Sometime later in the night the bell clanked twice from the courtyard. He woke suddenly. At first he thought it was the wind: a low whining sound that rose and fell for several seconds, before giving a high-pitched whistle and dying out altogether. There was a pause. He looked at his watch: it was nearly half past two. He could now hear a voice muttering somewhere behind the wall. It went on for a long time and he guessed that one of the monks was praying in a nearby cell.
He dropped back to sleep, but woke again in less than ten minutes. The voice had stopped. There were footsteps moving up and down the gallery outside. They passed the cell twice with a steady creaking, turned and started back, reached his door and halted.
He was wide awake now, sitting up, waiting for the next step. But the only sound was Van Loon’s breathing. Then, very gently, he heard a number of clicks, each followed by a ringing sound. He counted eight before they stopped. There was silence: the footsteps did not go away. He lay still, listening; then got up, felt his way across the cell and opened the door.
There was a moon outside and the walls shone stone-white across the courtyard. A man was standing opposite him, his back turned, staring over the balustrade into the yard. He swung round at the sound of the door and for a moment they faced each other in silence. Neil could not see his face against the moonlight: all he could make out was a tall spare figure with arms gripping the balustrade behind him. Neil took a step forward and the man snapped, ‘Qui êtes-vous?’
Neil stopped. He still felt muzzy with wine and arak. He squinted at the man and slurred in his competent French, ‘J’suis anglais — j’m’appelle Ingleby.’
The man seemed to relax; his arms slipped from the balustrade and he murmured, ‘Ah, an Englishman!’ He stared at Neil, then added, speaking French, ‘My name is Martel. Pierre Martel.’ He held out a hand that was dry and cold like a doctor’s then turned and took a coin from his pocket, which he held over the balustrade and dropped into the yard below. It landed with the clicking sound that Neil had just heard from the cell. Without turning, the man took out another coin. Neil moved closer and saw that it was a ten-drachma piece, worth about half-a-crown. Monsieur Martel leant out again and dropped it carefully over, at exactly the same spot as before. Neil wondered if it was some kind of game. The man was looking down into the yard and said absently: ‘I dropped something. I was just taking a walk and I dropped it over the edge.’
For a moment the two of them stood side by side, peering into the darkness.
‘What was it?’ said Neil.
‘A coin. A gold coin.’ The man had taken out another ten-drachma piece and dropped it over after the others.
‘What are you doing?’ said Neil.
Monsieur Martel straightened up suddenly and faced him. It was a gaunt grey face; the hair was the colour of white pepper, cropped over a round scalp, and his eyes were a sunken slate-grey with a curious shallow glare in them. Neil had a feeling that he had seen him somewhere before.
‘It’s an old trick,’ the man said, ‘didn’t you ever play it as a boy? You lose something, and you send something else after it.’ He jerked his head towards the yard: ‘There, in the morning, I shall find that all the coins have fallen in a limited area. The gold one will be somewhere among them.’
Neil suddenly wanted to laugh; he said, ‘I’ve got a lamp in my room. We could go down and look for the coin now.’
The Frenchman shook his head: ‘Thank you, I’ll go myself. Goodnight.’ He nodded, unsmiling, and walked away down the gallery.
Neil watched him go, then went back into the cell. Van Loon grunted, half-asleep, ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Some old Frenchman,’ said Neil. ‘He was dropping coins into the yard.’ He climbed down under the sackcloth, and Van Loon muttered, ‘Must be crazy!’
Neil thought again about that whining sound he had heard earlier; he decided that it hadn’t been the wind after all. He wondered where he had seen that gaunt face before.
CHAPTER 2
By the time they were up next morning M. Martel had already left. They washed at a well in the corner of the yard, and Neil noticed that the coins the Frenchman had dropped had now gone.
They set off by eight o’clock, after a breakfast of jam and thimble cups of sweet gritty-black coffee. For the first four hours they trudged up through warm pines, round the shoulder of the mountain. At about noon they were given some grapes by a hermit living in a tree: a decrepit old man with shoes made out of slices of car tyres who sat on a bed of branches built between two pines. Soon after they came out over the sea. From here the path became a ridge winding up the steep pyramid of Mount Athos. Knotted olive trees clung by their roots high above the Aegean, which stretched out below like beaten silver. There was no wind. They walked all day, till the sun sank low and the sea darkened to copper-brown veined with shifting shadows; and in the distance they saw the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon, its clumps of green cupolas bristling with crosses of dull gold.
An hour later they reached the gates. They were given a whitewashed room with windows over the sea. The beds were laid with coarse clean linen, and there was even a washbowl and a Tilley lamp under a gold-framed photograph of Czar Nicholas II, with an inscription in Russian and
