By misfortune Neil and Van Loon had arrived on Athos during one of the fasting periods, so — as travellers, enjoying the traditional hospitality of the monasteries — they had to make do with a diet of bread, dried fish and olives. But local wine, and the fierce spirits ouzo and arak, had flowed without stint, and after the gruelling marches uphill, drinking freely on an almost empty stomach, Neil was feeling in poor physical condition.
Back in London, where he was a successful political journalist, he had grown slack on a routine of well-ordered luxury. He had come out here on a three-month leave of absence from his newspaper, ostensibly in order to write a book about Greece. But the book was unimportant: after two weeks all he had to show were a few scrappy notes. He had really come away to prove to himself that he could resist the comforts and creeping sloth of his London life.
On Mount Athos he had been attracted by the legendary virtues of solitude and enforced chastity; but unfortunately, Neil Ingleby did not have the mental resilience of a religious man. While he liked to think of himself as an enlightened liberal, able to reject the vulgarities of materialism, he was also the victim of habit: he depended too much on a fat salary, good restaurants and fashionable friends. On Mount Athos he felt exhausted and depressed, while Van Loon seemed to thrive, dark with the sun and tough as whipcord.
The monk had reached a wooden door down the gallery and stood bowing them inside. The cell was cramped and dark; there were two beds laid with straw under blankets of sackcloth, and a tiny window, shut and caked with dirt. Everywhere was the same sweet smell of decay. The monk shuffled in after them and picked up a rusted oil lamp from under one of the beds. After a lot of grunting and fumbling, he lit it with a box of matches from beneath his habit. The flame gave off a ribbon of black smoke, and Neil saw with distaste that the ceiling was hung with a canopy of cobwebs.
The old man put the lamp down between the beds, then straightened up and swept the hair from his face, giving them a totally toothless grin. The one black eye glinted mischievously, while the other was closed up, weeping down the hairy cheek. He looked like a shrunken miniature of Rasputin. He stood to attention and muttered a blessing in Bulgarian, then went out, closing the door. Neil stretched himself out on the bed, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to give in and go back to Salonika or down to Athens.
Van Loon sat down and smoked his meerschaum; and soon the black shag began to overcome the smell of rot and burning oil. For some moments they said nothing. Neil found this one of the most restful things about their relationship. They talked to each other without effort, often in monosyllables, and there was no compulsion to impress or score over the other in intellectual combat.
Van Loon was a simple man: enormously strong, with a pleasant bovine face, blue eyes and a spiky blond beard. His hands were the size of spades and he had a great capacity for alcohol. He was a sailor by profession, but had done many jobs, never sticking to one for more than a few months. When they had met each other on the bus from Salonika he had been on the first leg of his journey round the world; and during the past five days the whole of Van Loon’s sad saga had been unfolded to Neil, as they tramped side by side from monastery to monastery.
He was travelling on a bounty of sixty pounds — all the money he had in the world — saved up while tree felling in Finland during the summer. For four years he had been in love with a Norwegian girl who worked as a secretary in Amsterdam. (‘A little black-haired girl, not like a Norwegian girl at all,’ he had told Neil, ‘with cat’s eyes and a thin white body.’) They were always making plans to get married, when Van Loon would become restless and set off on some trek. The last one had been to the forests of Finland where he had chopped logs for ten hours a day and spent the nights drinking wood spirit, collapsing to sleep it off in the snow. When he returned to Amsterdam three months later he learnt without warning that his girl had married a Dutch civil servant, and that the two of them had already left to live in a trading station in Borneo.
At first he had been stunned, incapable of belief; then had turned to rage and drink. (‘She goes with a stupid little government dog!’ he had roared at Neil. ‘Bald with spectacles! I would have killed them both!’) But unable to get his hands on either of them he had instead revenged himself on the bridegroom’s father whom he had thrown into one of the canals, followed by a passing policeman. Two more policemen had arrived to restrain him, and they had gone into the canal too, dragging him with them; but he had managed to clamber out and escape through the back of a warehouse where he had tripped and fallen into a vat of sugar. (‘I came running out into the square, white like a snowman!’ he told Neil, grinning.) Covered in sugar, he had been chased across half Amsterdam; then at the police station he had run amok, putting three men in hospital before they had been able to get him into the cells.
He had gone to prison for four months. As soon as he came out, just three
