Pascali's Island (19 page)

They showed no sign of being aware of my existence. With utmost circumspection, using declivities, thin folds in the hills, rocks, bushes, anything that afforded cover, I made my way down towards the ruins. Further down, concealment was easier as the vegetation grew more thickly, there were trees among the scrub, wild almonds, gnarled abandoned olives, umbrella pines, even some chestnut trees, all this due to the presence of water here, just below ground.

I paused again here, grateful for the shade. Far below I could see the long irregular swathe of green where vegetation clothed the shallow ravine of the water-course running down to the shore. Beyond this, and appearing like a continuation of it, the ancient jetty pushed into the sea, the water greening over the massive blocks below the surface. The shapes of marble, untarnished by centuries of immersion, glimmered in this light, at this distance, like limbs of some gigantic marine deity sprawling there. Somewhere below me, though I heard no sound, somewhere amidst this denser foliage, if I was right, was Mister Bowles.

I descended, following the green tracery of the spring, scrambling over rock and scrub, clumsy, fearful-yes, I was beginning to feel afraid, Excellency, as if Mister Bowles might suddenly manifest himself, confront me, rise up from among the rocks. I experienced that ancient fear of the watcher or tracker when he suddenly feels that he himself may be the quarry. Vigilance in pursuer or pursued breeds terror.

Nevertheless I persevered, hearing the sounds of my own exertion, hearing too the faint but all-pervasive sound of running water. The going was easier now, I was following a cracked, uneven pavement, partly grassed over. On one side of me circular bases of pillars formed the rough pattern of a colonnade; on the other the ground had slipped and fallen away, there were hummocks of rubble softened by grass and ground ivy. The pavement led to a tholos, perhaps marking the inner sanctuary of the temple. Beyond this the ground was again heaped and broken.

I took a path between thickets of arbutus, or what at first seemed a path – in fact it was merely a level cleft between outcrops of rock, and led me into another, but much narrower and steeper ravine.

As I moved slowly forward through this defile, my sense of desolation grew, the constriction in my heart tightened. No longer the ardour of discovery. Now I felt only doubt of surviving in this fearful undergrowth. Perhaps Mister Bowles was not there at all. Why should I have thought that he was? Why was I there myself, what chimera had lured me? Reason dimmed in me, all purpose left me. I was reduced to my own solitary inexplicable existence, an unwieldy, sweating person, uttering intermittent grunts, his life wasted behind him, his prospects minimal. In search of what? I stopped, stood still, and fear at my existence settled round me, closely, intimately. In full summer, in the middle hours of the day, we should avoid lonely, enclosed places, Excellency. Existence is intensified in us, to the point of dread. There was dread in the beating of my heart, in the shrilling of cicadas, the wavering flight of butterflies, the leaps of grasshoppers sustained beyond expectation. Pan's time, when every creature realises itself, the weak in fear, the strong in power.

I had some moments of swoon there, Excellency. Then, with an effort, I went on, clambered out of this 'well of eternity', literally clambered, as the gully had become impassable. I scrambled up one side, clinging to the roots of cistus and sage, on to a more gradual upward slope facing away from the sea. Before me, on the left, were further ruins, low walls, the ground plan of a house. A fig tree grew against the arch of a doorway. To my right, the slope continued, bare, ochreous, scattered with small rocks. Along the crest of the slope a few straggling thorn bushes. As I stood there, looking up, I heard, or thought I heard, a voice, a human voice, male, in trailing snatches of song. I at once began to climb the rise, setting my feet sideways, caution and the effort of climbing keeping my body low. The singing carried to me again. I lay flat, with my breast against the last few feet of the slope. Very carefully I worked my way upwards until by raising my head I was able to see what lay on the other side of the slope. What I saw was so extraordinary that I almost despair of making it credible to Your Excellency.

The ground fell steeply into a hollow, roughly circular in shape, tangled with bushes immediately below me, then open for a few yards until the land tilted up again, reddish in colour and bare, like the slope I had just climbed. Alone there, full in the sun, was Mister Bowles. He was working, slowly scraping with a short-bladed knife at the face of the farther slope. Except for his hat and a pair of white drawers, he was naked. Naked and dark red in colour, gleaming with perspiration. Red too, lustreless dull red, was the earth face he was working at. He was singing to himself in a droning baritone; not words, but odd random notes, such as a man makes when he is busily occupied.

At first, in those first few seconds, it seemed to me that Mister Bowles had taken leave of his senses in this hot secret place, and was attacking the very earth itself, in slow maniacal protest against the human lot. But the motions of his knife were too fostering, too delicate and loving. There was no adversary there. Besides, it seemed to me now that I could discern a shape, a form, lurking in the clay: Mister Bowles was engaged in an act of creation, he was carving a form out of the hillside. Stilling my agitated heart, and clearing my eyes, I made out lines of a human figure, largely embedded still, turned a little from me, the contour of a shoulder, a face, the shadow of a face, curiously obscured and indistinct. Man's or woman's? It dwelt there, while Mister Bowles, like some devotee in his hat and drawers, made worshipful motions with his knife, and droned his song. – It dwelt there, yes. He was not carving it. Not sculptor but midwife, freeing the form from its impedimenta, its gross obscuring matter, delivering it. This is the task that has been absorbing him, this the reason for all his prevarication and delay.

I watched him for some time longer, in fascination. Then I began to think about getting away. It struck me as distinctly unwise to announce myself there and then, even dangerous. I thought it best to steal away and deliberate on how best to use the knowledge thus unexpectedly gained. However, dis aliter visum. Along the crest of the slope where I was lying the earth was loose and friable. In shifting my position preparatory to retreat, I dislodged several small stones and one or two larger ones, which slid a few yards down the slope behind me until caught in the scrub. Unfortunately for me, Mister Bowles was not singing just at this moment, and he heard it. He turned at once and very quickly. I ducked down below the crest. There was silence for some moments and I was beginning to breathe again when I heard his voice, in quite distinct and passable Turkish – ah, le perfide! – saying, 'Come down here at once.' I heard sounds which indicated that he had changed position. I thought of flight, but Mister Bowles is fitter and faster. Besides, there was the revolver.

I raised my head and looked down. I was filled with apprehension. He was at the foot of the slope, on my side, just beyond the bushes. He was holding the revolver. 'It is I,' I said. 'Pascali.' Grammatical, in spite of my fear, Excellency.

'Come down here,' he said again, this time in English.

I did so, with what alacrity you can imagine. He stood there waiting. Naked, glistening red, that instrument of death steady in his hand. When we were face to face, I saw a look in his eyes that I recognised – I had seen it the day before in Izzet's: not fury, not dislike, a steady look of murder.

When he spoke, however, his tone was almost equable. 'What the devil are you doing here?' he said. He had a heavy, sweetish smell about him, mingled sweat and oil – he had oiled himself against the sun.

In fear I told him. I had been curious, I said, and being curious had made my way up here. Curiosity, I said, was a primal instinct in homo sapiens, and I had my fair share of it. Besides, there had been particularly strong cause for curiosity in this case, because I had wanted to see what a man would risk losing so much money for, not only his own share, but mine. And more than money was at risk, perhaps he did not realise that our lives were in danger. I told him of the meeting with Izzet, how they had waited for me. Talking thus volubly, I saw the look of death leave his face.

All the same he had not really listened. 'Professional curiosity,' he said, when I had rather breathlessly come to a stop. 'Once an informer, always an informer, I suppose.' There was something of a sneer on his face.

'Indeed yes,' I said, in haste to agree. I was beginning to feel a certain elation, now that he looked saner. I knew the existence of something he had wanted to keep secret. That he could have hoped to keep it secret for long was a sign of his less than total grasp of reality, his belief in the shaping force of his own desire. With troops on the ground, Mahmoud and Izzet intent on recovering the lease, and half the town no doubt aware by now of his interest in this place among the hills, it can only be a matter of time before his trouvaille is common knowledge. Perhaps even now there are others who know, others who have watched…

He went over to where his clothes were lying, bent down. When he returned his hands were empty. He turned to indicate the form in the hillside. 'Isn't it marvellous?' he said, and in those blurted syllables there was a kind of confiding enthusiasm. I think he was glad, now that the murderous desire to preserve his secret had passed, to have found someone with whom he could share the experience. 'Too early yet, of course, to identify the period,' he said, with an attempt at scholarly dispassion. I was reminded of his manner on producing the articles from the Gladstone bag, the way he had lectured us. His pale eyes in the sun-darkened face looked hallucinated almost.

'By God, yes,' I said, taking some steps nearer to it. In fact, the figure gave me feelings of dread, Excellency; or rather, it renewed that dread I had felt some time before, trapped in the gully. It was life-size as far as I could tell, reddish clay-coloured, the colour of the earth that still largely contained it and into which it was half-facing. The contours of left shoulder and upper arm were all that had been so far uncovered completely, the features and head still partially obscured by encrustations of earth; and it was this masking accretion that disturbed me, as I went closer. With the beauty of the shoulder and arm revealed and evident, and head and face bemonstered still by those gouts of clay, there was a sense of affliction and stillness in the form, as of some creature arrested by the gods, punished with partial metamorphosis, flesh into earth.

'Bronze,' Mister Bowles said. 'It is bronze, you know, not stone.'

'Male or female?'

'Oh, male,' he said at once. 'Look at that arm.'

It was extremely hot in this hollow. My feeling of oppression increased. It was due, I think, not merely to the heat, or the ambivalence of the figure in the hillside, but to what I felt as the intensities of feeling expended and retained in this enclosed place. Secrecy, aspiration, fanaticism-I know not what to call it. It was in the red earth and pale rock and the bushes and the liturgies of the bees among the thyme. It was in Mister Bowles's face. Savage was the word that came to my mind. I am sensitive to atmosphere, as I have told you before, Excellency. All good informers are.

I could feel sweat trickling slowly down my left side. 'Beautiful,' I said, vaguely.

'Isn't he?' he eagerly and instantly agreed.

'I think I must leave now,' I said. 'I find it very hot down here. A regular suntrap,' I added, attempting a laughing tone.

He paused, looking at me as if considering. 'Yes,' he said. 'It does get hot down here. I'll stay a little while longer. The work is just getting to an exciting stage, you know.'

'Quite so,' I said.

'Then I've got to clean up a bit before I leave. Fortunately there is water here.'

'Yes,' I said.

Mister Bowles hesitated again, then he said; 'I've got a proposition you might be interested in. Will you come over to my room at the hotel for a drink this evening? I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to explain all this.'

'Very well,' I said.

'About nine? In the meantime, keep this to yourself.'

'Of course,' I said.

'You'll be the loser if you don't.' Mister Bowles nodded significantly and looked intently at me from under the brim of his hat. 'You'll lose everything.' he said.

It was with these words echoing in my mind that I turned away from him, started scrambling up out of the hollow. They are in my mind now. How long I have been sitting here, writing to your Excellency, I don't know. I lose count of time here at my table. Time, in any case, is running out for me, as it is for Mister Bowles, and you too, Excellency, I think. I will never get the money now, never get off this island. I must write everything down before it is too late. Already I know with sadness that things have been missed and lost, impressions, complexities of meaning, significant facts even, that will never now find their way into this report. Inevitable, I suppose. Now all my waking thoughts are devoted to this work of mine. Even when I am with others I am formulating phrases, looking for the significant detail with which to enlighten Your Excellency.

I have forgotten to eat today and now I am hungry, but there is no food here. Mister Bowles mentioned a drink, perhaps food will be included. Nine, he said. I should think it must be six now, perhaps a little later: the sea has assumed its evening softness and depth, the sky is paling. I must rest a little, Excellency.

The sun had set when I awoke. I made coffee – it is here before me now. I rate the coffee bean above the olive among God's gifts to man. My legs and shoulders ache from the exertions of earlier. I look from my window at the luminous after-glow on the sea. The sky a gauze-rose suffusion. I look along the shore to the darkening hills where I stalked Mister Bowles today. As the sky loses light the trees along the sky line lose distinctness, they soften like charred wood. Minutes after this charring of the trees darkness will fall, abruptly, like some dark stuff with scents in its folds, smells of dust and pine and the faint brackish odour of the night-time sea.