Levkas Man (15 page)

That was how I came to find myself wandering alone next day in the lunar landscape of the red dunes near Ayios Giorgios. Sonia had produced food for me, which she had stowed in his old rucksack, and by ten that morning I was in the cab of a cattle truck driving south out of Jannina. We called at two villages on the way, and it was a little after eleven-thirty that we came to the valley, the road snaking down between the hills, and that hole in the rock showing like a watchful eye above us. The aqueduct came into view, its ancient arches spanning the river, and beyond it the reservoir gleamed like a mirror in the sunshine, ‘Endáksi—Ayios Giorgios.' The truck slowed to a stop where the road to the village turned off to the left. I thanked the driver and climbed out. ‘Hérete.' I waved him goodbye and he drove off, leaving me standing alone in the dust of the verge, the sun warm on my face.

As soon as the truck was out of sight, I started down the road which had been blasted out of the hillside above the reservoir. There was no breeze and already it was hot, an early spring heat-wave. Patches of red earth showed on the far side, and high in the sky a bird wheeled and hovered. At the far end of the reservoir the sloping face of the dam was white with the water pouring down it. And on the other side of the road, the aqueduct tunnel was a shadowed slit in the naked rock. There was no difficulty in reaching it. You could even walk in it without stooping, for it was built to the height of a man, tapered at the top like the entrance to a catacomb. It was so narrow that my body blocked the light and I probed ahead with her torch only to find that she had been right—the cleft was blocked by a rock fall about 25 or 30 yards from the entrance.

I switched the torch off and stood in the semi-darkness, thinking for a moment of those Romans hacking their way into the mountainside nearly 2,000 years ago. It must have been quite an engineering feat in those days. I wondered what the old man had been thinking when he had stood where I stood now. Had the rock walls told him what he would find on the top of the hill inside which he stood? It seemed unlikely. I had no idea what chert looked like then, but the walls were smooth, except for the marks of Roman tools. It appeared to be a fairly soft rock, volcanic probably, and no doubt an earthquake had caused the rock fall.

I walked slowly back towards the slit of brightness that marked the entrance, and when I reached it and stood again in the sunshine, I found my mind had moved far enough back into the past for the road itself to seem an intrusion. I followed the road, moving almost automatically, and where it curved round the shoulder of a hill, I found a goat track leading steeply up. It was not a very long climb, but the track zigzagged to a bluff, so that I had no view of what lay ahead of me until I topped the last rise and it burst upon me with all its strange unearthly beauty. Here, suddenly stretched out before me, was a world that was out of time, completely apart from the landscape in which it lay. Instead of grass and rock, and the Greek flowers of mountains in springtime, here was nothing but desert—red, desiccated dunes, so bare of anything that a withered, stunted bush was like the prospect of an oasis.

I hesitated, shocked by the transformation. And when I finally started forward again, that red world, with its extraordinary timeless atmosphere, seemed to swallow me completely. The colour of the sand absorbed the sun's heat. The place was like an oven, and so deathly still that it seemed all life had ceased here long, long ago. I felt my nerves tingle and the hair of my neck stiffen. I glanced quickly up at the blue vault of the sky. Nothing stirred, no sign of that eagle, or whatever it had been, hovering; the sky was empty, as empty as the red dune world into which I was slowly advancing. And when I looked back, there was no sign of any other world behind me, only the scuff of my feet in the loose sand to show the way I had come.

It was a confusing place, for the dunes were a series of humps and hollows without any regular pattern. The sun was little help, for it was almost overhead, but as I topped a rise, I came upon something I could use as a guide line. At first I did not understand what it was. I was looking across a steep ravine of sand, and on the far side, the smooth red surface of the next dune was broken by a spill of stones. These stones built up like a cone to a point on the dune-top where they stood proud by at least the height of a man, as though a great cairn, had been erected there. What puzzled me was where the stones had come from.

Standing there, looking around me, I saw that there were other points where stone showed through the sand. But these were all quite different, for there was no spill of stone and nothing had collapsed; here the rains and strong winds had eroded the sand overlay to expose the rock below. And since in every case the rock had been shattered as by a giant hammer, it was clear that this could only have been caused by ice. I realized then that the rock I was seeing exposed in the twentieth century
A.D
. was rock that had not seen the light of day since its shattering by the deadly cold of the last Ice Age.

But that did not explain the spill of stones on the far dune. I slithered down into the ravine. The floor was packed hard, but the soft sides made it difficult to claw my way up. When I finally reached the top, I found that the pile of stones had the form of a collapsed circle. There was a distinct hollow in the middle. It was like the shaft of an old well exposed by erosion of the surrounding soil until it stood like a column above the ground, finally falling in upon itself and spilling down the slope.

I was standing fairly high at this point and had a good view over the whole dune area. It was all of it red in colour, but two shades of red, as though formed by two different types of sand, and the dune formation was uneven—steeply humped in the ravines, but thin on the slopes with the underlying rock exposed in places. And then, as I turned to view the whole area, which looked as though it covered about four, possibly six square miles, I saw that there was another spill of stones several hundred yards away, and I thought I could see yet another beyond that. These spills were not so pronounced, the ‘well-heads' standing less proud of the surrounding sand, but what struck me immediately was that they were more or less in a straight line running in a south-westerly direction.

I understood what they were then. These were the remains of vertical shafts connecting with the line of the aqueduct tunnel deep in the hill below me. They were either ventilation shafts, or else the Romans had used them for hauling out the rock cut from the tunnel, and where the rock ceased and they were in to the red sand, they had had to line the shafts as well-diggers have to line a well in soft ground. A geologist could probably have gauged from the amount of stone debris exposed just how much erosion had occurred in the two thousand years since those shafts had been built. My guess was that it was 20 feet, and if the rate of erosion had been constant for the whole twenty thousand years since the last Ice Age, then that would give an original depth of 200 feet for the sand over-lay. This more or less confirmed the depths Sonia had given me, since obviously the rate of erosion over such a long period would not have been constant.

I have gone into this in some detail, because the sense of being in a world lost to everything but geological time was very strong, and it affected my mood. It is true that I had seen goat, possibly sheep droppings in the dune bottoms, but this evidence that animals crossed the area in search of the next grazing land did not detract in any way from the feeling that this was a world apart; rather the reverse, in fact, for it made me conscious of the struggle life must have been when all of Greece had looked like this red throwback to a long dead age. And there were the flakes of chert. At least, I presumed they were chert—between brown and ochre in colour, quite small and sharply edged, so that I was certain they had been chipped from larger stones. I had seen them everywhere, lying on the surface as Sonia had said. One, which I had put in my pocket, looked like an arrow-head.

I think I must have stood there for quite a time, my mind lost in the past, my eyes searching and searching the whole hot expanse of shimmering sand. There was a small wind blowing from the north and it gradually chilled the sweat on my body. Search as I might, I could see no sign of life. There were no birds, no cicadas even, the whole area so utterly still and lifeless it might indeed have been the moon. And when I called out in the hope of an answer, my shouts seemed deadened by the dunes, the sand acting like a damper.

It was almost two and I stopped to eat on the top of a dune where the breeze touched my damp skin. Below me the sands pulsed with the heat, and on a ridge away to my left the third of those strange shafts spilled stones into a hollow. It had the shape of an old worn-down molar, and near the crown of it a shadow cast by the sun showed black like an unstopped cavity. It was a possibility—about the only one left in this desolate stretch of country. But by then I had opened up the rucksack. Sonia had made up a package for me of bread and cheese and tinned ham. I put on my sweater and began to eat. I was facing south-west at the time, my back to the breeze and the way I had come. I don't know what made me turn—some instinct, some sixth sense. The second of those stone shafts stood like a cairn, sharp against the blue sky, and beyond it, a long way away, the purpling shape of a distant range stood humped on the horizon. And then my gaze fell to the red sand valley below and I saw something move, a shambling figure wandering with head bent intent upon the ground.

The sight of him so shocked me that for a moment I did not move. I just sat there unable to believe what my eyes recorded, for he looked so frail, so insubstantial. Partly it was the khaki shirt and trousers. They seemed to have taken on the colour of the dunes so that they merged into the sand. But the long white hair, the way he walked, head bent, searching the ground … those nights in Amsterdam so long ago came back to me and the certainty that it was him was overwhelming.

I got to my feet, tried to call out to him, but though I opened my mouth no sound came and I was trembling. He was moving slowly nearer all the time, coming up the floor of the valley, and he looked small, a ghost of a figure in the red immensity of that dune landscape, walking with slow uncertain steps, searching, but not stopping, not picking anything up.

I started down the dune slope then, loose sand under my feet, and even when I reached the hard-packed sand of the valley floor, he still did not hear me. It wasn't until I was within a few yards of him that he stopped suddenly, his head lifted, his body quite still, alerted to the fact that he was not alone. I had stopped, too, waiting for him to turn. And when he did so, slowly, there was no recognition in his eyes, only a secret, hunted look.

‘Who are you?' he asked, the words coming falteringly as though speech were strange to him. ‘What do you want?'

I didn't answer. I couldn't—I was too appalled. I had expected him to look older, of course, and those two photographs should have warned me, the observations Gilmore had made. But I was not prepared for such fragility. He seemed smaller, a shadow of his former self, withered and stooped, and so thin he looked half starved, the khaki trousers hanging loose, the rib cage staring through the torn shirt. But it was his face that really shocked me, the hunted, burning look in his eyes.

It had always been a remarkable face, the leathery features like a piece of deep-chiselled, fine-carved wood. Now there was the grey stubble of a beard, and beneath the stubble the lines had deepened. The flesh seemed to have fallen away, exposing the bone formation of the skull, accentuating the jut of the jaw and the beetling brows. It was a haggard, tortured face, and the eyes, which had always been deep-sunk, seemed to have retreated deeper into their sockets.

They were staring at me now, seeing me only as a stranger who had invaded his secret world. I said my name, and for a moment it didn't seem to register. And then suddenly there was recognition and his eyes blazed. ‘Who sent you?' There was hostility, no sign of affection—I might have been an enemy out to destroy him. ‘What are you doing here?' The words came in a whisper and he was trembling.

‘I was worried about you,' I said.

A rasping sound came from his throat, a jeering laugh of disbelief. ‘After eight years?' And then, leaning forward, he repeated his first question—‘Who sent you?'

‘Nobody sent me. I came of my own accord.'

‘But you knew where to look.'

‘Sonia thought I might find you here.'

‘Sonia Winters?' His face softened, the eyes becoming less hostile.

‘She's at Despotiko,' I said.

‘And you came—to look for me?'

I nodded, wondering how to break through to the man I had once known.

He was silent for a long time. Finally he seemed to gather himself together. ‘That was good of you.' He said it slowly as though making an effort, and then suddenly there were tears in his eyes and I stood there, staring at him stupidly, uncertain what to do or what to say. He'd been here—how long? A fortnight, nearly three weeks. The red dunes all around him, and nobody with him, nobody at all. ‘What have you found to live on?'

But his gaze had wandered, searching the ground. ‘You haven't seen the sole of my boot, have you? I lost it last night, and I've been searching.'

He was wearing an old pair of desert boots, tough camel skin, and the right foot had the crêpe rubber missing. ‘It's no good to you. I said. ‘You couldn't repair it here.'

‘Somebody may find it …' His eyes were roving again, his voice irritable. He seemed obsessed by his loss and I realized he was afraid it might betray his presence here. ‘Are you sure nobody sent you?' He was looking at me again, his eyes shifting and uneasy.

I did my best to reassure him, but it was only when I told him how I had come to Greece that his attention seemed to focus. ‘A boat? You chartered a boat?'

I nodded.