Mayhem in Greece

by Dennis Wheatley

  After a glance at the camera, the man said: ‘You have used only six of the eight films on the spool. Don’t you wish to take something with the other two?’

  ‘No,’ Robbie told him. ‘I’m in a great hurry for the six I’ve taken. How soon can you let me have two sets of prints? If possible I’d like to get one off to Athens by the evening post.’

  The man wound up the unused part of the film, removed the spool, handed the camera back to Robbie, and said:

  ‘Usually we ask people to call the following morning, but if it is all that urgent, I’ll oblige you. Come back at half past four this afternoon and I’ll have them ready.’

  Returning to the hotel, Robbie collected Stephanie and they paid a visit to the little museum on the slope below it. The museum contained a number of fine Roman as well as Greek statues, but the outstanding exhibits were the world-famous Hermes of Praxiteles and the Victory of Paeonios. The former occupied a central position at the far end of the main hall, and its base was raised on a square, deep bed of sand that extended for some way all round it. On Stephanie’s asking the reason for this, an attendant standing nearby told her that it was a precaution against earthquakes. Should one cause the masterpiece to be toppled over, the sand would save it from being damaged.

  Going round the museum took them only three-quarters of an hour, so they had ample time for a bathe in the pool they had discovered. Then, after lunch, they went to their rooms for their usual read and nap. Soon after four, Robbie set off down to the village, eager to see the results of his first efforts as a photographer.

  As he entered the pharmacy, the man behind the counter looked up and said: ‘I’m sorry about your photographs, but the whole lot has been ruined.’

  ‘Ruined!’ exclaimed Robbie. For once there was anger in his voice.

  ‘Oh, not by me,’ the man retorted with asperity. ‘You said you were not used to handling a camera, and you must have opened the back of it to have a look inside. If you remember, you hadn’t used the whole of the film; so, until I wound it off to take out, it would have been loose. It was the light getting in that spoiled your pictures. The tops and bottoms are quite gone, and whichever way I held them up I couldn’t make anything out of the middles. It would have been a waste of time and paper to print them.’

  19

  A Bolt from the Blue

  Robbie had the man put a new film in his camera, then left the shop, angry and puzzled. He had certainly not opened the camera and he could not recall having dropped or knocked it—which the man had also suggested might account for light having filtered in.

  When he joined Stephanie for tea on the broad terrace of the hotel his expression was so woebegone that she asked with quick concern what was the matter. On his telling her, she said:

  ‘What rotten luck. But, of course, that is liable to happen at times with inexpensive cameras. Since you can’t remember giving it a knock yourself that would have sprung its back, someone else must have. Perhaps when the chambermaid was in your room last night, turning down your bed, she moved and dropped it; or perhaps the man at the pharmacy made a mess of developing the film and told you this story to cover up his clumsiness.’

  ‘Ah! Now I believe you’ve hit on it!’ Robbie exclaimed. ‘He seemed a bit on the defensive when he told me about it. That was probably because he had a guilty conscience. How infuriating—the results of the lucky break I had yesterday simply chucked away.’

  ‘Do the photographs really matter?’ Stephanie asked gently. ‘After all, you have found out that these people are drilling for oil. Surely your firm will take your word for that.’

  ‘Yes, I … I suppose so,’ he replied, a shade hesitantly. He had never even hinted to her his original belief that the Czechs might be up to something sinister, and was averse to mentioning that possibility now; so he added after a moment: ‘All the same, I would like to have sent to Athens some photographs of the plant that is being used. I think I’ll go to Pirgos again and take another lot.’

  ‘Oh, Robbie!’ she protested. ‘You said yesterday that you were definitely finished with this dangerous business.’

  He shrugged. ‘Then, the photographs I took hadn’t been ruined. But I won’t risk going in while they are likely to be working on the site; so you’ve no need to worry about me. We’ll think no more about it for the next few days.’

  Next morning, after their swim, Robbie hired a guide to take them on a proper tour of the ruins. They lay between Mount Kronion and the river, on level ground covering an area of a quarter of a square mile. The whole of it was thick with the remains of temples, porticoes, baths, treasuries and other edifices, so that in its heyday it must have formed a great town consisting entirely of beautiful public buildings. Even in ruin, its broad flights of steps, huge, fluted pillars and still-standing arches were immensely impressive in the dappled shade of the tall Scotch pines that grew among them.

  They visited in turn the Philippeion, the Heraion, the terrace with the twelve Treasuries, the great temple of Zeus, the house that had been built for the Emperor Nero, the Beuleuterion and the Leonidaion. This last had been a building as big as many modern hotels, in which distinguished guests lived while attending the Games. In its interior there had been small grass courts and round the outside a quadruple row of pillars supporting a shady colonnade, which must have made it very beautiful. Further on lay the workshop in which Phidias had carved his greatest masterpiece—the forty-foot-high ivory-and-gold statue of Zeus. Beyond it lay the gymnasia in which the athletes had practised under the eyes of their trainers before competing in the Games.

  Crossing the area of ruins again, they left the sacred precincts by a tunnelled way and entered the Stadium where the Games had been held. From the first Olympiad in 776 B.C.— which had afterwards been taken by the Greeks of classical times as the starting date of their history—the Games had been held there every fifth year, with very few breaks, right up to the fifth century A.D. For over a thousand years the most perfectly-formed young men from all over the country, proudly displaying the beauty of their naked bodies, had competed there in running, jumping, wrestling, throwing the javelin and the discus, and in other sports. The victors of the contests won not only honour and life-long security from want for themselves, but also renown for the cities which had bred them.

  Yet the Games brought to Greece a benefit far exceeding the pleasure and excitement of following a great athletic contest. When their date was announced, any wars that were being waged in the country automatically ceased. Kings and Democracies alike declared a truce for the period of the Olympiad. Not only that, but every State sent its great men as Ambassadors to the Games, with valuable gifts to be laid in the Treasuries of the gods. Then, meeting to witness the Games provided the perfect opportunity for discussing terms of peace in an atmosphere of goodwill; so many a bitter conflict between States was temporarily stopped by an Olympiad and was never resumed after it, to the relief and benefit of their peoples.

  It was next day, after they had enjoyed a swim and were sitting sunning themselves on the sand beside their pool, that Stephanie asked:

  ‘About your book, Robbie. Will there be much more of it than the parts you have already written and those you have told me about?’

  ‘No,’ he replied after a moment. ‘Not much more. The only long piece would be about Odysseus and his return from the Trojan War, and I’m in two minds whether to include that or leave it out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, owing to Poseidon’s having a grudge against him, he was ten years on the way, and his adventures nearly all have to do with overcoming giants and monsters; so, apart from tricks he played to get away from people who were trying to hold him up, it would read rather like a repetition of the deeds of Perseus and Hercules. Also, unlike the Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy, the Odyssey seems to have very little in it based on real history.’

  ‘Oh, come!’ Stephanie laughed. ‘Surely that applies also to lots of other matters you have wri
tten about. For instance, the war of the gods and giants in which they heaved mountains at one another.’

  ‘But that was historical; or, at least, a race memory of an historical event. So was the account of Phaethon’s terrible end.’

  ‘He had something to do with the sun, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. He was the son of Apollo by Clymene. When he grew up, she told him that his father was a god and he became so bumptious about it that all his school friends said he was only boasting. That made him so wild that he went to his father and demanded to be publicly recognised. As he had grown up into a real maiden’s dream, Apollo felt quite proud of him and promised him any proof he liked to ask.

  ‘To show his friends what a fine fellow he was, Phaethon asked to be allowed for one day to drive the Chariot of the Sun. Apollo was frightfully against letting him, but he had sworn by the Styx to grant his son’s wish; and as that oath was to the gods like having sworn on the Bible, he couldn’t refuse.

  ‘The chariot was drawn by a team of tremendously powerful steeds and, in spite of Apollo’s advice about how to hang on to them and prevent them from charging into one of the constellations, a stripling like Phaethon hadn’t got a hope. In no time at all, he lost control and the chariot was zigzagging all over the heavens. It came swooping down over the earth, drying up rivers and burning up forests with its heat as it passed. Whole cities went up in flames and vast tracts of fertile land were scorched into barren desert. Great rifts appeared in the land, the earth trembled and the volcanoes erupted. It was on that day, so it is said, that what remained of the negro races were burnt black.

  ‘Naturally, everyone who had escaped death from heatstroke sent up frantic prayers to Zeus to do something about it, and that woke the old boy from his noonday nap. Whatever one may think about his morals, he was a good man in an emergency. He grabbed one of his thunderbolts and heaved it at Phaethon. That not only settled the young man’s hash but freed the horses from his futile jerking on their reins; so they galloped back to their stalls beneath the eastern horizon and on earth it became night at midday.’

  Stephanie smiled, but shook her head. ‘How can you possibly say that has anything to do with history?’

  ‘But it has,’ Robbie insisted. ‘It has been scientifically proved that all the other planets revolve with their axes at ninety degrees to the sun. Earth is the only exception and our axis is tilted to an angle of twenty-three degrees. The only possible explanation for that is that at one time a big comet came so near that it threw the earth off balance. And it is easy to imagine the sort of thing that would have happened while the comet was passing. Its pull would have brought about tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Whole peoples would have been annihilated, the courses of rivers would have changed and the sun would have appeared to have gone haywire in the sky. Here and there groups of people would have survived, of course, just as in remote places some people would survive an all-out atomic war. Those who did handed down their memories of the cataclysm, and gradually the powers of Nature came to be attributed to the gods; so the accounts took the form of Phaethon’s losing control of the chariot of the sun, and the Immortals waging a ten-year war in which whole mountains were thrown about.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ murmured Stephanie. ‘There certainly seems something to that.’

  ‘The Deluge is another example,’ Robbie told her. ‘At the time of the Flood there was not just one Noah but several. They lived in different countries, some as far apart as Babylonia and Mexico; but all of them, by forethought or luck, managed to save their families and some of their domestic animals, and their descendants re-populated their parts of the world.

  ‘The Greek Noah was named Deucalion. He was one of the first race of men created by Prometheus, who tipped him off that the Flood was coming and told him to build an Ark. He did, and shut himself up in it with his wife, Pyrrha, a daughter of Pandora. They floated round for nine days and nights, then the Ark beached itself on Mount Parnassus. When the water had gone down a bit, they hiked it to Delphi and begged the gods to create another human race. As usual, the reply that they got was pretty obscure. They were told to veil their heads and cast behind them the bones of their first ancestor. That foxed them for a bit, but they worked it out that Gaea, the Earth-Mother, was the beginning of all things; so they went about throwing stones over their shoulders, and the stones turned into men and women.

  ‘Of course, no one takes the stone-throwing part of the story literally, but that’s not to say that Deucalion and Pyrrha were not real people who lived at the time of the Flood. No one who has read Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough can doubt that the Flood happened, because there are memories of it in the folklore of scores of different races on both sides of the Atlantic. It wasn’t world-wide, but it affected the whole of Central America, Western Europe and the Mediterranean countries, and such a terrific cataclysm can only be accounted for by the same great comet, or perhaps another one, having nearly collided with the Earth.’

  For a few minutes they sat silent, then Stephanie picked up a small stone and threw it so that it made a loud plop in the pool. Robbie had been looking at her as she raised her arm, and her right breast was forced outward by the action. She was wearing only a bikini. It was of white satin and showed up her golden skin to perfection. For the hundredth time his eyes drank in her loveliness, and he toyed with the thought of attempting to take the role that Zeus had so often played with beautiful mortal maidens in this sunny land of Greece.

  He had only to stretch out his arms, seize her in an overpowering embrace and smother her with kisses. Yet he dared not do it. He felt certain that, instead of responding, she would do her utmost to fight him off. Then, whether he succeeded in having his way with her or not, everything between them would be finished. She had come to mean so much to him that the thought of losing her was unbearable. It would have sent him mad with grief.

  Again and again since he had met her he had cursed his upbringing and his total lack of experience with young women. During their youth other men all seemed to have gradually acquired the ability to attract girls by semi-serious chaff and clever little compliments, leading up to declarations of their feelings; but he simply did not know how to begin on such a normal type of courtship. In the three weeks they had been together his self-confidence in handling all other situations had enormously increased and, with her, he had for the first time really found his tongue. He could talk, laugh or sit silent with her more naturally than with anyone he had ever met. Yet the one thing that still froze him with shyness and embarrassment was the thought of saying anything which would reveal that his feelings for her were more than those of a friend.

  While his thoughts were still racing, she threw another stone into the pool and said: ‘What else are you going to put in your book? Aren’t there some love stories that would counterbalance a bit those full of horrors?’

  Her mention of ‘love’ brought him back with a start. It was a golden opportunity for him to begin talking of love, not as between the ancient Greeks but living people, then reveal how much he had come to care for her. But, even before he thought of taking it, he found himself replying:

  ‘Oh yes; there are several. Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion and Galatea, Hero and Leander. Then there’s Cupid and Psyche.’

  ‘Tell me some of them.’

  By that time he felt he had lost his chance so, after a moment, he started off. ‘Pyramus and Thisbe lived in Babylon, and theirs was the original case of “the girl next door”. As children, they planned to marry. By the time they were well into their ‘teens, their love had developed into a grand passion; but their fathers hated each other’s guts, and were so dead against their getting hitched-up that they forbade them to see one another. A high wall separated the gardens of the two houses, but it was built only of mud and straw; so they made a hole in it just large enough to whisper sweet nothings through when no one was looking.

  ‘At last they became so fed-up with not being able to get t
ogether that they decided to elope. Thisbe was to slip out of her home at midnight and make for a place in the woods outside the city, known as “The Tomb of Ninus”, and Pyramus was to be there to meet her. But she was so impatient to have Pyramus cuddling her that she set off too early. With a white veil wrapped round her head, she scurried through the dark streets and into the wood, only to find when she reached their dating place that her boy friend was not there.

  ‘She knew that she hadn’t mistaken the place because a big tree with white mulberries grew beside the tomb.’

  ‘White mulberries?’

  ‘Yes, I’m coming to that. When she had stood round for a bit, she heard a rustling in the bushes, and ran forward to get Pyramus in a clinch. But instead of Pyramus she found herself face to face with a lion slobbering blood from a prey that it had just devoured. Letting out a yell, she threw her veil at the lion and sprinted off down the track for dear life. However, the lion had had his supper; so he just mauled her veil about a bit, then went off on other business.

  ‘Ten minutes later Pyramus turned up. He recognised her veil, saw that it was all bloody and concluded that a lion must have killed his sweetie-pie, then dragged her body off into the bushes. Frantic with grief, he drew his good and trusty and killed himself.’

  ‘How awful!’

  ‘Wasn’t it? But worse is to follow. Thisbe, meanwhile, finding the lion was not after her, had pulled up; then, half an hour later, she plucked up the courage to creep back to the tomb. There she found Pyramus lying on his side, apparently asleep. With a yodel of joy, she threw herself upon him, only to find herself clutching a corpse. Snatching up his sword, she stuck it into herself and fell dead upon his body.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Stephanie. ‘I think that must have been the original from which Shakespeare got Romeo and Juliet. But what about the mulberries?’

  ‘The blood of the two lovers soaked into the roots of the tree and that is why the fruit of most mulberry trees afterwards became dark purple.’