The iron ramp of the ferry has been cranked up, the whistle blows a third time, and the ship is under way. A small group has somehow collected to wave them off, and in the café the waiter stands among the empty tables shading his eyes. The suns shines, the breeze strengthens, the wool floats more thickly down. On deck the foreigners look back to Delphi, where the ruins are visible only for a moment in a curve of the hills.

“He was changed into a dolphin, you know. Right here. That’s where they get the name. Delphi.” The stocky teacher is the bossy one.

“Who?”

“Apollo. For heaven’s sake.”

The younger one is writing in a notebook. “I’ll put it in at the end. How do you spell Oedipus’s father?”

The Irish couple have taken a bench for themselves, and even have a small cushion covered in imitation leopard. They sit sideways looking out to sea, their knees companionably touching, their Guide Bleu warping on the seat between them.

“What were the Mysteries of Eleusis?”

“Nobody seems to know.” He is more serious than she.

“Maybe that’s the point.” She brings a pink scarf out of her pocket and ties her hat on under her chin. She looks back at the mountains and sighs. “Wasn’t Delphi divine?”

He smiles. “It’s nothing if not that.”

“Is that the Castalian spring? That groove to the right?”

“No—I don’t think we can see it from here. Don’t you remember, we had to drive farther up the road to get to it.”

“Oh yes.” She recites:

“A little Learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Castalian spring.”

“That’s the Pierian spring,” he corrects her, and they both burst out laughing. They turn their attention back to the deck. Like all travelers in Greece, they have run into some of their fellow tourists before today—on the Acropolis, was it, or behind Herodes Atticus?—and have already exchanged nods and smiles with them this morning.

Delphi disappears. The chauffeur of the Danes’ car arrives on deck with a steward. The steward sizes up the situation, then goes back for a collapsible table which is set up for the Danes’ lunch. “Parakalo,” says the stocky teacher, rising to her feet, and soon there are tables for the teachers and the Irish couple as well, and a boy who speaks only Greek is taking impossible orders for lunch.

The Danes and their guide are in deck chairs. They have brought books, and their books are in earnest: Die Griechischen Altertümer, Le Trésor de Sifnos, Alexander’s Path; their Guide Bleu has been warped for years. Before lunch the party has a glass of retsina apiece, and the guide talks to them continually, pointing from time to time.