They drove down amongst the empty shells, the gaping foundries of Lavrion, where the colour of the sea, for the first time in their lives, it seemed rose up and smote them in the faces.

‘Drive on!’ Kikitsa commanded. ‘Lavrion is bad!’

It could have been. In the manner of predominantly masculine men, Spiro drove with that air of clinging to a few simple convictions. His instincts did perhaps sense something of evil in the derelict village of Lavrion, but his principles would not have allowed him to admit it to such a person as Kyria Alexiou.

‘You are quiet, aren’t you?’ Kikitsa remarked.

‘Leave him alone!’ Maro warned.

‘Is he a lion?’ Kikitsa asked.

Aleko looked more desperately than ever out of the window, in search of something, form or symbol, which might save him from humiliation in the face of the inexpressible.

‘I should understand,’ Kikitsa was saying. ‘A lion is only a different kind of cat. I have been practically inside their skins.’

Then she drew a deep breath.

‘Such air!’ she moaned. ‘Under our Greek sky! Look! A little sheep. Provataki! Provataki!’ Kikitsa Alexiou called. ‘It is no use,’ she murmured at last.

She worked herself deeper into the upholstery. She began to declaim Solomos, and hesitatingly, Palamas, and might have unpicked a line or two of Sikelianos, when the car leaped at the promontory, and there was Sounion out in the blue.

Nobody doubted that this was the original blue.

Then, when they had left the car, and climbed with grudging, almost fearful steps upon what remained of the little temple, Kikitsa asked a vaster audience.

‘What do you say if I dance?’

It was not surprising nobody answered, though Maro was surprised and grateful that, despite discouragement, her friend did not choose to begin. Instead, she flopped down. Against a column. A fat woman, in middle age, and a mackintosh with a grease-mark on it.

Maro Hajistavrou wished she could think of something to say in some way worthy of their setting. But she could not.

‘Do you come here often?’ she asked Kikitsa’s great man with a dryness she suspected people might consider typical of her.

‘We have other ruins closer at hand,’ he answered rather crossly. ‘It is all ruins, ruins!’

‘But what is Greece without its ruins?’

‘Exactly! Then we should be left with the keepers of them.’

Professional masochism deterred Maro, who had always remained an amateur. She was glad to watch her husband exploring the terrain, in clothes far too young for him. Though Spiro was younger than his grey head. She noticed on his arms the dark hair, which theoretically she should have abhorred, but which secretly she rather admired.

‘Spiro! Don’t you think you ought to take a picture?’ she called to him in gratitude.

And Spiro Hajistavros was only too glad. He had brought with him his Hasselblad, though nobody, not even his wife, realized exactly what that meant. He was dangling the full gadget bag, which bumped against his sturdy calf, and bumped again, and reassured.