‘My bones ache from that beastly floor,’ said Megan.
‘What about us?’ said Gelert. ‘We had to be pillows as well.’
The little boys, who had made their own plans for the evening, were clambering about on the theatre and eating as they climbed. The heat did not appear to affect them, and they, alone of the company, had taken no ill effects from the hardness of the floor in the museum. At intervals they came to Dmitri for drinks of water which he, still smiling, served to them.
‘Dmitri,’ said Ivor, ‘have you seen the vipers?’
Dmitri still smiled.
‘The snakes,’ said Stewart.
‘The serpents,’ said Kenneth.
‘Serpents. Ah, yes.’ Dmitri smiled more widely. ‘I have not seen.’
The little boys nudged each other, and, as though some idea had communicated itself to each of them simultaneously, they got up and went towards the ruins. The remains of Turkish lime-kilns were still too obvious a feature of the landscape to go unremarked, but, even so, there were stone foundations everywhere – results of excavations in the sacred valley – to show where temple, stadion, and colonnades had been. Still visible were the ground-plans of the rooms for the pilgrim patients of Aesculapius, and reminders of the once populous shrine of healing.
Dusk fell. The modern pilgrim company were summoned to camp by three blasts on a whistle, and, shepherded by Dish and Dmitri – according to whether they preferred to sleep in the cars or the museum – went to their quarters to remain there until half an hour before midnight. The little boys were given no choice. Accompanied by Sir Rudri himself, Alexander Currie, Ronald Dick, and Armstrong, they were marched to the museum and bedded down on coats, rugs, and sacks.
Mrs Bradley, Megan, Cathleen, Gelert, Dish, and the three chauffeurs occupied the seats in the cars – Mrs Bradley, Megan, and Gelert in the first, Cathleen and Ian in the second, the other chauffeurs and Dish in the third. At about eleven o’clock Ian started his engine and drove away with his wife. His conduct – an interesting sidelight, this, Mrs Bradley thought, on the Greek character – appeared to afford neither amazement or amusement to the other chauffeurs.
Megan and Mrs. Bradley, peering out from the back seat of their car, watched the lovers go. Gelert was asleep in the driver’s place, and the departing car did not wake him. Mrs Bradley lay back in her corner, closed her eyes, and immediately fell asleep. Megan tried to sleep, but could not. She stared out of the window at the darkness. She was glad that her brother, although asleep, was with her. The lonely road and the lonely valley, the vast, bare, empty theatre, the Hieron of Aesculapius, a place of mystery and faith to generations who had gone, impressed her with a growing sense of fear. She half longed for and half dreaded the signal which was to arouse the party and bring them to the temple precincts for Sir Rudri’s second experiment.
She found herself thinking of the first, and, the trend of her thoughts veering insensibly from fear to self-congratulation, she felt surreptitiously for the bruises on knuckles and shin with which that night of the Eleusinian experiment had provided her. Her mood soon changed again, however. She was superstitious. She had been greatly impressed by Cathleen’s revelation (as she considered it) of the death of one of the party. The thought of it made her uneasy. She began to wish herself safe at home in Athens. She was worried, too, about the changing over of the snakes.
After a time she gave up staring out of the window at the darkness. She turned herself in her seat, leaned back in the corner of the car, settled the air-cushion behind her head, tried to persuade herself that she was comfortable enough to go to sleep, closed her eyes, and, strangely enough, fell asleep in less than five minutes. But her dreams were twined with serpents, and the sound of Sir Rudri’s whistle, which cut across her writhing dreams with the sudden shock of a sword-thrust, brought her terrified to wakefulness, her face sweaty, her hands clenched, her throat dry with fear.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered hoarsely. Mrs Bradley’s voice reassured her. They woke Gelert, and the three of them got out of the car, and, guided by Mrs Bradley’s electric torch, they picked their way carefully towards the meeting-place.
Sir Rudri did not count the company. He took it for granted that all those who desired to be present were with him. As this was, in fact, the case, there was no occasion for question or argument. His directions were clear and easy to follow. The company were to repair, in the smallest groups possible – ones, twos, or, in the case of the especially timid, threes – to the ruins of the Colonnades, lie down there, compose their minds, think upon any small ailments from which they might be suffering – he himself, he informed them, had a couple of very bad mosquito bites – and wait for what might happen.
‘But don’t we have to sacrifice to the god?’ inquired Gelert. ‘Surely he would not cure the patients for nothing?’
‘That is one of the things we might be able to discover,’ was Sir Rudri’s inspired reply.
‘Hippolytus, son of Theseus, dedicated twenty horses to Aesculapius,’ Gelert remarked sotto voce, as he walked away from his father. Sir Rudri called him back.
‘Don’t forget to think about your symptoms,’ he adjured him. Gelert snorted, and swung round on his heel. It annoyed him that his father should be so pleased with himself.
‘Stay with me, Aunt Adela, I’m terrified,’ said Megan, holding Mrs Bradley’s arm.
‘Very well. We will watch for the god together,’ Mrs Bradley graciously replied. ‘What ailments have you? I have an uneasy conscience. Will the god cure that?’
‘The sexes should be separate,’ Sir Rudri suddenly boomed across the intervening space of darkness. ‘That disposes of my desire that Mr Dick should bear us company,’ said Mrs Bradley regretfully. ‘Good night, Mr Dick. Have you ills to cure, by the way?’
‘One,’ replied Dick. He sounded as though he meant it. Gelert, in the darkness, laughed. Armstrong, who was carrying his camera, stumbled against a stone. They could hear him cursing.
‘I wonder whether Mr Armstrong has ills,’ Mrs Bradley observed in Megan’s ear. Megan giggled, knowing what she knew, for it was difficult to imagine the robust and godlike young man seeking the sanctuary of Aesculapius of his own free will, in patient, unquestioning faith.
The company dispersed themselves about the valley. The ground was hard and stony, but the Colonnades had once been a long portico where the patients of the god and his priests had spent the night. Now only the ground-plan was left A certain amount of laughing, some chaffing remarks, a quantity of stifled blasphemy and muttered objurgations – the result of the hard ground, the peculiar circumstances, a feeling of superstitious fear from which none of them, with the possible exceptions of Sir Rudri and Mrs Bradley, felt entirely free – died at last into vague fidgeting noises and occasional scrabblings and grunts. Then all was quiet. Before midnight, it seemed that everything must be in readiness for any visitation which might come. Whether the visitation was to be in dream form or whether something more tangible might be expected, had not been made clear.
Megan remained close beside Mrs Bradley. After about a quarter of an hour she whispered:
‘If only we didn’t know about the snakes!’
‘They are safely locked away,’ replied Mrs Bradley. ‘Don’t think about them. Think about home comforts, as I am doing.’
‘I keep hearing queer noises,’ Megan continued. ‘That’s what makes me think of snakes, I believe. Besides, I’m supposed to be concentrating on my ailments. I suffer from flat-foot. It would be nice – oh, listen! What’s that?’
‘I think the little boys may be up and doing,’ was Mrs Bradley’s sane and comforting reply. ‘In fact, I think that there can be no doubt about it. Were they to come to the revels to-night, do you know?’
‘I am sure father did not intend it. Do you really think it’s the boys? Oh, that’s all right, then. I shall put all the rest of the noises down to them.’
Reassured by this thought, she was silent again, an
d looked up at the stars in the wide sky, and removed various small uncomfortable stones from beneath her reclining body. It was cold. She shuddered, envying the relaxed stillness of Mrs Bradley’s spare and stringy form.
At about half an hour after midnight Sir Rudri, heralded by a lantern, made a visit of inspection, going from pilgrim to pilgrim in quest of something. It seemed as though he wanted to be certain that they were all where he expected them to be, and that no one was playing truant. To each person he put the same question:
‘Do you feel just as you did?’
Having received complaining or flippant replies, he followed up each inquiry with the plain statement: ‘I shall not come near you again. We must let the Power work undisturbed if it will. Be sure to remember what you dream.’
Just as he left Megan and Mrs Bradley, there was a sound of scuffling, stumbling, and curses. Mrs Bradley switched on her torch, and the man Dmitri was disclosed in the grip of the man Dish.
‘No you don’t, my hearty,’ Dish was saying. ‘You let that reptile-box alone now, do you hear? That ain’t nothing to do with you. I got to see that nobody but Sir Rudri comes anywheres near it.’
Mrs Bradley switched off her torch, and Sir Rudri, coming up to the disputants, gave tongue. He sounded very angry. A Welsh whine, absent for years, began to creep into his voice. A little later various sounds suggested that Dmitri had settled down and that Dish was returning to the car, his sleeping-place.
‘A trustworthy man, that,’ said Sir Rudri, as he went away. Megan fell asleep, in spite of her earlier fears and the chilly night, and even Mrs Bradley, who, apparently resting, had been alert at first for every sound, including that of the scaly rustling of mythical snakes, soon slept, and remained asleep until the pallor of dawn broke over the distant mountains.
2
Instead of going to the village to sleep, Ian and Cathleen took the lane-like, dusty road to Nauplia, sure of finding there a respectable inn. There were customers still with the landlord. All stared admiringly at Cathleen, and a room was immediately offered with a view seawards which, their host informed them, they would be able to enjoy in the morning. The furniture comprised a bed, a chamber-pot, and about a pint and a half of water in a kind of earthenware vase.
‘Here we have,’ said the host, indicating the niceties of his provision for their needs. They thanked him, and soon went to bed. The bed was comfortable enough and quite miraculously clean.
‘I don’t like it about those snakes,’ said Cathleen.
‘Oh, we have no time now to talk of snakes,’ said Ian.
3
The little boys woke up when their elders left the museum, but made no sign that they had done so. With the mysterious powers of telepathy given to intelligent boyhood, each knew that the other two were awake, and knew, equally, that no movement could be made to put their midnight plans into practice until it was certain that Alexander Currie and the guardian of the museum had gone to sleep again. It was easy enough to tell when the guardian went to sleep, because his breathing altered and grew considerably more audible with the passing in him of conscious life; with Alexander Currie it was more difficult to be certain.
They gave him plenty of time. The door closed behind Sir Rudri, Ronald Dick, and Armstrong, and the little boys lay in the darkness, surrounded by bits of the temple of Aesculapius. Ivor, who had a wrist-watch with a luminous dial, propped himself on his elbow and studied the movements of its hands. For a quarter of an hour, which crept by more slowly than any other of their lives, the other two lay waiting for his signal. It came at last; like cats they crawled to the door. It was ajar – a fact of which Alexander Currie could not have been aware, for he had a horror amounting to mania of small apertures.
One by one, the little boys glided out. Their movements, lissom and fluid, would have done credit to Red Indians or to sinuous beasts of prey. Outside the museum they retained their stealthy method of making progress until they were over the dip between the stretch of ground on which the building stood and the stony valley about which, they knew, their slumbering elders were dispersed.
Their plans were nebulous, except for the fixed project of obtaining possession of the vipers. What they proposed to do with the vipers when they had them they were not yet clear. They halted on the edge of the sacred ground, closed in, and literally put their heads together.
‘The thing is,’ Ivor whispered, ‘are they, or aren’t they, where they were put this afternoon?’
‘Trouble is, somebody may be sleeping in that part,’ said Stewart – for the boys knew the plans of their elders, although the elders seldom knew the plans of the boys.
‘I’d like to scare old Armstrong into a fit,’ said Kenneth. ‘He hoofed me this morning. I’ve got a bruise from it, too.’
‘He’s a stinker. I’d like to get one of the vipers to bite him,’ said Ivor. ‘But if that happened I dare say it would completely muck the holiday. There have been worse holidays than this one.’
‘Well, what?’ said Kenneth.
‘Yes, what?’ said Stewart. ‘Personally, I vote for having a straightforward shot at sneaking the snakes. We’ve got to chance who’s with them or whether they’ve been moved.’
‘But what are we going to do with them, you ass?’
‘Well, you ass, let’s get them, and then we can see.’
It was not so easy to find their way by night as it had been by day. The ruins (which comprised not only those of the hostels, temple, and Tholos, but a stadion with the goal still clearly marked and with one or two stone seats quite well preserved) were widely-spread and scattered. The stony plain had seemed vast by day to the boys; at night, with not even an electric torch or a lantern to help them pick their way, it seemed a desolate wilderness spreading out for miles in every direction.
‘I don’t know where we are,’ muttered Ivor at last. ‘I thought we ought to have got to that funny old maze bit by now.’
‘Down there is where we ought to release the snakes when we’ve got them,’ Stewart observed. To the others this also seemed obvious. The foundations of the Tholos were serpentine, and with their sunk walls and straight sides would make an ideal snake-run, they decided. There was a surprising unanimity about their unspoken thoughts on the subject of the vipers, and all were clear that the snakes must not be wasted.
‘We shall just have to keep on scouting round until we find it,’ said Kenneth, giving Ivor a slight shove onwards.
‘Pity we can’t separate,’ grunted Stewart. ‘We’d stand more chance like that, but we couldn’t signal each other because of making a row.’
‘No, we must stick together,’ Ivor agreed. ‘I wonder whether any of them can spot us against the sky?’
‘It isn’t light enough,’ said Kenneth. ‘I vote we shut our eyes, count a hundred, and then open them. It will seem as light as day out here when we do that.’
This did not prove to be the case. Nevertheless their eyes did become accustomed to the darkness, and, stumbling a good deal but stoically making no sound, even when they fell over and sustained contusions and abrasions from the rocky ground or the ruins, they came with some suddenness upon their objective.
There was only one place from which the inside of the maze-like foundations of the Tholos could be seen, and Ivor was the first to set foot across the ditch which surrounded the intriguing little place, and peer downwards into the blackness. He backed hastily, dragging the other two by the arm.
‘There’s somebody in there,’ he said, at a distance away from the ruin.
‘It’s one of them,’ said Stewart, who had the scientific mind and did not intend to be intimidated. ‘They’re all over the place, man, to-night. They’re all in ones or twos, to make the experiment. You know what Sir Rudri said.’
‘But you don’t need to make any experiment. It wasn’t one of our lot that I saw!’
There was a horribly suggestive, ghostly quality about these last words that made the other two catch up with him and quicken thei
r pace. Even Stewart capitulated. Stumbling, tripping, bleeding, bruised, they got back to the museum without realizing that instinct alone had guided them. They sank down by its friendly wall, and huddled like frightened animals together. They listened, fearing pursuit from the supernatural elements of the valley; but no sounds, nor any indication of vengeance, could be heard.
‘Golly!’ said Ivor at last. He wiped blood and sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘I don’t want to go there again!’
‘What was it?’ Stewart inquired.
‘I don’t know. It was in white. I couldn’t see any face. It was too dark.’
‘I expect it was your father, togged up like a Greek, or something.’
‘It wasn’t. However much he was togged up I’d know my father, you ass.’
‘All right, you ass. But I wish I’d had a squint at him, all the same.’
‘I’m going back to have a squint,’ said Kenneth.
‘You can go by yourself,’ said Ivor, who now, so resilient are the young, was beginning to feel a coward and a bit of a fool, and did not want the others to know his feelings. ‘I was only pulling your beastly legs. There wasn’t anything there.’
‘We might as well go, all the same,’ said Stewart, unimpressed by this declaration. ‘There was something there, and it doesn’t chase one, anyhow. I know the way this time.’
4
But for the fact that the snakes were securely locked in their box and were not to be used for experiment during the night, it is doubtful whether Ronald Dick would have taken part in the vigil. It is certain that he would not have consented to spend the dark hours alone. As it was, and even admitting that he would have complete immunity from the serpents, he was highly nervous as he settled himself as comfortably as he could in his ground-plan ruin, and, having been disturbed once by Sir Rudri on his tour of inspection and a second time by the capture of Dmitri by Dish, prepared to make some effort to go to sleep.
Come Away, Death Page 9