the grass in a parched garden. Solaced, Marianne began to dream that the Almighty, in His mercy, had decreed that she should spend eternity drinking sweet water, and that she had gone to the paradise of those who have died of thirst.
If so, it was a singularly hard and uncomfortable paradise. Her disembodied spirit was actually hurting quite savagely. Her swollen eyelids parted painfully and she saw a heavily bearded face bending over her, out of which looked a pair of questioning black eyes. Something red flapped in the background which she was soon able to identify as a sail rippling in the wind.
Seeing that she had regained consciousness, the man slipped an arm beneath her head and supported her while he held something rough and cool to her cracked lips. It was the rim of an earthen jar. He let a little more of the blessed water trickle down her throat. As he did so, he said something incomprehensible, evidently speaking to someone Marianne could not see. Weak as she was, she struggled round and saw a black figure standing outlined against the red sail. He made a sinister impression standing there in the fiery glow of the setting sun: there was a Greek priest on board. Although himself heavily bearded and by no means clean, he was looking at her with evident disapproval. He said something clearly unflattering in reply and pointed an accusing finger. Instantly the man holding Marianne drew a piece of sailcloth over her, while the priest tucked his hands in his sleeves and turned away to stare at the horizon. Marianne remembered suddenly that her flimsy nightclothes must be in ribbons.
She tried to smile her thanks to her rescuer but her parched lips would only form an agonized grimace and she winced at the pain of it.
The man, apparently a fisherman, then reached behind him and produced a small phial of olive oil, which he smeared generously over her face. After this, he drew a basket towards him and took out a bunch of grapes, some of which he fed cautiously to his patient. Marianne took them eagerly: they were white and sweet and it seemed to her that she had never tasted anything so delicious.
Then he finished wrapping Marianne in her cocoon of sailcloth, slipped a rolled-up fishing net under her head, and signed to her to go to sleep.
At the other end of the boat, against the red sail whose colour faded with the fading light, the priest stood in an impassive and hieratic pose, eating black bread and onions, washed down by frequent draughts from a pot- bellied jar that he had beside him. When he had finished, he embarked on a lengthy prayer involving various ritual prostrations which, on the moving boat, called for considerable acrobatic skill. By the time this was over, it was quite dark and, curling himself into a ball with his strange-looking mitre tipped over his eyes, he settled himself into his corner and began to snore, without another glance at the creature whom his companion had fished out of the water.
Tired as she was, Marianne felt no desire to sleep. She was exhausted but the thirst, the terrible thirst, had gone; the oil on her face had soothed away some of the pain and she felt almost better. The heavy canvas protected her from the chill of night-time, and above her the stars were coming out, one by one. They were the same stars she had seen the night before, as she lay in the bottom of her boat, but then they had seemed cold and hostile. Tonight there was something friendly about them and from the bottom of her heart Marianne offered up a prayer of thanks to the God who had sent a saving hand to her just at the very moment when she had abandoned hope and decided to put an end to her existence. She could hear the man humming now, through closed lips, as he steered his little craft. She could not understand the language, she did not know to what land he was taking her, nor even where she was, but she was alive, and the sea that bore them up was the same sea that carried the American brig and the pirate who had taken possession of it. Wherever she was taken now, Marianne knew that it was only the first step towards her revenge. She knew, too, that she would know no rest until she had tracked down John Leighton and made him pay the price of his crimes in blood. Every sailor, friend or foe, who sailed the Mediterranean, must be pressed into service to pursue the slaver, so that Leighton might be hanged from the yard- arm of the ship he had stolen!
Towards midnight, the moon rose, a thin crescent giving scarcely more light than the stars. A light breeze sang in the sail, and the sea slid past the vessel's hull with a noise like silk. The fisherman's voice sank to a low, faintly melancholy chant, so slow and soothing that Marianne dropped off to sleep at last. She was sleeping too deeply to see the island, with its tall black cliffs, or hear the whispered colloquy between the priest and the fisherman, nor did she feel the hands that carried her ashore, wrapped in the sail.
When she woke, there was nothing but the absence of tormenting thirst to prove that she had not dreamed her rescue. She was lying in the shadow of a rock and a few stunted bushes on a shore of black sand strewn with silver weed. In front of her a sea the colour of indigo lapped at a fringe of black and white pebbles. The piece of sailcloth that had been wrapped round her had gone, like the boat, priest and fisherman, but her thin cotton rags were dry, and when she looked round she saw two bunches of golden grapes laid out neatly on a big flat stone. Automatically her hand crept out towards them. She felt incredibly weak and tired.
Raising herself on her elbow, she nibbled a few of the sweet, juicy grapes. They tasted real enough to assure her that this was not all part of some fantastic dream. She was dizzy and ill, but there was no time to ponder why her fisherman rescuer had apparently changed his mind and abandoned her again on a deserted shore, for at that moment the shore ceased to be deserted.
At the far end of the beach, where a path led down through the rocks, a white procession was emerging, so unexpectedly anachronistic in appearance that Marianne could only rub her eyes to ensure they were not deceiving her.
Led by a tall dark woman, as beautiful and queenly as Athena herself, and a pair of flute-players, came a file of young girls dressed in the many-folded antique chiton, their black hair bound with criss-crossing white fillets. Some carried branches, others bore an amphora on one shoulder, and they walked two by two, slowly and gracefully, like the priestesses of some ancient rite, singing a kind of chant to the piping notes of the flutes.
This curious procession was coming towards her. Marianne dragged herself over the sand until she felt that she was safely hidden by the rock, and with its help managed to stand upright. Her head was swimming and she was still very weak, far too weak to run away from this apparition from the past, which made her feel that she had taken a leap back over about two thousand four hundred years.
However, the women had not seen her, and so took no notice of her. The procession swung away towards a fig tree, in whose shade Marianne could make out a figure, a statue of Aphrodite, mutilated but undoubtedly ancient. The left arm was missing but the torso was undamaged and the right arm bent in a graceful attitude of welcome. The head, whose profile was turned to the girl by the rock, was perfect in its beauty and purity.
The flutes continued playing while the offerings were laid before the statue. Then the other girls prostrated themselves, and the tall dark woman stepped forward and addressed the goddess in the noble tongue of Demosthenes and Aristophanes, to the amazement of Marianne who still stood clinging breathlessly to her rock. Forgetting her own wretched plight for a moment, Marianne listened, wonderingly, to the language she had learned as part of Ellis Selton's plan for her niece's education, letting the woman's warm, grave tones sink into her being:
Deathless Aphrodite, on your shining throne,
Beguiling daughter of Zeus, to you I pray.
Do not with pain and anguish like a stone
Crush my poor heart.
But come to me, as you would come of old,
Hearing my cries of passion from afar,
Leaving your father's dwelling-house of gold,
To bear my part.
The bright-winged sparrows harnessed to your cap,
Flew swift from heaven through the midway air,
A myriad flutterings brought you from afar
To this black earth.
Soon, soon they came. And you, O Blessed One,
Your glorious face illumined with a smile,
