Indiana Jones & the Peril at Delphi

He nodded, slid down in his seat and closed his eyes. Soon the drone of the engine lulled him to sleep.

He dozed, was jolted awake, dozed again, a rhythm as pre dictable as the tick of a clock. By early afternoon, they climbed the lower slopes of Mount Parnassos, and his anticipation increased with the altitude.

'Almost there,' Dorian said, gazing through the wind shield at the mountain peak.

Indy touched her thigh; she nudged it away. 'We have to act professionally while we're at the ruins.

Here, you're my student, that is all. Do you understand?'

Her expression was hard, cast in stone. Indy gave a quick, nervous laugh. 'Oh, c'mon, you afraid of a scandal because I'm younger than you?'

'This isn't funny, Jones, and age has nothing to do with it. It just doesn't look right for a professor to be sleeping with her student.'

Look right to whom? But he didn't ask. He suddenly wanted to tell her that he'd never experienced anything like their lovemaking. It was more than mere sexual passion. It was the fulfillment of his longing for a woman who was different from the others he'd known. Yet, he wanted her more than ever. She was as seductive and enigmatic as the mystery of Delphi itself, and he needed her. But he didn't say anything of this, either. He was afraid she would laugh, that she'd call him her sweet student of love or something equally humiliating.

'There.' She pointed. 'See it?'

Indy leaned forward and saw a mountain terrace that seemed to literally hang in space, in a pocket between ominous craggy peaks. It looked small and insignificant compared to the mountain.

Dorian told the driver to stop for a minute. They got out and gazed up at Delphi.

'I guess I was expecting it would be larger,' he said.

'Its size had nothing to do with its importance. Think of it, Indy. For a thousand years, kings and statesmen, military leaders and merchants, climbed the sides of this mountain, bearing questions for the oracle.'

He recalled her saying in class that the predictions were often obscure and ambiguous. If that was so, how could it have lasted so long, and impressed so many?

'Did anyone ever keep track of the accuracy of the predictions?'

'Why do you ask?'

'If I were resting my future on some old lady's bab blings, I'd want to know how accurate she was.'

'You Americans.' Dorian laughed. 'You think the world is like one of your baseball games. You want everyone to have a batting average. I doubt if anyone kept such records, but of course the tradition of the oracle would never have survived for so long if the predictions were usually wrong.'

'I'd bet the successes had more to do with the knowl edge of the priests, than the oracle.'

She said nothing in response. Her enigmatic smile was her answer.

They climbed back in the truck and ten minutes later rounded the final bend and arrived at Delphi. At eighteen hundred feet the air was a bit cooler here than in Athens. He gazed up at the massive surrounding peaks which rose to more than eight thousand feet, and then down at the sharp drop of the landscape to the valley below.

The truck stopped and they stepped out. Most of the buildings were merely foundations and rubble, the result of centuries of earthquakes and man's own destruction. But just the sight of the tilted Doric columns of Apollo's Temple so near the steep face of the mountain sent chills along Indy's spine. Here he was at the most famous religious site of antiquity, a place once considered the center of the world, a place of earth and stone and, he was certain, of secrets still hidden.

'What do you think, Jones?'

It bothered him that she rarely called him Indy any more, but he let it go. What mattered was that he was here, at Delphi. 'It's not just a myth anymore. It's a real place, at least, it was.'

'It still is a real place. Don't forget that.'

He was about to say that right now it was more real than the Sorbonne when he saw a fat man hurrying toward them. He was trying to run, Indy thought, but his corpu lence made his effort nothing more than a waddle. As he neared them, it was obvious he was excited.

'Dr. Belecamus, I'm glad you're finally here,' he said, sucking in breathfuls of thin air. 'We've been expecting you for a couple of days.'

'I told you I would come as fast as I could.' Indy heard a trace of annoyance in her voice, and sensed there was animosity between them. 'Jones, this is Stephanos Dou mas, the current chief of archaeology here.'

Indy pegged him to be just a few years older than he was. He extended a hand, but the man just nodded and continued talking to Dorian.

'Something incredible has happened,' he exclaimed. 'You must come quickly and see for yourself.'

'What are you talking about?'

'It's the crevice in the temple.' He gestured with his hands. 'There are vapors rising from it. Vapors—like those the oracle breathed.'

9

THE RETURN

Panos, the stonemason, ambled along the main street of the village, en route to the platia, the grassy park at the end of the village. As he passed the restaurant, he nodded to the familiar old men who squatted on a long wooden bench outside the crumbling wall. Except for the amber komboloi beads they fingered, they reminded him of cats, purring with contentment in the midmorning sun.

Several feet from where they sat, a pair of rough-hewn wood beams were propped against the wall, where the brick had buckled and bulged and sent a spider web of cracks along the tarnished white stucco. Damage from the recent earthquake, he thought. But life continued on. Earthquakes and tremors were hardly more remarkable here in the village of Delphi than a heavy thunderstorm. A part of life: birth, death, earthquakes.

One of the old men called out and asked him about his mother's health. That was about all the old man ever said to him any more. He was in the village, but no longer of it. He was another visitor, like the people who came to see the ruins. Only the old men knew him; they remembered Panos from another time.

So he talked about his mother's health in terms they could understand: 'She feels much better now that her son and grandson are here again.' He smiled. 'She says she goes up and down.'

The old men laughed. It was what everyone in Delphi said when you asked how they were. We go up and down. That was life on the mountain. Up the mountain and down the mountain.

The sight of the old men always made him feel good. They were the standard-bearers of the village. It seemed they had always been there by the restaurant, waiting, watching, occasionally talking. He knew, though, that there had been a time when they were active, vital men, working and traveling up and down the mountain. Car penters, craftsmen, merchants, shepherds.

But that was before the shift, when the village was moved from atop the sacred ruins to its present site.

Now the men were like the ruins of Delphi itself, their aged bones no longer able to support an active existence.

He kept walking down the road as the men muttered among themselves. They were probably saying something about the accident so many years ago in which Estelle had died. Or, more likely, they were repeating an old story about what had happened afterwards. Estelle had been walking along a mountain trail carrying her infant son, Grigoris, when a landslide had buried both of them. Panos, who had been several yards ahead, had managed to dig Grigoris from the rubble. Miraculously, he was unhurt. But when Panos reached Estelle, he cried out in agony and grief. Estelle, his beautiful young wife, was dead, her skull crushed by a boulder.

That was the year of the shift. Thirty years ago, he thought. The year the archaeologists arrived. The year everything changed.

But out of Estelle's death rose a new life—his own. He was transformed, changed by her death, by the shift of the village and by Milos, Estelle's father. As long as he had known him, Milos had been called the Crazy One, and

afterwards he became even more crazy. But Panos learned to look beyond Milos's craziness, and slowly he