“So that when you come up here another time, you will find peaches growing ready for you.”
The boys laughed at him.
“We had better not come here for two or three months, and by then your trees will of course be laden with fruit.”
Pavlo had lived much alone, and he was accustomed to people who meant exactly what they said.
“No,” he said slowly, “I did not mean in two or three months, but some time.”
“Even if they were ever to become trees, without watering or digging or anything,” said Andromache, struggling with Philos, who had left his dinner to attack the roots of a monster lentisk bush, “do you think the shepherds would leave any peaches on them?”
But the word “shepherd” reminded Iason of their object.
“I am going down there,” he said, pointing to the left, where the bushes were rarer and the gray crags began. “It looks cave-y. Leave the baskets there under that bush. No one will touch them.”
The children began to scramble down towards the rocks, and the scent of the thyme as they crushed it mingled little by little with the fresh smell of the sea, as they got nearer and nearer the shore.
The search for the cave was very thorough. Every big bush growing near a rock was pushed aside, every shadow was peered into.