The Magus - John Fowles [167]
more broken sprays of tamarisk. A little higher I picked up several screwed-out cigarette ends. One was only half-smoked and had the beginnings of the same phrase: _Leipzig da_--I stood on the bluff looking down over the other side of the island. A long way to the south I could see a big ca�e of the kind that must have brought the "soldiers" to the island; there was nothing unusual in seeing it. Such caIques passed through the straits facing the school several times a week. But it reminded me how easy it was for Conchis's cast to get on and off the island without my knowing. I stood some time on the bluff, because if anyone was watching I wanted them to know I was on my way. I had already told Demetriades I was going out for a long walk; and made sure that old Barba Vassili saw me going through the school gates, so that the information could be, if it usually was, wirelessed across. I arrived at the gate and walked straight to the house. It lay with the cottage in the sun, closed and deserted. I rattled the French window shutters hard, and tried the others. But none of them gave. All the time I kept looking around, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. I must be meant to meet Lily again. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four of five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pumphouse, the old baulk, the shadowed mouth of the little cave; but no boat. Then to the Poseidon statue. Silent statue, silent trees. To the cliff, to where I had sat with Lily the Sunday before. The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption. I began to walk along towards the bay with the three cottages. The landscape to the east came into view, and then I came on the boundary wire of Bourani. As everywhere else it was rusty, a token barrier, not a real one; shortly beyond it the inland cliff fell sixty or seventy feet to lower ground. I bent through the wire and walked inland along the edge. There were one or two places where one could clamber down; but at the bottom there was an impenetrable jungle of scrub and thorn ivy. I came to where the fence turned west towards the gate. There were no telltale overturned stones, no obvious gaps in the wire. Following the cliff to where it levelled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages. Shortly afterwards I was walking through the small olive orchard that surrounded them. I watched the three whitewashed houses as I approached through the trees. Strange that there was not even a chicken or a donkey. Or a dog. There had been two or three dogs before. Two of the one-story cottages were adjoining. Both front doors were bolted, with bolt handles padlocked down. The third looked more openable, but it gave only an inch before coming up hard. There was a wooden bar inside. I went round the back. The door there was also padlocked. But on the last side I came to, over a hencoop, I found two of the shutters were loose. I peered in through the dirty windows. An old brass bed, a cube of folded bedclothes in the middle of it. A wall of photographs and ikons. Two canebottomed wooden chairs, a cot beneath the window, an old trunk. On the windowsill in front of me was a brown candle in a _retsina_ bottle, a broken garland of _immortelles_, a rusty sprocket-wheel from some bit of machinery, and a month of dust. I closed the shutters. The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing twine. I struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living room in front.