“He believed that the would-be initiates were taken down into the Hollow City by the Leucoparthenoi – the white maidens – and there underwent an initiation ceremony which in some way replicated their final journey through the underworld in death. Now we know that something like this happened at Eleusis, the other great site of Ancient Greek mystery religion, but this one, he thought, was on a much vaster scale. Of course, you might say, that was just the good Doctor’s megalomania talking, but there were some possible indications. Have a look at this.”
Whittle leapt up, looking about sharply as he did so. After mounting the steps, he clambered over the remains of the tholos wall and furtively beckoned to me to follow him into the centre of the rotunda. There he indicated what looked like a large smooth paving stone in one corner.
“Get out your handkerchief or something and brush away the sand and what not from that stone.”
I did so.
“That’s right. Now what do you see?’
I could see some very faint marks incised on the smooth stone surface. They looked geometrical in that they consisted of straight lines, right angles, and a few regular curves, but they did not look exactly like decoration.
“What do you make of it?” asked Whittle.
“I don’t know. Some sort of hieroglyphic writing? A code?”
“No. Not exactly. What does it remind you of?”
“Well, it looks a bit like . . . a ground plan?”
“Aha! Yes. Precisely. That is what Dr Leichenfeld believed. And there are several of these, very similar, dotted around, inscribed on paving slabs. There are resemblances between these maps – as I might call them – and the general plan of the buildings you see around you here in the shrine, but there are crucial differences too. These plan things, for instance, are much more complicated. Labyrinthine, you might say. Unless you knew the way, you might get lost in them. Especially in the dark. Mmm?”
The look he gave me had no warmth. I had the feeling that the information he was imparting had a purpose, but that it was for his own benefit rather than mine. I asked if Dr Leichenfeld had actually found the entrance to the Hollow City.
“We don’t know,’ he said abruptly. I saw his eyes stray away from me to a point beyond my left shoulder.
“Well, well,” he said brushing the knees of his trousers quite unnecessarily. “Mustn’t stand around here gossiping. Must get on! No peace for the wicked . . . time and tide . . . etcetera.” Again his eyes strayed from me. I looked round and saw a figure standing between two Ionic columns about fifty yards away. The sun was in my eyes, but I identified her from the tall, slender figure, the headscarf and the film star dark glasses.
On returning to the Xenia from the site I was informed by one of the Blue Overalls that I could, after all spend another night there, but that I would have to occupy another room. I agreed and was shown the new room to which my belongings had already been moved. This one was almost identical to the last, except that it did not face the sea but looked out across the valley where lay the remains of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods.
One of the odd pastimes I had invented for myself during my travels was the “nocturnal visit to the ruins”. I would take a torch and, in the dark, visit archaeological remains by its light. The strange shadows cast by the torch and its selective illuminations often created the illusion that I was walking by night in a living city, or that I was paying homage at a shrine whose god still breathed and demanded blood. Aided by imagination and silence, it would turn dusk into an ancient evening. That night I decided to go to the Sanctuary of the Great Gods.
I supped late and alone in the dining room: Whittle and Madame Leichenfeld had perhaps had their meal earlier. When I had finished I took care to leave the hotel unnoticed. I am not quite sure why, but perhaps the carafe of retsina had heightened my sense of the dramatic. There was a near full moon, and so I hardly needed my torch. My whole body embraced the silence and the stillness. For a while, as I wandered among the moonlit ruins, occasionally stumbling over a stone or two, but not letting it bother me, I barely thought at all; I simply was. I don’t share Longfellow’s opinion that “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts”. He may have imagined that his were, but mine in those days were brief or blissfully non-existent.
I had walked some distance, had rounded the Tholos and was just approaching the little Ionic temple erected in honour of the Great Gods by Arsinoe, wife and sister to Ptolemy of Egypt, when I heard a noise. It was not a particularly alarming noise, but it was strange to hear it at night, and it brought me to my senses. It was the sound of heavy stones being moved. I switched off my torch and stood still, just listening, to make sure I was not deceived. No. Someone in the dead of night was shifting rocks or blocks of masonry and dropping them onto others.
It was hard to tell the direction from which the sound came, but it seemed to be emanating from beyond and to the left of the Ionic temple. I placed myself carefully so that I could escape easily if I were challenged and then switched on my torch again. The beam swept across the Ionic columns and into the space beyond where it encountered nothing, literally nothing, neither earth nor scrub, nor stone. I switched off the torch and looked once more without its aid. The noise of moving stones had stopped.
Beyond the temple was a black space which reflected nothing. It was an absence, an emptiness without form or content. For several moments I stared at the void. It seemed to drain me of thought and will. Then the noise of rock moving began again; this time, nearer. It came horribly close, like someone suddenly breathing into your ear. I turned and did not stop running until I had reached the drive of the hotel. There I paused to catch my breath.
I did my best to look normal when I walked into the Hotel, but the Blue Overall behind the reception desk gave me a very searching look.
I am not sure what I was planning to do the next morning, but I had it determined for me before I had entered the dining room for breakfast. The Blue Overall at reception handed me a large brown manila envelope. There was no writing on it.
I entered the dining room and said good morning to Madame Leichenfeld, at her usual table. She was wearing a charcoal dress with belted waist and gently gathered skirt, and was drinking black coffee. She made no acknowledgment, but I was sure she was watching me covertly, so I waited till I had got back to my room to open the envelope. As I had somehow expected, it was from Whittle.
It contained two full plate photographs, both of Whittle’s drawings. I recognized them from the style and the initials S. P. W. in the corner. The first was sketchier and more expressive than any of his designs I had hitherto seen. It depicted what looked like some sort of cellar or undercroft, vast in size. The low and rather irregular roof was held up by a line of stout Doric columns that extended infinitely into an obscure distance. In recesses between the columns were a number of grotesque classical sculptures. I spotted Cerberus, the Chimera, Pan and the she-goat, and others, but between two of the columns was a black doorway towards which a draped figure of indeterminate sex was crawling on its hands and knees. The second photo seemed to be the ground plan of some kind of building complex, similar to but more detailed and elaborate than the scratches I had seen on the paving stone in the Tholos. One notable feature was an arcade of columns which stretched the whole length of the diagram. About halfway down the colonnade an entrance was marked which gave access to a labyrinth of passages. In the centre of the labyrinth was a circular space which Whittle had marked by hand with a blob of red ink. On the back of the diagram some words had been scrawled hastily in pencil: “If you do not see me today, go again tonight.”
I folded up both pictures, put them in my inside pocket and went out to explore the site again. I went first to the Tholos but saw no one. On the steps where I had first seen Whittle I found a tiny bottle of red India ink, that was all. Naturally I explored the area beyond the Ionic temple, but could see nothing. It was just scrub, punctuated by a few fallen slabs of masonry. Here and there I noticed
that attempts had been made at excavation, but there was nothing of interest. Beyond that point there was an olive grove where a donkey cropped its stubborn grasses, after which the ground rose slowly towards Mount Aidoneos, the highest peak of Thrakonisos’s central massif. Distant sheep bells clanked peacefully from its slopes; the donkey brayed like a sick man in distress.
The rest of the day I spent alone on the beach, swimming and reading. Towards evening I paid a second visit to the little chapel on the hill above the sea. The coffin had gone, and I almost persuaded myself that it had never been there. At supper Madame Leichenfeld and I were the sole occupants of the dining room. She wore black, relieved only by a small rope of pearls. I drank mineral water.
The moon shone full, but clouds had blown in from the East and sometimes they muffled the light. I believe no one had seen me leave the hotel. Was I afraid? I don’t remember. All I know is that I could not possibly have turned back; something pushed me onwards. When I was standing by the Tholos I shone my torch. I swung it onto the Ionic temple and then to the left where the beam met void and was gobbled up by it. I turned the torch onto the ground just ahead of me and began to walk forward.
By the time I had gone twenty yards or so, the temple was on my right and I realized that the ground was sloping downwards, quite gradually at first. I kept my torch on the way ahead of me. Presently I came across some wide shallow marble steps and I continued on my way down. Silly things kept slipping into my mind, like the tag of Virgil: “facilis descensus Averno” – the way down to Hades is easy. The steps became steeper and began to twist and turn. I descended into the earth.
For a while darkness completely enveloped me. If I pointed my beam anywhere but at my feet, it met nothing; it did not even cast a faint shaft of light through the surrounding blackness. It was a long descent, in my mind that is, because I had no idea what the clocks would have to say about it: I had left my watch at the hotel.
Finally I stood on the black earth and felt rather than saw a faint grey light surrounding me. I switched off the torch so as to see my general surroundings better. What I saw gave me the impression that I was on the lonely street of a great city at night. To my right a long colonnade of marble Doric columns stretched into the distance. It resembled the drawing that Whittle had sent me, but the effect was far vaster.
I switched on the torch and saw the sculptures peering out from between the columns: Cerberus, the three-headed dog; the Chimera, Pan and the she-goat. In one of the recesses was the marble statue of a Harpy which looked like a bird of prey except for the head which was that of a beautiful blank-faced woman. I followed the colonnade along until I came to the dark entrance marked in the drawing and went in.
I was now in a labyrinth of stone clad passages, just wide enough and high enough to allow me to walk upright. I took out Whittle’s plan and shone the torch on it. Why was I doing this? Was I imagining it all? What did I hope to find? I still don’t know. This is only what I remember.
As I came nearer to the core of the maze I began to hear noises. Someone was groaning faintly and breathing hard. I turned a corner and almost fell over a man in shirtsleeves and pale, baggy trousers crawling away from me. He looked up. It was Whittle. He was pale and there were red scratches or gashes on his throat. I stooped to pick him up but he shook his head at me and pointed in the direction that he had been crawling. The more I hesitated the more urgently he pointed forwards. Now I could hear both his gasps for breath and someone else panting ahead of me. So I left him behind and, with the help of his map, came to the circular space, about fifteen feet in diameter, at the heart of the maze.
My torch flashed about the round chamber whose roof went up to a single central keystone at the apex. It was like being inside a smaller version of the beehive tombs at Mycenae. My torch beam continued to travel until it halted on the thing which I had heard panting in the dark. It squatted on the floor in the very middle of the chamber. What I saw first were two human heads facing me, one above the other. I then made out their white bodies, the larger clasped to the other’s back, like a pair of mating toads. The body on top was that of a man, his face bloated and heavy with small glittering eyes and a long, lipless crack of a mouth that gaped uselessly. My heart began banging against my ribcage because I had recognized the face from the frontispiece of the guide. It was Dr Leichenfeld, and the face beneath his was that of his wife Aspassia. I saw for the first time her savage eyes stripped of their shades, and her hair uncovered. It was long, silky and white.
They remained there in the centre of the hive, heaving slightly, locked in their sweating, animal embrace, and though they made no move to attack me, the loathing and rage in their eyes was palpable. My right hand held the torch, my left felt in my trouser pocket and gripped Stavros’s worry beads with the little metal cross.
I did not turn. I backed out of the beehive tomb and slowly retraced my steps. When I came on Whittle again I lifted him up and together we staggered out of the Hollow City, up infinite numbers of steps and into the overworld where a reluctant sun was beginning to creep up from behind Mount Aidoneos.
The hotel seemed to be empty when we staggered in. I took Whittle to his room and locked myself in mine. Later that morning I told the Blue Overalls to prepare my bill because I was going. They seemed rather indignant about this: I could not leave, they said; no bus was going from the hotel that day into Chora. I asked them to order a taxi. No, there were no taxis on Thrakonisos. Very well, I said, I would walk to Chora, “meta podia”. They had no answer to this, so I went into the dining room, feeling that I had scored a victory.
There I received a final shock. Whittle and Madame Leichenfeld were sitting at their usual table taking breakfast. At least, he was devouring bread and jam while she was drinking her black coffee. She did not look at me at all, but Whittle stared at me for a while, blankly, without a trace of recognition on his face, while he crammed great gobbets of bread into his mouth. His skin seemed unnaturally waxy and smooth; his formerly pink complexion was as white as Madame Leichenfeld’s.
Immediately after breakfast I packed my rucksack and walked the six kilometres into Chora. There I spent the morning at the bar, drinking beer and reading Dodds until the afternoon ferry took me across the sea to the mainland.
I find it rather surprising now that these events did not have more effect on me at the time. Perhaps it was because the mind goes numb when it encounters what it cannot understand; and I had been, as the Ancient Greeks used to say, “a donkey at the Mysteries”. So I simply continued my tour of Greece and saw many lovely things. If there was a change in me, it was that I was less earnestly interested in the classical antiquity of the places I visited, and more generally concerned with their beauty and their people.
In this way I came to the Meteora in central Northern Greece to the East of the Pindus mountains. The place is famous for the strange rock towers, great bony fists of stone, that thrust their way upwards from the Thessalian plain. The wind whistles round them with a sound like the sea, and on them are perched the monasteries of the Meteora. Some are inhabited by large colonies of monks, and these are the most accessible and frequently visited ones, but I was determined to visit them all if I could.
The Monastery of St Simeon can only be reached by coming up from the valley floor and climbing the several hundred steps that are carved into the living rock of the pinnacle. I met no one during my ascent. At the top of the steps I rang a bell at the monastery gate. A dark-robed monk with a long black beard, sunglasses and a limp answered my summons and in perfect silence escorted me round his domain, of which he was the sole human inhabitant. At the top of some clumsy wooden steps a cat arched its back and stared at us with indifference. The monk showed me the winch and pulley system by which he hauled up provisions from the ground below, then he took me to a chapel stained with mildew but painted all over with scenes from the life of Christ.
He moved about the chapel silently pointing out to me the various images painted on the wa
lls. Several times I noticed him staring at me; then, with a sudden, impulsive movement, he led me over to a tiny side altar, no more than an apsidal niche.
In the apse was the fresco of a scene which I later identified as the Anastasis: the Harrowing of Hell. Jesus, in a dynamic pose, unusual for the conventionally iconic style of painting, is dragging the dead from their tombs, his whole body redolent of the energy of the Risen Christ. I have come across this image many times since in Greek Orthodox iconography, but one detail, as far as I know, was unique to this particular image. The figure on the right whom Christ is dragging by the arm from his sarcophagus, was here being held back by a curious, pale, toad-like creature whose two long forelimbs were clasped round the man’s legs. The spectator is witnessing a moment of perfect equilibrium and suspense, the outcome of which remains forever uncertain. Will the dead man be dragged free into Paradise, or is he to be hauled down again into the tomb?
The monk said nothing to me but his finger pointed towards the scene for a long time, indicating first the toad, then Christ, then the toad again, then Christ. Finally he made the sign of the cross over me and led me into a small painted cell where he indicated that I should sign a visitor’s book. When I lifted my eyes from this task I found him standing by me with a small tray on which was a glass of ouzo and a piece of Turkish delight. While I consumed these he watched me in the same grave silence.
I had climbed down the pinnacle St Simeon, and was walking along the road back to Kalambaka when I ran into an old school friend, Mark Hutton. Like me he was going up to Oxford in the autumn to read Mods and Greats, and before leaving England we had made vague arrangements to meet up on our travels. I was surprised by how relieved I felt to see his hearty, cherubic face.
As we walked back to the village I told him about the classical sites I had visited. Without consciously avoiding the subject, I made no mention of Thrakonisos. At the end of my recital Mark stopped and studied me. A tiny frown wrinkled the freckled space between his eyebrows, a characteristic expression. My memory of it was dug up only last week while I was attending his memorial service.
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