Raising her dark eyebrows, she shot him a surprised glance. ‘Really! I thought Delphi was the pièce de résistance of all the ancient sanctuaries. That’s where the priestesses used to get dopey in a cellar on the fumes of herbs, and prophesy to people who put their ears to the ground. Surely you are going to write about that, and how people came from all over the place to consult the famous Oracle?’
‘Yes; oh yes, of course,’ he hastened to assure her. ‘But as a matter of fact, I don’t think the Oracle was quite all that it was cracked up to be. Most of the answers it gave were terribly ambiguous. You were left to interpret them for yourself, so that left the Pythoness who made them sitting pretty on the basis of “heads I win, tails you lose”. For example, look what happened to Croesus. Being a greedy type, he thought it might be a good idea to make war on his neighbour, Cyrus the Persian, and sack some of his cities; but, wanting to make certain before he started anything that he would get the best of it, he sent an Ambassador with costly presents to Delphi to consult the Oracle. The reply came back that his war against Persia would overthrow a mighty Empire. And it did—his own great Kingdom of Lydia.’
‘I should have asked for my money back,’ commented the practical Stephanie. ‘Anyhow, it’s better to be born lucky than rich.’
‘How right you are! Even before Croesus lost his kingdom, he found that out. He had a favourite son named Atys, and one night he dreamed that the beautiful youth would die of a wound from an iron weapon. He got into such a tizzy about this that he wouldn’t allow Atys to remain in the Army, found him a lovely wife to keep him busy at home, and even had all the spears and axes in the Palace hidden away, so that Atys shouldn’t cut himself on one by accident. But it wasn’t any good. A savage boar began to give trouble to the people in the Mysian hills; so they sent to the King for help to kill it. He collected his bravest hunters and Atys begged to be allowed to go along. Croesus said “No”, but Atys argued that a boar’s tusks were not made of iron, and persuaded his old man to let him go on the hunt. They found the boar, and made a circle round it. Naturally, all these young bloods wanted the kudos of being the first to wound it. They all rushed in, and Atys was just a fraction quicker than the rest. The boar didn’t get him, but the spear of one of his pals did; and that was that. Look at Midas, too.’
‘He was even richer than Croesus, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was the King of Phrygia and the richest man in the world, but even that didn’t satisfy his avarice. One morning, he was walking in his garden and he came across old Silenus. He was a kind of cask on legs, and one of the god Dionysus’s boon companions. The previous night, they had had quite a party, and Silenus had got so drunk that he had lost the others; and there he was sleeping it off under a bush.
‘Midas gave him an outsize “hair of the dog”, crowned him with a wreath of fresh roses, then took the old soak back to his patron. Dionysus was so pleased with the kindness shown his henchman that he offered to grant Midas anything he liked to ask.
‘Without a second thought, Midas asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. And, of course, it did—fruit, flowers, stones; anything he picked up on his way home. His clothes had become gold, too; so before he had gone far, he was getting pretty puffed. Seeing a mule in a field he thought he would ride, but the moment he mounted it, the animal became solid gold and couldn’t budge. When he did reach home, things went from bad to worse. The water in which he tried to wash turned to golden ice. He kissed one of his children, and the poor mite became a golden bambino; he struck a slave and found he had made a golden statue. By this time, really worried, he was getting hungry; but when he sat down to lunch, every bit of food he put in his mouth turned to gold, so he had to spit it out again. Hoping against hope that the whole thing was a bad dream, he lay down on his luxurious couch, but the great pile of soft cushions turned instantly to golden rocks.
‘At crack of dawn, with not a stitch on, he hurried back to Dionysus. The god laughed at him at first, but later took compassion on his pleading and told him that, if he bathed in the spring from which the river Pactolus rose, he could get rid of his golden touch. For days on end, willing to barter all his wealth for even a penny bun and a cup of ersatz coffee, he staggered round, hunting for the source of the river. At last he found it, plunged in, and came out able to eat and drink again.’
‘What an awful story. How about his child and the slave? Was he able to turn them back again?’ Stephanie suppressed a smile, and went on wickedly: ‘You didn’t mention his wife, but if they were fond of one another, that must have been very awkward, mustn’t it?’
‘You mean if … Well, there’s no record about that.’ Hurriedly, Robbie changed the subject. ‘That golden touch business wasn’t Midas’s only bit of bad luck or, if you prefer, stupidity. One day, he was taking a stroll through the woods and he came upon Apollo and Pan. Apollo had always prided himself on being the absolute tops where music was concerned, but Pan said he could get better music out of his reed flute than Apollo could out of his lyre. To settle the matter, they held a contest there and then, and asked Midas to act as judge. Midas said he liked Pan’s pipes better and Apollo was furious. He said Midas had no more sense of harmony than an ass, so for the rest of his life he should go about with asses’ ears. Poor Midas went home, hiding his head in a cloak; and after that, he was so ashamed of his great, pointed, hairy ears that he kept them covered up. But he couldn’t keep the secret from his barber; so everyone got to know about it, and he became the laughing-stock of his Court.’
‘I think that was very unsporting of Apollo, since he had asked Midas to act as judge. I’ve always been under the impression, too, that Apollo was one of the kindest of the gods.’
‘So he was, generally speaking. He bestowed all sorts of benefits on mankind, but he could turn awfully nasty if anyone upset him. Look at what happened to Marsyas. Athene is said to have been the first of the Olympian family to take up music, but the others laughed so much at the way she blew out her cheeks when playing the flute that she flung the instrument aside, with a curse on anyone who picked it up. Marsyas was unlucky enough to find it. He was a very ugly, ignorant Satyr. However, the flute, having touched Athene’s lips, made the most lovely music, so he was chump enough to challenge Apollo. Of course he hadn’t an earthly, and as a punishment for his impertinence, the god had him flayed alive.’
‘All the same,’ remarked Stephanie thoughtfully, ‘from what I remember about the gods and goddesses, Apollo must have been much the most attractive to women. He represented the warmth of the Sun and is always portrayed as strong-limbed and handsome, and he was both clever and brave. He would certainly have been my choice.’
‘Oh, he was brave enough,’ Robbie conceded. ‘There was the occasion when two monster giants piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa, because they had designs on two of the goddesses and hoped to get up into Olympus and abduct them. Apollo caught the raiders at it, and drove them off single-handed. And, of course, he did have a lot of successful love affairs, but the girls weren’t so universally smitten with him as one might suppose.
‘Coronis, the daughter of the King of Lepiths, was a case in point. She two-timed him with a chap named Ischys, and a crow let on to Apollo about it. He was so angry at her having preferred a mortal to himself that he not only struck her and her boy friend dead, but cursed the crow so that all crows have had black feathers ever since. Then there was a girl at Delphi named Castalia who disliked him so much that, rather than sleep with him, she drowned herself in a fountain. With the beautiful Daphne, too, he had no luck. He did his utmost to seduce her with presents and all that, but she flatly refused to play; so he tried to take her by force. He had actually got his arms round her, but she prayed for help to the Earth-Mother Gaea, who did a quick magic, and before Apollo knew what was happening he found himself clutching a laurel bush. He must have felt awfully sick.’
Stephanie hooted with laughter. ‘I bet he was! I would give anything to have seen his fac
e. Have you any more funny stories like that?’
‘Well,’ Robbie temporised. ‘I don’t know about funny, unless you have a practical-joke sense of humour. Of course, the ancient Greeks were pretty primitive. Just as schoolboys still get a big laugh out of seeing an old gent slip up on a piece of banana peel, I suppose your remote ancestors fairly split their sides at seeing someone they didn’t much care about turned into a lizard or a toad.
‘That sort of thing was liable to happen to quite nice people too, because lots of the trees and nearly every stream and lake were the home of some supernatural being, and it was terribly easy to damage their property without meaning to. Then out they popped, and did the most unpleasant things.
‘Take Dryope, for example. All she did was to pick a bright flower from a bush for her little girl. Red sap started to run because, as it happened, the bush was really a wood-nymph taking a nap, and the sap was her blood. “I’ll learn you to go about wounding bushes,” yelled the nymph in a fury—or words to that effect. And next moment Dryope found herself sprouting twigs and leaves. She had only just time to gasp out a prayer that her child might be allowed to come and play near her, before she became a bush herself. Then there was the awful business of Erysichthon; but, of course, he brought that on himself.’
‘What terrible fate befell him?’
‘Well, it was a sort of Midas trouble in reverse. In a general way, the oak was sacred to Hera; but there was one giant oak in Thessaly that Demeter had made her special property, and a bunch of Dryads living in the neighbourhood adopted it as an evening rendezvous to play “chase me round the mulberry bush” with a gang of young Satyrs. For some reason—I suppose because he wanted to build a ship or a new barn—Erysichthon, who was King of those parts, decided to have this oak cut down.
‘In vain, the locals implored him not to. He put his woodmen on the job and after tremendous efforts the giant oak was felled. The Dryads were fed to the teeth at their jive centre being ruined, so they rushed off and complained to the management. Demeter naturally resented Erysichthon’s having wrecked her dance hall, and assured the girls that she would see him off. She sent one of her Oreads up to the far, ice-bound north, having told her messenger to bring back Famine. When this character, with a head like a skull and his ribs sticking out through parchment skin, put in an appearance, Demeter simply said: “Go and do your stuff on Erysichthon.”
‘After his hard day’s work helping to cut down the oak, you can imagine that the King had put away a good-sized steak for his dinner; but while he was asleep, Famine breathed upon him and he woke up as hungry as a hunter.
‘I imagine he had a terrific “brekker”. Fried eggs, sausages and bacon, kidneys on toast, kedgeree and rounded off with a few slices of York ham and half a cold grouse. You know, the sort of breakfast our great-grandfathers used to have in Victorian times. But it wasn’t much good. By lunch time, he was again ravenous.
‘From then on, he never suffered a trace of indigestion but, on the other hand, he could never cram himself with enough to satisfy his hunger. His appetite was so enormous that he ate all day, till he had no flocks and herds left to slaughter. In due course, he had to sell his jewels and his palace in order to buy enough to eat.
‘At last, driven from his kingdom by his creditors, he had only one asset left—a lovely daughter named Mestra. As he was still tormented by hunger night and day, he decided to sell her as a slave. Luckily for her and for him, it happened that she had played “slap and tickle” with the great god Poseidon. In gratitude for the fun they had had, the Sea King had given her the power to turn herself into anything she liked. So each time her papa sold her for the price of a few cuts off the joint, she promptly became a bee or a beetle or a butterfly and came back to him, so that he could put her up for auction afresh.
‘But after a while, the chaps who were in the money and on the look-out for lovelies who would keep them warm at nights tumbled to this. They formed a ring, and when Mestra was put up, refused to bid for her. That left Erysichthon completely in the ditch, and as Demeter refused to pardon him he had to eat himself.’
‘That’s quite enough for today, thank you,’ said Stephanie.
But by that time they had rounded the great bend in the gulf and were nearing Patras. After the Piraeus and Salonika, it is the largest port in Greece and, as such, mainly a modern, commercial city. Earthquakes in its neighbourhood are frequent, but although the town has escaped recent devastation, it contains few ancient buildings of interest. It had not even occurred to Robbie to book rooms, but Stephanie had looked up the hotels and, finding that the Cecil in St. Andrew Street headed the list, she suggested that they go to it.
After a few enquiries, they found the way there, and Robbie booked two single rooms, each with a private bathroom. Stephanie then said that, after her drive, she would like to rest; so it was agreed that they should meet at eight o’clock down in the dining room. Robbie, who had lately been missing his long sessions of day-dreaming lying on his bed or a chaise-longue in the Embassy garden, decided that he could pass an hour or two very happily doing nothing; so he, too, went up to his room and enjoyed a belated siesta.
For dinner, Stephanie had changed into a cocktail frock, and so alluring did Robbie find her that, several times during the meal, the thought came to him how wonderful it would be if only he were a god and could carry her off into the woods and ravish her. But he sternly put such disturbing ideas from him and instead tried to draw her out about the sort of life she had led.
His efforts met with little success. As far as he could gather, she had not moved in Athenian society or, at all events, not its higher strata that mingled with the Diplomatic Corps. Her mother, she said, had never been really happy living in Greece, and had not many close friends. There were a few families with whom they dined from time to time or joined up with for beach parties in the summer. Her father, of course, was absorbed in his commercial interests and had a separate set of wealthy men friends, with whom he frequently spent the evening. She said that she had never been allowed to go to a night club, but various boy friends took her to the cinema and to subscription dances, and she had had one really desperate love affair of which she preferred not to talk. She added only that for her it had ended unhappily, because her father had not considered the man good enough for her; so he had married someone else. Robbie forbore from pressing her further on the subject.
They enjoyed their dinner, and lingered over it till nearly ten o’clock. Then, after a liqueur in the lounge, they went up to bed. As Robbie undressed, he could not remember ever having had such a happy day.
Next morning, he had just finished his breakfast in bed when the house telephone rang. It was Stephanie and, after briefly wishing him good morning, she said: ‘Look. I take it you will be occupied all the morning doing your business with the oil people you’ve come here to see. I had to pack in such a hurry that I left at home quite a number of things I need, so I want to go out and do some shopping. Would it be all right with you if we meet here about one o’clock for lunch?’
Robbie was completely nonplussed. He had no oil people he had to see, and he had been looking forward to a pleasant morning exploring the town with Stephanie, while other young men turned round to cast envious eyes at him for having such a charming companion. But he realised at once that, unless he played up to the role he had given himself, he could not expect her to continue to believe in it; so he said, a little lamely:
‘Yes, I’ve got a few people I have to see. All right, then. By all means do your shopping. I’ll be waiting for you here around one o’clock.’
Having taken his time bathing and dressing, he spent two rather boring hours mooching round the straight, arcaded streets and squares of the city. By half-past twelve, fed up with his aimless wandering, he turned back towards the Cecil. When he was within a hundred yards of it, a tall, thin man came out from the hotel entrance and, with rapid strides, approached him. With a sudden shock, he recognised the man as Václ
av Barak.
So unexpected was the encounter that Robbie instinctively lifted his right hand a few inches, on an impulse to raise his hat. Next moment, he was contemplating an abrupt about-turn as the only means of avoiding coming face to face with Barak. He need not have worried. When they had first come into contact at Toyrcolimano, Barak had not given Robbie even a glance and, when he had seen him again as a stooge at the Travel Agency, he had not bothered to take in his features.
The lean, dark Czech, with the black, hair-line moustache, strode past Robbie without appearing to notice him. But this encounter brought home one thing to Robbie, in no uncertain manner. However delightful he might find this new experience of basking in the smiles of a lovely girl like Stephanie, it was not for that he had come to Patras. He had much more important fish to fry, and it was quite time that he gave serious thought to them.
13
You Have Been Warned
For Robbie, running into Barak had been like receiving a pail of ice-cold water on the back after hours of blissful sunbathing. He had still not fully recovered from the shock by lunch time, and was so distrait that Stephanie asked him if he was feeling ill. He assured her that he was quite well, and took refuge in saying that a business meeting he had had that morning had been rather worrying.
During the past half hour, he had been upbraiding himself for not even having bothered to check up that the Bratislava was arriving at Patras on Monday. Instead of mooning about the streets while Stephanie did her shopping, he could have gone to the port to find out. Barak’s presence in Patras suggested that he had come there to meet the ship. Now that Robbie’s conscience had been aroused, he felt he ought to pay a visit to the docks to gather any information that he could; so, with considerable reluctance, he told Stephanie that he would have to make another business call after the siesta.
Mayhem in Greece Page 21
