richened, softened, refined all the colours. There were deep blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-coloured earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters _phi_ _omega_--light. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light It didn't touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be. We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its uninducedness, its being-nowness. I looked covertly at Alison; the tip of her nose was bright red. But I was thinking that after all she had guts; that if it hadn't been for her we wouldn't have been there, this world at our feet, this sense of triumph; this transcendent crystallisation of all I felt for Greece. "You must see things like this every day." "Never like this. Never even beginning to be like this." Two or three minutes later she said, "This is the first decent thing that's happened to me for months. Today. And this." After a pause, she added, "And you." "Don't say that. I'm just a mess. A defilement." "I still wouldn't want to be here with anyone else." She stared out towards Euboea; bruised face, being dispassionate for once. She turned and looked at me. "Would you?" "I can't think of any other girl I've ever known who could walk this far." She thought it over, then looked at me again. "What an evasive answer _that_ was." "I'm glad we came. You're a trouper, Kelly." "And you're a bastard, Urfe." But I could see that she wasn't offended.
41
Almost at once tiredness, as we returned, attacked us. Alison discovered a blister on her left heel, where the new shoe had rubbed. We wasted ten minutes of the quick-dying light trying to improvise a bandage for it; and then, almost as abruptly as if a curtain had dropped, night was on us. With it came wind. The sky remained clear, the stars burned frantically, but somewhere we went down the wrong rocky slope and at the place I expected the refuge to be there was nothing. It was difficult to see footholds, increasingly difficult to think sensibly. We foolishly went on, coming into a vast volcanic bowl, a stark lunar landscape; snow-streaked cliffs, violent winds howling round the sides. Wolves became real, not an amusing reference in a casual conversation. Alison must have been far more frightened, and probably far colder, than I was. At the centre of the bowl it became clear that it was impossible to get out except by going back, and we sat for a few minutes to rest in the lee of a huge boulder. I held her close against me for warmth's sake. She lay with her head buried in my sweater, in a completely unsexual embrace; and cradling her there, shivering in that extraordinary landscape, a million years and miles from the sweltering Athens night, I felt it meant nothing, it must mean nothing. I told myself I would have felt the same with anyone. But I looked out over the grim landscape, an accurate enough simile of my life, and remembered something the muleteer had said earlier; that wolves never hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth. I forced Alison to her feet and we stumbled back the way we had come. Along a ridge to the west another col and slope led down towards the black distant sea of trees. Eventually we saw contoured against the sky a tor-shaped hill I had noticed on the way up. The refuge was