The Moonspinners Read Free Page A

the deep-blue sky behind them; so that one can well believe that among those remote and floating peaks the king of the gods was born. For Zeus, they said, was born in Dicte, a cave of the White Mountains. They showed you the very place . . .
    At that moment, on the thought, the big white bird flew, with slow, unstartled beat of wings, out of the glossy leaves beside me, and sailed over my head. It was a bird I had never seen before, like a small heron, milk-white, with a long black bill. It flew as a heron does, neck tucked back and legs trailing, with a down-curved, powerful wing beat. An egret? I shaded my eyes to watch it. It soared up into the sun, then turned and flew back over the lemon grove, and on up the ravine, to be lost to view among the trees.
    I am still not quite sure what happened at that moment.
    For some reason that I cannot analyse, the sight of the big white bird, strange to me; the smell of the lemon flowers, the clicking of the mill sails and the sound of spilling water; the sunlight dappling through the leaves on the white anemones with their lamp-black centres; and, above all, my first real sight of the legendary White Mountains . . . all this seemed to rush together into a point of powerful magic, happiness striking like an arrow, with one of those sudden shocks of joy that are so physical, so precisely marked, that one knows the exact moment at which the world changed. I remembered what I had said to the Americans, that they, by bringing me here, had given me a day. Now I saw that, literally, they had. And it seemed no longer to be chance. Inevitably, here I was, alone under the lemon trees, with a path ahead of me, food in my bag, a day dropped out of time for me, and a white bird flying ahead.
    I gave a last look behind me at the wedge of shimmering sea, then turned my face to the north-east, and walked rapidly through the trees, towards the ravine that twisted up into the flank of the mountain.

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    When as she gazed into the watery glass
    And through her brown hair’s curly tangles scanned
    Her own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass
    Across the mirror . . .
    WILDE : Charmides
    It was hunger, in the end, that stopped me. Whatever the impulse that had compelled me to this lonely walk, it had driven me up the track at a fair speed, and I had gone some distance before, once again, I began to think about a meal.
    The way grew steeper as the gorge widened, the trees thinned, and sunlight came in. Now the path was a ribbon along the face of a cliff, with the water below. The other side of the ravine lay back from it, a slope of rock and scrub studded here and there with trees, but open to the sun. The path was climbing steeply, now, towards the lip of the cliff. It did not seem to be much used; here and there bushes hung across it, and once I stopped to gather a trail of lilac orchids which lay, unbruised, right at my feet. But on the whole I managed to resist the flowers, which grew in every cranny of the rock. I was hungry, and wanted nothing more than to find a level place in the sun, beside water, where I could stop and eat my belated meal.
    Ahead of me, now, from the rocks on the right, I could hear water, a rush of it, nearer and louder than the river below. It sounded like a side stream tumbling from the upper rocks, to join the main water course beneath.
    I came to a corner, and saw it. Here the wall of the gorge was broken, as a small stream came in from above. It fell in an arrowy rush right across the path, where it swirled round the single stepping stone, to tumble once again, headlong, towards the river. I didn’t cross it. I left the path, and clambered, not without difficulty, up the boulders that edged the tributary stream, towards the sunlight of the open ground at the edge of the ravine.
    In a few minutes I had found what I was looking for. I climbed a tumble of white stones where poppies grew, and came out on a small, stony alp, a level field of