“Petrocaravi is very interesting underwater. You will see.”

“I find Bourani very interesting above water.” I had come up beside him. “I heard voices in the night.”

“Voices?” But he showed no surprise.

“The ipcord. I’ve never had an experience quite like it. An extraordinary idea.” He didn’t answer, but stepped down into the boat and opened the engine housing. I untied the painter from its iron ring in the concrete, then squatted on the jetty and watched him fiddle inside the hatch. “I suppose you have speakers in the trees.”

“I heard nothing.”

I teased the painter through my hand, and smiled. “But you know I heard something.”

He looked up at me. “Because you tell me so.”

“You’re not saying, how extraordinary, voices, what voices. That would be the normal reaction, wouldn’t it?” He gestured rather curtly to me to get aboard. I stepped down and sat on the thwart opposite to him. “I only wanted to thank you for organizing a unique experience for me.”

“I organized nothing.”

“I find it hard to believe that.”

We remained staring at each other. The red-and-white skullcap above the monkey eyes gave him the air of a performing chimpanzee. And there stood the sun, the sea, the boat, so many unambiguous things, around us. I still smiled; but he wouldn’t smile back. It was as if I had committed a faux pas by referring to the singing. He stooped to fit the starting handle.

“Here, let me do that.” I took the handle. “The last thing I want to do is to offend you. I won’t mention it again.”

I bent to turn the handle. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder. “I am not offended, Nicholas. I do not ask you to believe. All I ask you is to pretend to believe. Just pretend to believe. It will be easier.”

It was strange. By that one gesture and a small shift in expression and tone of voice, he resolved the tension between us. I knew on the one hand that he was playing some kind of trick on me; a trick like the one with the loaded die. On the other, I felt that he had after all taken a sort of liking for me. I thought, as I heaved at the engine, if he wants me to seem his dupe, I’ll seem his dupe; but not be his dupe.

We headed out of the cove. It was difficult to talk with the engine going, and I stared down through fifty or sixty feet of water to patches of pale rock starred black with sea urchins. On Conchis’s left side were two puckered scars. They were both back and front, obviously bullet wounds; and there was another old wound high on his right arm. I guessed that they came from the execution during the second War. Sitting there steering he looked ascetic, Ghandi-like; but as we approached Petrocaravi, he stood up and steered the tiller expertly against his dark thigh. Years of sunlight had tanned him to the same mahogany brown as the island fishermen.

The rocks were gigantic boulders of conglomerate, monstrous in their barren strangeness, much larger now we were close to them than I had ever realized from the island. We anchored about fifty yards away. He handed me a mask and snorkel. At that time they were unobtainable in Greece, and I had never used them before.

I followed the slow, pausing thresh of his feet over a petrified landscape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals of fish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; Bosch-like fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind dark blue. Conchis raised his head above the surface.

“I am going back to fetch the boat. Stay here.”

I swam on. A shoal of several hundred golden-gray fish followed me. I turned, they turned. I swam on, they followed, truly Greek in their obsessive curiosity. Then I lay over a great slab of rock which warmed the water almost to bath heat. The shadow of the boat fell across it. Conchis led me a little way to a deep fissure between two boulders, and there suspended a piece of white cloth on the end of a line. I hung like a bird in the water overhead, watching for the Octopus he was trying to entice. Soon a sinuous tentacle slipped out and groped the bait, then other swift tentacles, and he began skillfully to coax the octopus up; I had tried this myself and knew it was not nearly as simple as the village boys made it seem. The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife, turned it inside out in a moment. I levered myself aboard.

“I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And he will let himself be caught as easily.”

“Poor thing.”

“You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal.” A piece of old white sheeting, from which he had torn his “bait,” lay beside him. I remembered it was Sunday morning; the time for sermons and parables. He looked up from the puddle of sepia.

“Well, how do you like the world below?”

“Fantastic. Like a dream.”

“Like humanity. But in the vocabulary of millions of years ago.” He threw the octopus under the thwart. “Do you think that has a life after death?”

I looked down at the viscid mess and up to meet his dry smile. The red-and-white skullcap had tilted slightly. Now he looked like Picasso imitating Ghandi imitating a buccaneer. He let in the clutch lever and we moved forward. I thought of the Maine, of Neuve Chapelle; and shook my head. He nodded, and raised the white sheeting. His even teeth gleamed falsely, vividly in the intense sunlight. Stupidity is lethal, he implied; and look at me, I have survived.

23

We had lunch, a simple Greek meal of goat’s-milk cheese and greenpepper salad with eggs, under the colonnade. The cicadas rasped in the surrounding pines, the heat hammered down outside the cool arches. All the time we talked of the undersea world. For him it was like a gigantic acrostic, an alchemist’s shop where each object had a mysterious value, an inner history that had to be deduced, unraveled, guessed at. He made natural history sound and feel like something central and poetic; not an activity for Scout masters and a butt for Punch jokes.

The meal ended, and he stood up. He was going upstairs for his siesta. We would meet again at tea.

“What will you do?”

I opened the old copy of Time magazine I had beside me. Carefully inside lay his seventeenth-century pamphlet.

“You have not read it yet?” He seemed surprised.

“I intend to now.”

“Good. It is rare.”

He raised his hand and went in. I crossed the gravel and started idly off through the trees to the east. The ground rose slightly then dipped; after a hundred yards or so a shallow outcrop of rocks hid the house. Before me lay a deep gulley choked with oleanders and thorny scrub, which descended precipitously down to the private beach. I sat back against a pine trunk and became lost in the pamphlet. It contained the posthumous confessions and letters and prayers of a Robert Foulkes, vicar of Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. Although a scholar, and married with two sons, in 1677 he had got a young girl with child, and then murdered the child; for which he was condemned to death.

He wrote the fine muscular pre-Dryden English of the mid-seventeenth century. He had mounted to the top of impiety, even though he had known that the minister is the people’s Looking-glass. Crush the cockatrice he groaned from his death cell. I am dead in law—but of the girl he denied that he had attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old; for upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done.