After this it was too late to make any serious start on our voyage—we could not have been sure of making a safe harbor before nightfall. We spent the afternoon dawdling about inside the Gulf, getting used to the foibles of the Kymothoe and from time to time stopping for a swim. The sky was clear and the winds very light, so much so that I eventually had to use the motor to take us back to Preveza. The water, however, was a good deal choppier than one would expect in such weather. I began to wonder why, and what conditions would be like outside the Gulf. While we were drinking our first ouzo at a bar by the quayside, I instructed the crew (whose duties include those of interpreter) to engage the barman in conversation about the weather.
This was how we came to hear that on the previous night there had been a violent storm, in which a yacht owned by an Englishwoman had been lost and all those on board her drowned. Or almost drowned. Or one drowned, and the others almost—our informant was rather vague about the details. Of course I didn’t know, at that stage, that it had anything to do with Camilla.
We put to sea early on the following morning, having taken such steps as we respectively thought prudent to ensure a safe voyage: that is to say, I had listened to the weather forecast and checked that the engine was working, and the crew had poured a glass of retsina over the bows as a libation to Poseidon.
“Sebastian,” I said, “you have always told me that you are a dialectical materialist, and do not believe in gods of any kind.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But it does no harm to be on the safe side.”
The gods seemed to show less gratitude than they might have done for these attentions—a brisk west wind and the after-effects of the storm combined to produce in the sea outside the Gulf a distinct bumpiness, which caused the crew to feel not quite well. He lay in the cockpit, groaning, and unable to attend to the duties previously mentioned—namely, the reading aloud of the Odyssey. I tried to divert his mind by asking why Homer always speaks of the wine-dark sea, when the Mediterranean is such a striking shade of blue, and whether this meant that the Greeks of that period drank some kind of dark blue wine. The crew, however, showed no enthusiasm for this interesting question, but continued to lie in the cockpit and groan.
You will perhaps think it heartless of me, but I was enjoying myself more than if the sea had been entirely smooth. I don’t know how to describe to you, Julia, how splendid it is being at the helm of a sailing-boat in a firm wind on the open sea—there’s nothing like it in the world. I suppose one might compare it to having a very good day in court—I don’t mean when it all goes well from the start, but the sort of day when the judge begins by thinking your witnesses are liars and there’s a House of Lords decision against you, and you bring him round gradually to taking a more sensible view and finding in your favor: well, it’s something like that, but better.
“I didn’t know,” said Julia, amazed at understanding her friend so little, “that Selena thought anything was better than that.”
We made reasonable progress, close-reaching at a speed of about five knots on a course almost due north and parallel to the coast of Epirus: this is what the books on navigation would call “an aggressive littoral”—an almost unbroken line of oatmeal-colored cliffs dropping straight down into the sea, with occasional clumps of dark green scrub, like undernourished spinach, trying to scrape a living from the cracks in the limestone. I intended at first to press straight on to Parga; but seeing that there was no prospect of the crew making lunch, still less eating it, while we were still under sail, I decided to put in at Ayios Ioannis, a little harbor some twenty miles north of Preveza. When the crew was sufficiently recovered to take an interest in things, I showed him that according to the chart we were at the mouth of a river called the Akheron.
Julia turned pale and lit a Gauloise.
This was thought to be news of most sinister significance: the Akheron, it seems, is really the Acheron, known to all students of classical mythology to have its source in Hades, the Kingdom of the Dead: further libations were insisted on, this time to the gods of the Underworld. (It is the duty of a ship’s captain to respect the religious sensibilities of the crew, though I did think it rather a pity to waste so much retsina.)
All this reminded me that there was a temple nearby which the crew had expressed a wish to see—a place called the Necromantion, dedicated in ancient times to the cult of the Underworld. Although we had meant to visit it by bus or car from Parga, it occurred to me that it might be even easier to reach it from Ayios Ioannis. With this in mind we went ashore, and were supplied by the local grocery not only with retsina and goat’s milk cheese, but also with the services of a boatman—the son-in-law of the grocer’s cousin—who was willing, for a modest consideration, to row us up the Acheron.
The crew read to me, as we were rowed along between banks of willow trees, from Book XI of the Odyssey, which describes the voyage of Odysseus into the Underworld. With a following wind and some rather vague sailing directions from Circe, it seems to have taken him only twenty-four hours; but one of his men still managed to arrive before him, having fallen when drunk from the roof of Circe’s palace and so found a much shorter way to Hades.
Everyone thinks, says the crew—and you, having had a classical education, will no doubt be included in his concept of “everyone”—everyone thinks that Odysseus sailed westwards to reach the Underworld, and that the Kingdom of Hades can accordingly be located somewhere in the area of Manhattan Island; but that is on the strength of what Odysseus told the Phaecians. It is to be noted (says the crew) that all the really unlikely stories in the Odyssey—the magic and monsters and giants and wizards and impressionable goddesses living alone on islands—all these stories are the ones told by Odysseus himself at the fireside of King Alcinous, when invited by the Phaecians to sing for his supper by telling them of his travels: under such conditions, the most truthful of travellers might embroider a little. To others he gives a less colorful account of his adventures; and I was called on to notice that on such occasions, though he says nothing about Hades, he often mentions having spent some time in Thesprotia—the region where the cult of the Underworld was practiced and through which we were at that moment travelling.
This doesn’t mean that I can claim to have made the same journey as Odysseus. Ah, no—the crew remembered just in time that he is a serious classical scholar and that it would not be respectable for him to believe that anything in Homer ever actually happened. The most he will let me say is that in Homer’s time there would have been a temple on the same site as the Necromantion, dedicated to the same cult, which people would have visited to hear prophecies from the ghosts of the dead; and that Book XI of the Odyssey may be regarded as a fanciful and poetic account of such a pilgrimage.
I was rather baffled by the business about prophecies: I couldn’t see why the ghosts of the dead should know any more about the future than anyone else—rather less, I would have thought. The crew, admitting the force of my objection, suggested that the oracle might have been used to reveal the truth about any mysterious death, especially where murder was suspected: “For it must be supposed,” he said, forgetting again about being a classical scholar, “that it is those who have died young, or by violence, or by the treachery of those who should have protected them, whose unquiet ghosts would gather closest to the banks of the Acheron, pale with the thirst for blood and wailing to be avenged.”
We picnicked beside the Acheron on bread and goat’s milk cheese washed down with retsina, and afterwards climbed up to the Necromantion: a temple built of polygonal blocks of stone, of massive size and irregular in shape, which are fitted together without cement or mortar to produce something like a cartwheel pattern. The chief attraction is to clamber down a rickety iron staircase to a sort of underground chamber, its roof formed by a series of rough stone arches, which is said to be the place where the prophecies were made. The only lighting is from a dim electric light bulb at the far end from the staircase: very sinister and atmosp
heric, but in view of the uneven floor also rather hazardous. Three-quarters of the way along one comes without warning to a shallow trench—no more ancient, I dare say, than the staircase or the electric light bulb, but supposed to have been used for sacrifices: I managed to avoid it; but the crew stumbled on the edge and scraped his wrist quite badly. I bathed the wound in retsina, however, which I suppose from its taste to have strong disinfectant qualities, and there seem to be no ill-effects.
Julia, pausing to refill her glass, looked troubled. I saw that she thought it an ominous thing that Sebastian had stumbled and suffered injury in the Temple of the Dead.
“My dear Julia,” I said kindly, “it is simply a minor accident, such as might happen anywhere. It does not mean that something bad is going to happen to Sebastian. It is not a sign or an omen, you see, or anything of that kind. Not in the same way, for example, that leaving the pan on the stove for an hour is a sign that your supper will be burnt or that drinking wine after whiskey is an omen that you will have a headache next morning—nothing like that at all.”
She continued to look anxious, however, and I saw that the distinction was beyond her understanding.
In spite of this diversion we reached Parga well before nightfall, having had to motor only a short part of the way, and berthed in the western harbor.
The accident of having a long sandy beach has turned Parga from a fishing village into a cosmopolitan little tourist resort, especially popular with sailing people. It has two or three hotels and several open-air fish restaurants, in one of which we sat down for dinner. At the table next to us there was a group of English people whom at first we felt inclined to avoid: rather hearty and brick-colored and laughing uproariously at jokes I had heard quite often before, mostly from Cantrip. When I heard them mention the name of Camilla Galloway, however, I felt curious enough to engage them in conversation. There was no difficulty in persuading them to repeat the story—no one in Parga is talking of anything else, at least in sailing circles.
On Thursday, presumably just after saying goodbye to Rupert and Jocasta, Camilla and her cousins sailed down from Corfu to Preveza, where friends of theirs were holding a party. When it was over they decided not to wait until morning but to sail back by night as far as Paxos. They had all, it was thought, had a good deal to drink. A few miles south of Parga they were overtaken by the storm of which we had already heard, and Camilla was swept overboard from the deck.
You may be under the impression that the deck of a sailing-boat is much the same as the deck of a Channel steamer—a broad expanse of solid timber, with good stout railings round it. This is not the case: on a boat such as Camilla’s—I gather it was a Sadler 32—the deck consists of the cabin-top and a strip of timber, about eighteen inches wide and slightly sloping, on each side of it. There is a wire safety rail, of the same thickness as a washing-line, at about knee height.
You will understand, then, that if you were on the deck of a sailing-boat in a heavy sea with a gale blowing—and I think, Julia, that you should avoid the contingency—it would not be at all difficult to be swept off. In such conditions it is customary to wear a safety-harness—a webbing contraption with a lifeline shackled to it: the lifeline should be clipped to some secure point on the boat, so that if you do go over you have some chance of getting back. No one knew whether Camilla had been wearing such a thing: if she had, she had still been unable to get aboard again.
And that, in any ordinary sailing story, given the visibility and weather conditions, would have been the last of Camilla.
Beauty and riches, however, are not the only attributes which she shares with the heroine of a romantic novel: she has also, it seems, the same indestructible quality. In the early hours of Friday morning she was discovered by a fisherman somewhere on the seashore between Parga and Ayios Ioannis, wearing only a black silk negligée—by some accounts, indeed, entirely naked, but the black negligée version is preferred by connoisseurs. After going overboard she had simply struck out for the shore and kept swimming until she reached it—a distance, it was thought, of about three miles. She was bruised and fairly exhausted, naturally, but otherwise (said the sailing men, leering) in perfect condition. It really is a remarkable achievement: three miles may not sound far, but in pitch darkness with a heavy sea running, and without a mask or wetsuit—well, I suppose one might do it if one had to.
Such was the public interest in the notion of Camilla in her black negligée that I could learn little of what had happened to the others, though they too apparently spent an adventurous night. They were eventually taken off by a fishing vessel and the Sadler broke up on the rocks a mile or two from Parga—it seems very hard on Camilla, to be almost drowned and then find her boat was lost. I can give you, however, no further details.
It will soon be too dark to go on writing. The sun has gathered itself into a compact red circle and is slipping neatly down the sky behind Sivota Island. The bay where we are anchored looks rather pretty by this light, like a lake in Arcadia—almost encircled by mountains, with olive groves coming right down to the water’s edge and no sound except the tinkling of goat bells: Hilary would see nymphs and satyrs at every turn.
Further unrest among the crew, who complains of hunger and thirst and wants to go ashore for dinner. He instructs me to send you his love and to tell you of his sufferings and hardships—you will agree that I have done so in almost unseemly detail.
SV Kymothoe—at the same anchorage.
Monday morning.
By a coincidence less remarkable than you might think—the Ionian Sea is really a very small place—I have more news of Camilla.
The only other customers in the taverna where we had dinner were three Greeks of villainous appearance, all looking as if they were born with cutlasses between their teeth. After a while the oldest of them—a man about five foot square, with a huge walrus mustache—asked us in quite a friendly manner where we were from, and seemed very pleased when the crew replied in Greek. There followed an amiable conversation, which from time to time was translated to me in summary.
In the course of this the crew made some remark which gave rise to great hilarity, with much stamping of feet and banging of fists on the table: he had mentioned the story we had heard in Parga on the previous evening, and so put everyone in mind of Camilla’s black silk negligée.
It had been a friend of theirs who found her—a fellow-fisherman by the name of Stavros. Their friend Stavros was always lucky, they said, too lucky to come to any good end. It was therefore typical of him to have spent the night of the storm safe and comfortable in his bed and gone out in the morning to fish up an heiress, while the rest of them had been out on the rough sea and got nothing but the small fry—two boys and one girl only between the three of them, and her not an heiress. It was they who had taken the other three off the Sadler.
They had gone out with their nets as usual on Thursday night, not quite trusting the weather but unwilling to lose a night’s work and meaning to make for Parga if it looked like breaking. The storm, however, blew up more suddenly than they had expected, and overtook them a few miles south of Parga at about three o’clock in the morning—a force eight gale, gusting nine, and blowing from the south. Parga is at the center of a stretch of rock-bound coast running west to east for about twelve miles, almost at right-angles to the main coastline—when the wind is from the south, an absolute lee shore: a dangerous harbor to run for in a southerly gale. The skipper accordingly decided to ride out the storm at sea. They had just settled down comfortably for the night—I tell the story as it was told to me—when a distress flare went up somewhere on the starboard bow.
They motored towards the place where it had seemed to come from and after a few minutes the light of their storm-lantern picked up a small sailing vessel. She was carrying far too much sail and looked to be shipping a good deal of water. She was also moving fast towards the Parga shore. It seemed a pretty even chance whether she sank or broke up on the rocks, but certain that
she must do one or the other.
Given the weather conditions, there was no possibility of salvaging the yacht, but the skipper thought they might manage something to help the people on board: he could see three of them above decks, and he didn’t think he needed to ask if they wanted to be taken off. He took the fishing-boat round to windward of the yacht and on to a parallel course, trying to bring her close enough, without a collision, for the two decks to be within leaping distance. The erratic progress of the yacht made it a difficult maneuver and it took him longer than he had hoped—all the time, you see, they were moving closer to the Parga shore. At last there were a few seconds when the two vessels were within six feet of each other, with the fishermen all shouting to those on the yacht to jump. One of them did and landed neatly enough on the deck of the fishing-boat: but the others couldn’t or wouldn’t.
At this stage the skipper was inclined (he said) to give himself no more trouble about the matter, and to leave the other two in the good hands of God. At the last moment, however, when the boats were moving apart, young Andreas jumped the other way—from the fishing-boat on to the deck of the yacht. This (said his shipmates) was because he had noticed that one of those left on the yacht was a girl, and he thought this would be a fine opportunity to cuddle her. (Great laughter and much digging of Andreas in the ribs—he was a large, placid-looking young man, who bore it all with fortitude.) They were in two minds (said the skipper) about going back for him; but he was the son of the skipper’s youngest sister, who had said he must be kept out of trouble, and probably meant that they shouldn’t let him cuddle strange women on sailing-boats. So the whole maneuver had to be repeated, with the Parga shore coming closer all the time.
This time it went better. Andreas threw the girl across to his shipmates and then jumped back himself, carrying the second boy in his arms. The three from the sailing-boat had survived their tossing about without much serious damage. They were tired and bruised, and the older boy had a broken arm—this had made him unable to balance for the jump when the boats were first alongside each other, and his sister had refused to leave him; but otherwise they were well enough. They were all in great distress, however, about another girl who had been on board the yacht and had been swept overboard about twenty minutes earlier. The skipper knew that by this time she must certainly have drowned; but he put out a call on the radio, asking any shipping in the area to be on the lookout for her. When at last they put in at Parga he reported her missing, with no idea that she was tucked up safe in bed at the house of their friend Stavros—safe from drowning, at any rate, said the skipper, leering horribly over his walrus mustache.
The Shortest Way to Hades Page 14