Part 2 chapter 6

AS THE week promised to be quiet, Georges obtained some days’ leave to make the excursion to Delos. He had not thought of this plan alone: Rudolf Schwartz had, by extraordinary favour, obtained the same permission.

The steamer which plied to the Cyclades was exceedingly picturesque, with its load of vegetables, goats, and sheep on the lower deck, not to mention the passengers herded together with them. The upper deck was occupied by elegant folk going on holiday to Syra or Mikonos. As Georges looked down on the overcrowded lower deck, he remembered his thoughts while crossing Jugoslavia: the contrast between two civilizations which jostled side by side could be seen here as he had seen it from the Orient Express.

They left the Piraeus in the dusk. For the first time Georges saw Athens from the sea, spread magnificently between its mountains. The time of day softened the evidences of modern life and restored to the city its eternal aspect. Above the clamouring of the deck-passengers and the chatter of the others, floated those cries of joy and admiration which had echoed through the centuries from ships whose occupants had seen the same sight. One could imagine Virgil greeting Minerva, “inventress of the olive”, Julian the Apostate stretching out his arms towards the Parthenon, or that orator who said he would refuse the bed of a goddess, simply to see the smoke of Athens.

“Isn’t it a miracle,” said Georges, “that the finest monument built by men should still be there, after more than twenty centuries? That should give us confidence in the future.”

‘Who knows whether the future will preserve the Parthenon? I tremble at the idea that the will of two or three men is enough to raze to the ground all the monuments of Europe.”

“Nothing is ever completely destroyed. But you are talking, my dear Rudolf, as though war seemed to you inevitable.”

“I should like to have your optimism. Our two ambassadors have it, if not their military attachés. What makes me fear that war will break out is the stupidity of the masses. I know the German people as a burgomaster knows them: you know that I pass most of my leisure among the gens germanica. You know, I never see anyone to whom I could say that I am going to Delos with the secretary of the French Embassy, but they would start to hear me say it. I am sure that your own circle would react the same way where I was concerned. That is what is disturbing, my dear Sarre. How can we talk of peace, when we have succeeded in creating a state of mistrust and even of hatred between our two peoples? And in the name of what has it been created?”

“Certainly not in the names of Goethe and Voltaire.”

“Since neither the French spirit nor the German spirit has succeeded in restoring harmony, we should partake of the Greek spirit, which may perhaps succeed.”

“But what is the Greek spirit? It has counselled everything: gentleness and violence, loyalty and deceit, justice and injustice.”

The deck-passengers, reassured at last by the calmness of the sea, began to sing. They sang one of those lilts which seem to sum up the sorrows and aspirations of the Greek people throughout its history. The dull sound of the engines and the echo of the song disturbed the great silence of the Aegean Sea.

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The Delos steamer did not go to Delos, where there is no harbour. Disembarkation took place at Mikonos. Georges and Rudolf took the little caique which made the crossing to Apollo’s island. “White Mikonos” receded behind them, with its dazzling houses and the sails of its old mills on the hill-tops. Ahead, the low outlines of Delos were dominated by the faint peak of Cynthus. Georges was not sorry to be going there by sail, like a pilgrim of former times, even if the sails were eked out by a motor-engine.

The caique landed at a cove, where several fishermen were waiting. In spite of their miserable appearance, they had a certain nobility which might justify Pythagoras in having been, as he claimed, a Delos fisherman in one of his incarnations. For the moment they became baggage-porters, and led the new arrivals through untilled fields to the Pavilion of Tourism. It was the only refuge offered to visitors by the island, on which there were not ten houses.

The ruins of the sanctuary were in front of the pavilion. The two travellers visited them in the interval before lunch. A group of buildings nearly level with the ground, some bases, and a lot of debris were not a very imposing spectacle, except for the fact of their desolation. There was not a tree to be seen in this place, once the favourite haunt of the Huntress. Beside the sacred lake, now dry, there was no shadow to be seen of the palm-tree beneath which she and the God of Light had been born. But he was still there, burning the earth with his rays. The French School, which was responsible for the excavations and had not bothered to replant, evidently had no love of greenery.

Besides all these things which spoke only to the spirit, a statue of a naked man had been discovered, lying face downwards in the earth, like the immortal corpse of Apollo’s last servitor, and a row of lions, a votive monument of the inhabitants of Naxos. The remains could also be seen of an enormous phallus, put up on a pedestal by the Syrians. It was curious that this symbol of life and pleasure, ordinarily reserved to Bacchus, should have been erected in Apollo’s sanctuary. But the ancients remembered that the god of the arts did not disdain pleasure. Georges thought of the famous archaic inscriptions engraved on the rocks of Santorin, not far from Apollo’s temple, which he had read in the School of Athens: “Such an one danced for Apollo and gave himself to such an one.”

The little museum likewise had a bas-relief of a monstrous satyr. As a great secret, the caretaker showed them the worthy complement to this sculpture: four unpublished plaques dug up since the last excavations and also representing phalluses. They were arranged two by two, heraldically affronted, with these words: “This for thee and this for me.” One could imagine the emotions of M. Giletière confronted by this find accompanied with this injunction. At first, the caretaker said, he had tried to explain them as signs against the evil eye; but he had ended by agreeing that they belonged to a house for the **** of ephebes.

“Ancient history,” said Georges, “is one of the first things children are taught, and it should be forbidden them if one wishes to protect their innocence.”

“Do your school-books,” asked Rudolf, “contain illustrations inspired by these marbles?”

“On the contrary, they are carefully emasculated. But by what they suggest, they glorify nudity all the more, at least for schoolboys who have eyes at all.”

“I, too, had experience of antiquity during my childhood. I was thirteen and I was visiting Pompeii with my parents. We were among a group of tourists in charge of a guide. In one villa where I was separated from the others, a caretaker beckoned to me and opened one of those locked shutters which cover obscene paintings. He did not know that at that moment he was killing a child.”

“Perhaps you were happy enough to bury that child?”

“Perhaps, but it is always sad to watch the departure of someone whom nothing can bring back to us.”

After lunch and the siesta they wandered among the ruins of the town, which were beyond those of the sanctuary. The main objects of interest were some beautiful mosaics and a statue of a woman. They also included the best preserved monument of Delos: the theatre, shaded by a hundred-year-old fig-tree, the only tree on the island.

The two friends decided to climb Cynthus to see the sunset. They followed the sacred way which climbs up the slopes of the little mountain. Here and there clumps of cystus gave forth their aromatic perfume, fostering the illusion that Delos was still the “island of balm”. On a terrace could be seen the enclosure of a temple. Higher up, a mysterious cave opened before them. The view from the summit was magnificent. Everything was glory and beauty: the island with its ruins, Mikonos, Rhenea close beside, and the other Cyclades gleaming farther away like ingots of gold, the crown of Delos.

Georges and Rudolf lay down on the dry grass of the slope. Silent and motionless they waited for the end of the day. They had no longer before them, as they had had at Rhamnontos, the severe goddesses of Justice and Vengeance. The naked foot of Apollo seemed to skim the mountain, and “Artemis was lightly on the way”.

The mountain---or hill---was as sublime as the Acropolis of Athens. Georges felt that there he had reached one of the peaks of his life, and he drank deeply of the joy of it. In this place of dreams, he dreamed of the time of his childhood, when there had awoken in him the love of Greek things, the desire for the light of Greece, and when, among so many beautiful Greek names, that of Cynthia had first sounded on his ear. Yes, this august place could lend itself only to noble and grand memories. Here one was no longer among the obscenities of museums and schools, but at the source of whatever had been pure in the world, even if men had soiled it with their impurity.

As Georges continued to muse, the memory suddenly came to him of a face whose beauty was worthy of this place: the face of the boy he had loved at school, who had died of that love. He wondered what his existence would have been, if he had had such a companion. He seldom thought of him; did he need to think of what was woven into the most intimate parts of his being? He was none the less glad to invoke his memory today, here on Mount Cynthus more gloriously than at Rhamnontos.

The pleasure of this daydream did not conceal from him the emptiness of his regrets. Could the friend of his first youth have been the friend of his whole life? What would it have meant, this life in common of which he had dreamed? He knew very well that it was chimerical, and that the world in which he lived did not admit such couples. Certain things could never leave the enchanted domain of childhood.

The moment had arrived when the sun was drowned in the waves: little by little the shadow blotted out the islands and spread across the sea. The softness of the dusk was as beautiful as the enchantment of the sunset: one felt nearer to oneself, nearer also, perhaps, to another.

Georges took Rudolf’s hand and shut his eyes. The contact seemed to prolong his dream. He seemed to breathe in his past and his future, as he breathed the air of the falling night and the air of the Cyclades. All that he had buried, rather than destroyed, now revived, and was insistent in demanding audience. But Rudolf gently took his hand away and said in grave tones:

“The friendship of two men is the friendship of two souls.”