"Come up quickly," he said. "Here is the Mediterranean, your mother sea."
When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out in the middle like a woman lying on her side.
[1]The author does not hold himself responsible for the opinions held by his characters.
[III]
CLINGING to a rocky prominence, warm and brown as bread-crust, seamed with long scars, and without an ounce of vegetable earth, lay the only village on the island. A flight of cobbled steps led down to the little harbour adorned by a few periwinkle-coloured boats and six empty barrels. Houses made of unbaked bricks, cracked by the midday sun, a few palms, laurels and cactus white with dust, all shimmering like glaciers. Above these was the Apostolatos house, its embrasures edged with blue, entirely built of marble inside and as cool as a glass of water. Its first owners had fled in 1818 (the women with gold coins hidden in their hair) to start trading at Odessa and later at Trieste, whilst a cadet branch established itself at Bombay. The house had subsequently been restored by Irene's two old aunts, who had lived there nearly all their lives in the greatest affection; one day they left it after a bitter and relentless quarrel; one, Hera, was a Venizelist, the other, Calliope, a Constantinian. Irene had played as a child in this drawing-room furnished with Second Empire buhl; in the room in which Lewis was sleeping her mother had died.
Lewis sat on his trunk and looked about him. There was a lithograph of King Otho on the wall and a large imaginative picture, turning black, representing the massacre of Suli, where the Greek women threw their children over a precipice rather than let them fall into the hands of the Turks. He examined the furniture; a bed, a chair, a cracked ikon, a water jar and a stove full of fruit stones dipped in resin. He looked at his dusty feet and suddenly the weariness of the week's journey came over him. Paris seemed to him all dewy, fresh and far away. Once more he was being punished for his eagerness for travel. This leap into a wild, romantic, uninhabited corner of the earth overwhelmed him. This feeling of oppression sent him to sleep.
When he awoke he was rested, that is to say comforted; night was falling; Irene was near him on the terrace, before the window, her eyes fixed on the crest of a hill from which rose the mauve wall of a leper-house.
"What are you thinking about, Irene?" She started, got up and came and knelt by him.
"I was looking at this sea which never rises or falls (it was her business woman's way of saying "this tideless sea")." "I seem, like it, to be stagnating. I am so happy that I ask myself if I oughtn't to stop living. The wise thing would be to sell out now, at the top of the market."
As the evening fell the grasshoppers made a deafening noise. From the mountain came the great holy scent of goat followed by a perfume of mint so hot and so aromatic that one thought one was wearing a sprig of it against one's chest all night.