The Magus - John Fowles [236]
pulled the trigger. The crack made my ears ring and the huge brown and white swifts that slit their way across the blue sky above my head jinked wildly. Conchis's last joke. I climbed a hundred yards or so to the top of the hill. Not far to the north was a ruined curtain wall, the last of some Venetian or Ottoman fortification. From it I could see ten or fifteen miles of coastline to the north. A long white beach, a village twelve miles away, one or two white scattered houses or chapels, and beyond them a massively rising mountain, which I knew must be Mount Parnon, visible on clear days from Bourani. Phraxos lay about thirty miles away over the sea to the northeast. I looked down. The plateau fell away in a sheer cliff seven or eight hundred feet down to a narrow strip of shingle; a jade-green ribbon where the angry sea touched land, and then white horses, deep blue. Standing on the old bastion, I fired the remaining five bullets out to sea. I aimed at nothing. It was a _feu de joie_, a refusal to die. When the fifth crack had sounded, I took the gun by the butt and sent it whirling out into the sky. It paraboled, poised, then fell slowly, slowly, down through the abyss of air; and by lying flat at the very brink I even saw it crash among the rocks at the sea's edge. I set off down. After a while I struck a better path, which twice passed doorways that led into large rubble-choked cisterns. At the south side of the huge rock I saw, far below, an old walled town on a skirt of land that ran steeply from the cliff bottom down to the sea. Many ruined houses, but also a few with roofs and eight, nine, ten, a covey of churches. The path wound through the ruins and then to a doorway. A long downward tunnel led to another doorway with a hurdle across it, which explained the absence of a goatherd. There was evidently only one way up or down, even for goats. I climbed over the hurdle and emerged into the sunlight. A path with a centuries-old paving of slabs of grey-black basalt graphed down the cliff, finally curving towards the red-ochre roofs of the walled town. I picked my way down through alleys between whitewashed houses. An old peasant woman stood in her doorway with a bowl of vegetable parings she had been emptying for her chickens. I must have looked very strange, carrying a suitcase, unshaven, foreign. "_Kal' espera_." "_Pios eisai?_" she wanted to know. "_Pou pas?_" The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant: Who art thou? Where goest thou? I said I was English, a member of the company who had been making the film, _epano_. "What film up there?" I waved, said it didn't matter, and ignoring her indignant queries, I came at last to a forlorn little main street, not six feet wide, the houses crammed along it, mostly shuttered, or empty; but over one I saw a sign and went in. An elderly man with a moustache, the keeper of the wineshop, came out of a dim corner. Over the blue iron mug of _retsina_ and the olives we shared I discovered all there was to discover. First of all, I had missed a day. The trial had not been that morning, but the day before; it was Monday, not Sunday. I had been drugged again for over twentyfour hours; and I wondered what else. What probing into the deepest recesses of my mind. No film company had been in Monemvasia; no large group of tourists; no foreigners since ten days ago... a French professor and his wife. What did the professor look like? A very fat man, he spoke no Greek... No, he had heard of no one going up there yesterday or today. Alas, no one came to see Monemvasia. Were there large cisterns with paintings on the walls up there? No, nothing like that. It was all ruins. Later, when I walked out of the old town gate and under the cliffs I saw two or three crumbling jetties where a boat could have slipped in and unloaded three or four men with a stretcher. They need not have passed the handful of houses that were still inhabited in the village; and they would have come by night. There were old castles all over the Peloponnesus: Korone, Methone, Pylos, Koryphasion, Pass�. They all had huge