have been a record, had been deliberately slowed--there seemed to be some tonal distortion as well--I couldn't tell, but the song came with a dreamlike slowness, almost as if it was being sung out of the stars and had had to cross all that night and space to reach me. I went to the door of my room and opened it. I had some idea that the record player must be in Conchis's room. Somehow he had had the sound relayed to a speaker, or speakers, in the hills--perhaps that was what was in the little room, relaying equipment, a generator. But there was absolute silence in the house. I closed the door and leant back against it. The voices and the song washed dimly down out of the night, through the pine forest, over the house and out to sea. Suddenly the humour, the absurd, tender, touching incongruity of the whole thing, made me smile. I realised that it must be some elaborate joke of Conchis's, mounted for my exclusive benefit. There was no need to rush about trying to discover how it was done. I should find that out in the morning. Meanwhile, I was to enjoy it. I went back to the window. The voices had become very dim, barely audible; but something else had grown penetratingly strong. It was the cesspool smell I had noticed earlier. Now it was an atrocious stench that infested the windless air, a nauseating compound of decomposing flesh and excrement, so revolting that I had to hold my nose and breathe through my mouth. Below my room there was a narrow passage between the cottage and the house. I craned down, trying to see what it was, because the source of the smell seemed so close. It was clear to me that the smell was connected with the singing. I remembered that corpse in the shell hole. The sound faded, went completely. After a few minutes, the smell too was fainter. I stood another ten or fifteen minutes, straining eyes and ears for the faintest sound or movement. But there was none. And there was no sound inside the house. No creeping up the stairs, no doors gently closed, nothing. The crickets chirped, the stars pulsed, the experience was wiped clean. I sniffed at the window. The foul odour still lingered, but under the normal antiseptic smell of the pines and the sea, not over it. Soon it was as if I had imagined everything. I lay awake for at least another hour. Nothing more happened; and no hypothesis made sense. I had entered the domaine.
22
Someone was knocking at the door. Through the shadowy air of the open window, the burning sky. A fly crawled across the wall above the bed. I looked at my watch. It was half-past ten. I went to the door, and heard the slap of Maria's slippers going downstairs. In the glaring light, the racket of cicadas, the events of the night seemed in some way fictional; as if I must have been slightly drugged. But my mind didn't seem fuzzled; I felt fit and clearheaded. I dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast under the colonnade. The taciturn Maria appeared with coffee. "_O kyrios?_" I asked. "_Ephage_. _Eine epano_." Has eaten; is upstairs. Like the villagers, with foreigners she made no attempt to speak more comprehensibly, but uttered her usual fast slur of vowel sounds. I had my breakfast and carried the tray back along the side colonnade and down the steps to the open door of her cottage. The front room was fitted out as a kitchen. With its old calendars, its lurid cardboard ikons, its bunches of herbs and shallots and its bluepainted meatsafe hanging from the ceiling, it was like any other cottage living-kitchen of Phraxos. Only the utensils were rather more ambitious, and the stove larger. I went in and put the tray on the table. Maria appeared out of the back room; I glimpsed a large brass bed, more ikons, photographs. A shadow of a smile creased her mouth; but it was circumstantial, not genuine. It would have been difficult enough in English to ask questions without appearing to be prying; in my Greek it was impossible. I hesitated a moment, then saw her face, as blank as the door behind her, and gave up. I went through the passage between house and cottage to the vegetable