'Don't go to sleep after you have eaten,' she said. 'I will come for you when it is quite dark.'
'What for?'
'Ask no questions. Not now. Later, you will understand much that must have seemed to you strange, even insensate. You need know only that I do nothing without a good reason, and it has cost me much thought, all day, before I made up my mind what I should do about you.'
Marianne's throat felt suddenly dry. The woman's voice held a veiled but horrid menace. It occurred to her that perhaps she was really dealing with a lunatic who, like all those in that condition, refused to recognize her own madness. Nevertheless, she refused to show her fear and merely said quietly:
'Ah!… And you have decided?'
'Yes, I have decided… to trust you. But woe to you if you are deceiving me! The whole of the Mediterranean will not be big enough to save you from our vengeance. Eat now, and wait for me. Oh, I nearly forgot…'
She took a bundle of black material from her basket and tossed it on to the bed.
'Put this on. Darkness is a fine concealment if you know how to melt into it properly.'
This Sappho was a strange creature, Marianne thought. She was still wearing her absurd classical garb but she was a very different person now from the one she had been hitherto. It was as though she had suddenly decided to throw off a mask and reveal her real face, and that face had something implacable about it that could be disquieting. Yet she had said that she had chosen to trust her, although there had been such a menacing note in her voice as she said it that it was almost as though she regretted her decision, or as though her attitude were not of her own choosing, to say the least, and she was merely bowing to circumstances.
Whatever the truth of it, Marianne felt that it was best to do as she was told, since her fate depended on it, but at the same time to be on her guard. As she regained her strength, so she was regaining her appetite for life.
She sat down at the table and began to eat, quite calmly and with relish. She even found herself enjoying the strong, heady wine which was the island's pride, and the agreeable sense of well-being it sent coursing through her veins. She had slept so well that she felt quite rested now and almost ready to face up to whatever new obstacles fate seemed to be taking a malign pleasure in putting in her way.
Darkness had fallen long before Sappho returned to the chapel, and Marianne had long been ready and waiting, without impatience, sitting on a stool with her hands hugging her knees. She had put on the costume given to her, which turned out to be of the kind commonly worn by the peasant women of the Greek islands, consisting of a full black cotton skirt with a thin band of red round the hem, a tight-waisted bodice to match, and a large, black scarf covered with fine red embroidery which was worn over the head, completely hiding the hair.
The other woman was dressed in almost identical fashion and she cast an approving glance over Marianne.
'What a shame you don't speak our language! You might easily be taken for one of our girls. Even your eyes are as fierce as if you'd been born here! Now, put out the lamp and follow me, without a sound.'
The darkness swallowed them. Marianne felt Sappho's hand take hold of hers in the blackness and draw her forward. Outside, the night seemed inky black and carried on its breath the scents of thyme and myrtle with a faint whiff of sheep. Without that guiding hand, Marianne would undoubtedly have fallen flat within a few steps, because she was walking blind, feeling the ground ahead with her foot before she put it down.
'Come on!' Sappho whispered impatiently. 'We'll never get there at this rate.'
'But I can't see,' Marianne protested. She refrained from inquiring where she was being taken in such haste.
'That will pass. Your eyes will grow accustomed.'
They did, far more quickly than Marianne would have thought possible. At the same time she understood the reason for Sappho's precautions in dressing her in dark clothes and enjoining her to keep silent. A few furlongs from the villa, and hidden from it until they were outside the broken wall, a fire was burning. The light came from outside a formless white building, something between a mosque and a barn, and illuminated the weird, mustachioed figures of a number of Turkish soldiers who were gathered round it, cooking something in a big copper cauldron suspended over the fire.
The firelight also served to show Marianne that the path Sappho had taken passed close by this guard post, but already the poetess had put her finger to her lips and was leading her noiselessly behind a piece of ruined wall which must have belonged to some ancient fortification. The two women were engulfed at once in a thicket of tamarisk and juniper and, with the aid of this twofold cover, were able to move forward slowly, bent almost double and taking care to avoid the smallest snap of a twig underfoot. With this precarious shelter, they passed close enough to the Turks to smell their food cooking. Marianne felt the clutch of fear. At last the perilous part was over, and the two women walked on a little farther and then joined the path which was now winding through what must have been an ancient cemetery, dotted with antique steles and the empty stone troughs of what might once have been sarcophagi. At that point, Sappho turned sharp left up a stony sloping path, like nothing more than a mule track, which climbed precipitously towards the summit of the ridge.
By now Marianne's eyes had grown sufficiently used to the dark for her to make out some details of the landscape, even distinguishing the white blurs of the cistus flowers that grew in patches along the path. It became dear that, for all its winding to and fro, this path was leading them to the hostile white walls of the monastery.
Marianne pulled gently at her companion's sleeve as the other woman climbed ahead of her.
'Surely we aren't going there?' she said as Sappho looked round, and she pointed to the ridge.
'Yes, that is where we are going. To the monastery of Ayios Ilias.'[3]
'Judging from what I saw earlier on, you aren't exactly on the best of terms with the monks there.'
Sappho paused for a moment, hands on hips. She was breathing hard, for the climb was a tough and tiring one, even for someone who was used to it.
'There is appearance,' she said, 'and reality. The reality is that the higoumenos Daniel is expecting us at eleven o'clock. What you witnessed at sunset was nothing more than a conventional exchange. My song required an answer – and the answer was forthcoming.'
'With stones?' Marianne said, bewilderedly.
'Precisely. Eleven stones were thrown. That meant eleven o'clock. It's time you should know, stranger, that all of us here, and on every other island in the archipelago, and throughout Greece, have sworn to devote our lives to shaking off the Turkish yoke which has oppressed us for centuries. We are all vowed to the service of freedom: rich and poor, peasants, brigands, monks… and madmen! But we must stop talking and press on, because the way is steep and it will take us a good quarter of an hour to reach Ayios Ilias.'
In fact it was twenty minutes later when Marianne and her companion stood beneath the monastery's tall white walls. Marianne, still barely recovered from her recent ordeal, was breathless and thankful that it was night: by day, in the glare of the sun, the climb must be intolerable, for there was not so much as a tree or a blade of grass. She was sweating under her black cotton skirts and knew how to value the draught that swirled under the big entrance portico, a massive semicircular arch surmounted by an open pediment hung with bells. An iron gate, adorned with the two-headed eagle of Mount Athos, to which Ayios Ilias belonged, creaked open. A shadow stepped out from among the thick dark shadows of the doorway, but there was nothing alarming in it. It was the plump shadow of a fat little monk, bearded and pigtailed, who, to judge from the odour of sanctity that emanated from him, was not inclined to waste the island's precious water supply unnecessarily. He said something in an undertone to Sappho and then rolled away like a little ball on his short legs, leading the two women along a terrace by a white wall, past a stone-built cistern and elegant Byzantine basin, before plunging into a maze of passages, curved bays opening on to empty vestibules and stairways which, in the light of the smoky torches that burned here and there, looked as if carved out of snow. At last he opened a painted door into the monastery chapel.
Two men were standing in the light of the great bronze lamp in front of a massive eighteenth-century iconostasis, carved and painted in a primitive style, like a child's picture book. But if there was something primitive about the chapel, with its silver-mounted icons and white walls decorated with the two-headed eagle of the Holy Mountain, its two occupants had nothing of the freshness and innocence of childhood about them.
One, wearing a long black robe and gleaming pectoral cross, was the higoumenos Daniel. He had the narrow, emaciated face of the ascetic, made to look still longer by his grey beard, and his eyes were those of a visionary and fanatic. He had the power to annihilate time, and as she crossed the chapel towards him, Marianne had the unnerving feeling that he could see right through her, as though she had no real substance or personal
