The captain leaves his table in the café without paying (can there be such a thing as an account at the Itea café, or is it possible that he owns it?), and strolls toward the pier holding his folded newspaper. Like some martinet, some stickler for punctuality, he takes out a watch and chain as he walks along, glances at it, and snaps it shut. (Is this to confirm more precisely the extent of the delay?) As he pauses to put it away, two figures appear behind him where the Delphi road joins the waterfront. Since they are on bicycles, they soon draw almost level with the captain, but politely do not pass and allow him to board his ship alone.

These new figures are singular enough to attract a little attention, although their type is familiar in spring and summer on the roads of Europe: a boy and a girl—he about twenty, she perhaps a year younger, each with a plain pedal bicycle to which is strapped a heavy pack. They are both short, fair, and neatly built. A tiny Norwegian flag has been painted on the boy’s bicycle. He wears a bleached khaki shirt, khaki shorts rolled up an inch or two, and leather sandals with rope soles. His legs and arms are fuzzed with ginger and deeply sunburned to a peeled and blotchy red. His face is reddish brown except at the hairline and disfigured by an uncertain ginger beard.

They wheel their bicycles on board. The girl is wearing a loose yellow jersey, above which the back of her neck shows crimson, and a limp cotton skirt of red and blue flowers. On her limbs the down is blond. Her arms are as crimson as her neck, but, since her legs are scarcely pink, there must be a pair of blue jeans somewhere in her monstrous pack. Her hair has been cropped almost as short as her companion’s. On her feet are roughly made sandals of a very old design—an open casing laced together over the instep with thongs that continue halfway up the calf and tie there.

Among the cars and trucks they find a place to put their bicycles where they can be seen from the deck above. The girl’s pack is the same size as the boy’s and must, by the look of it, weigh about thirty pounds (one imagines some misguided pact of equal responsibility), and rummaging in it she produces a paper bag spotted with grease and a clear plastic bottle of water. A frying pan has been strapped to the side of her pack—the sole token of her sex. The pack is closed again and the boy leads the way to the upper deck, where they seat themselves in two canvas chairs just vacated by the American ladies, who have gone into the shade of the wheelhouse.