Her body felt like water, and when she reached the doors and saw the Citroën parked without lights across the street she was weeping.
PART 1: ON THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
CHAPTER 1
The Dutchman, Pieter Van Loon, stopped under the monastery wall and sat lighting his meerschaum pipe, waiting for Neil Ingleby to reach him. The Englishman was a good fifty yards below, plodding up the slope under the weight of a small rucksack and portable typewriter.
The two of them had been on the move now for more than fourteen hours, leaving the last monastery of Chilandariou at dawn and tramping all day up the spine of the mountain peninsula. They had stopped only for a lunch of bread, olives, and retsina offered by some monks in a vineyard, and to pause for regular gulps from Van Loon’s litre-bottle of ouzo.
Neil Ingleby arrived at the head of the path, exhausted.
The Dutchman grinned and breathed black smoke into the still air: ‘You are not so tough, Neil old fellow!’
The Englishman unhoisted his rucksack and Olivetti 22, and sank down on the stony ground beside Van Loon, head on his knees. The Dutchman brought out the bottle of flawed green glass with no label, half-full of ouzo mixed with water. They both drank deeply, feeling the milky-white liquid spread through them with a sweet aniseed warmth, as they sat looking down the walls of the valley to the isthmus far below, where the dried-up Xerxes Canal once severed the peninsula from the Greek mainland. Beyond, they could just see the little town of Ierrissou with its jumble of white houses and the stone jetty where the girls went walking arm-in-arm in the evenings.
‘That would be a good place to live,’ said Van Loon, ‘you could take a pretty girl there and live quietly, and when you are fed up with her, you come over the canal to escape.’ He laughed and shook his head, enjoying his little fantasy over another gulp of ouzo.
The valley was growing dark with a grey-green twilight that smouldered out of the dense olives and vineyards. Mists began to crawl down the foothills of the mountain, trailing like cobwebs from the tops of the pines and walnut trees; and the heat was rapidly going out of the earth.
Van Loon stuffed the bottle back into his rucksack and said, ‘Come, we go before they close the gates.’
Neil followed him wearily round the wall which climbed two hundred feet above them: a stone face pitted with age, its balconies and buttresses honeycombed with the nests of wild birds. The gate was sunk under a gloomy arch; Van Loon tugged at an iron lever and a bell chimed distantly behind the wall.
They had come to the Bulgarian monastery of Zographou, built in the twelfth century. It is one of more than thirty monasteries on the Holy Mountain of Athos, which rises from a finger of land pointing down into the Aegean off the north coast of Greece. For centuries the peninsula has been the refuge of thousands of monks, hermits and holy men belonging to the Orthodox Church; but with the spread of Communism cutting off the flow of novices from the east, and with the growing agnosticism of the West, the population of Athos has now dwindled to a few hundred stooped and senile men whose memories of the outside world ended before the murder at Sarajevo. Today their ancient palaces, lying in the folds of valleys or clinging to precipices over the sea, are falling silent, into decay.
Mount Athos is still governed by the oldest democracy in the world: an elected assembly of monks whose rule is respected by the Greek Government. No female creature, except birds and insects, and no wheeled vehicle is allowed on the peninsula; the mules and donkeys, which are the sole form of transport, have to be bred on the mainland. Only once, when a band of Communist guerrillas, including sixteen girls, attacked the monasteries to loot food in 1946, has a woman ever put foot on Athos. One of the few concessions to modern bureaucracy is a grubby office in Salonika where prospective tourists to the peninsula are issued with visas by a bearded monk in the chimney-pot hat of the Orthodox Church.
Neil, who had first met Van Loon on the bus from Salonika five days ago, had come to see this womanless civilization before it died out altogether; but now, standing in the gathering gloom, limp with tiredness, his head throbbing with the fumes of ouzo, he had to admit to himself that he found it a dead and dispiriting place.
There was a grinding like clockwork behind the wall and the gate creaked inwards, held open by a monk bent over a knotted stick. He raised his hand in welcome, turning to them a face swathed in a cocoon of dirty white hair hanging over his shoulders, revealing one black eye that shone at them with unnatural vigour.
They passed under the stone arch, into a courtyard full of the sweet stench of rotting vegetation. Walls of blind windows rose round them, under a belfry where a clock had stopped at five to one. The monk led them up a spiral staircase, past four
