuge there under the disguise of a religious brotherhood … Talisman has affected them, perhaps. Forty or fifty of them. The people here shun the place even in the daytime, and at night none of them would venture near it at any price… . You managed to get a driver?–-Yes, of a kind- What’s wrong with him?–– I don’t know. The woman didn’t seem to trust him, but I had great difficulty in understanding her at all–– Sort of bad man of the village, eh? … Have to trust him if no one else will take us.’
De Richleau passed his hand across his eyes. What was it that they had been talking about. He was so tired, so terribly tired. There had been a peasant woman, with whom he had talked of the ruined monastery up in the mountains. She seemed to be filled with horror of the place and had implored him again and again not to go. He began to wonder how they had conversed. He could make himself understood in most European languages, but he had very little knowledge of modern Greek; but that did not matter they must get on get on….
The others were standing round him like a lot of ghosts in the narrow, fog-filled village street. A little hunchback with bright, sharp eyes was peering at him. The fellow wore a dark sombrero, and a black cloak, covering his malformed body, dangled to his feet; the light from the semi-circular window of the inn was just sufficient to illuminate his face. A great, old-fashioned carriage, with two lean, ill-matched horses harnessed to it, stood waiting.
They piled into it. The musty smell of the straw-filled cushions came strongly to their nostrils. The hunchback gave them one curious, cunning look from his bright eyes, and climbed upon the box. The lumbering vehicle began to rock from side to side. The one-storeyed, flat-topped houses in the village disappeared behind them and were swallowed up in the mist.
They forded a swift but shallow river outside the village, then the roadway gave place to a stony track. Ghostlike and silent, walls of rock loomed up on either side. The horses ceased trotting and fell into a steady, laboured walk, hauling the great, unwieldy barouche from bend to bend up the rock-strewn way into the fastness of the mountains.
Simon’s teeth were chattering. That damp, clinging greyness seemed to enter into his very bones. He tried to remember what day it was and at what hour they had left Paris. Was it last night or the night before or the night before that? He could not remember and gave it up.
The way seemed interminable. No one spoke. The carriage jolted on, the hunchback crouched upon his seat, the lean horses pulling gallantly. The curve of the road ahead was always hidden from them and no sooner had they passed it than they lost sight of the curve behind.
At last the carriage halted. The driver climbed down off his box and pointed upwards, as they stumbled out on to the track. De Richleau was thrusting money into his hand. He and his aged vehicle disappeared in the shadows. Richard looked back to catch a last glimpse of it and it suddenly struck him then how queer it was that the carriage had no lamps.
The rest were pressing on, stumbling and slithering as they followed the way which had now become no more than a footpath leading upwards between huge rocks.
After a little, the gloom seemed to lighten and they perceived stars above their heads. Then, rounding a rugged promontory, they saw the age-old monastery standing out against the night sky upon the mountain slope above.
It was huge and dark and silent, with steep walls rising on two sides from a precipice. A great dome, like an inverted bowl, rose in its centre, but a portion of it had fallen in and the jagged edges showed plainly against the deep blue of the starlit night beyond.
With renewed courage they staggered on up the steep rise toward the great semi-circular arch of the entrance. The gates stood open wide, rotted and fallen from their hinges. No sign of life greeted their appearance as they passed through into the spacious courtyard.
Instinctively they made for the main building above which curved the broken arc of the ruined Byzantine dome. That must be the Church, and the crypt would lie below it.
They crossed the broken pavements of the forecourt, the Duke leaning heavily on Rex’s arm. He nodded towards a few faint lights which came from a row of outbuildings. Rex followed his glance in silence and they hurried on. That was evidently the best-preserved portion of the ruin, in which these so-called monks resided. A gross laugh, followed by the sound of smashing glass and then a hoarse voice cursing, came from that direction, confirming their thought.
All the way up from the inn half-formed fears had been troubling De Richleau that they might fall foul of this ill-omened brotherhood. He assumed them to be little less than robbers under a thin disguise, who probably eked out a miserable existence by levying toll in corn and oil and goats’ milk upon the neighbouring peasantry, but this great pile upon the slopes of Mount Peristeri was so much more vast than anything that he had imagined. A matter of fifty men might easily be lost among its rambling courts and buildings.
They advanced through another great courtyard, surrounded by ruined colonnades which were visible only by the faint starlight from above. Built by some early Christian saint, when Byzantium was still an Empire and Western Europe labouring through the semi-barbarous night of the Dark Ages, the colossal ruin must once have housed thousands of earnest men, all engaged day by day in pious study, or various active tasks to provide for that great community. Now it was as dead as those African temples which have been overgrown by jungle, only a small fragment of it occupied by a small band of dissolute, uncultured rogues.