The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [469]
fell away steeply where the gallery spread out to the sea, and the deeper lining of water faded from emerald to apple green, and from Prussian blue to black, suggesting great depth. Here, too, was the wreck of which Clea had spoken. I had hopes of finding perhaps a Roman amphora or two, but it was not alas a very old ship. I recognized the flared curve of the poop as an Aegean design — the type of caique which the Greeks call ‘ trechandiri’ . She had been rammed astern. Her back was broken. She was full of a dead weight of dark sponges. I tried to find the painted eyes on the prow and a name, but they had vanished. Her wood was crawling with slime and every cranny winked full of hermit crabs. She must have belonged to spon ge fishers of Kalymnos I thought, for each year their fleet crosses to fish the African coast and carry its haul back for processing in the Dodecanese Islands. A blinding parcel of light struck through the ceiling now and down flashed the eloquent body of Clea, her exploding coils of hair swerved up behind her by the water’s concussion, her arms spread. I caught her and we rolled and sideslipped down in each other’s arms, playing like fish until lack of breath drove us up-wards once more into the sunlight. To sit at last panting in the shallows, gazing with breathless delight at each other.
‘What a marvellous pool.’ She clapped her hands in delight.
‘I saw the wreck.’
And climbing back to the little sickle of beach with its warm pebbles with her drenched thatch of hair swinging behind her she said: ‘I’ve thought of another thing. This must be Timonium. I wish I could remember the details more clearly.’
‘What is that?’
‘They’ve never found the site, you know. I am sure this must be it. Oh, let us believe that it is, shall we? When Antony came back defeated from Actium — where Cleopatra fled with her fleet in panic and tore open his battle-line, leaving him at the mercy of Octavian; when he came back after that unaccountable failure of nerve, and when there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the certain death which would follow upon Octavian’s arrival —
why he built himself a cell on an islet. It was named after a famous recluse and misanthrope — perhaps a philosopher? — called Timon. And here he must have spent his leisure — here, Darley, going over the whole thing again and again in his mind. That
woman with the extraordinary spells she was able to cast. His life in ruins! And then the passing of the God, and all that, bidding him to say good-bye to her, to Alexandria — a whole world!’
The brilliant eyes smiling a little wistfully interrogated mine. She put her fingers to my cheek.
‘Are you waiting for me to say that it is?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well. It is.’
‘Kiss me.’
‘Your mouth tastes of oranges and wine.’
It was so small, the beach — hardly bigger than a bed. It was strange to make love thus with one’s ankles in blue water and the hot sun blazing on one’s back. Later we made one of many desultory attempts to locate the cell, or something which might correspond to her fancy, but in vain; on the seaward side lay a tremendous jumble of granite snags, falling steeply into black water. A thick spoke of some ancient harbour level perhaps which explained the wind-and-sea-break properties of the island. It was so silent, one heard nothing but the faint stir of wind across our ears, distant as the echo of some tiny seashell. Yes, and sometimes a herring gull flew over to judge the depth of the beach