The Wanderer Read Free

War. I understood from the captain that it was the goddess Aphrodite who had been born off this island, which the ancient Greeks called Cytherea, but I found it hard to understand why the loveliest of all pagan deities had chosen this bleak, rocky, inaccessible isle for her birthplace.
    I was therefore filled with a burning desire to go ashore and contemplate the relics of a former age, and discover whether indeed there were any grounds for the tales the ancient Greeks had told. And when I had related to Giulia all I could remember of Aphrodite’s birth, Paris’s golden apple, and Helen’s unlawful love, I found no difficulty in persuading her to accompany me. Her curiosity was, if possible, more intense than my own thirst for knowledge.
    Seamen rowed the four of us ashore, and I bought a basket filled with new bread, dried meat, figs, and goat’s cheese. I could understand little of the villagers’ dialect, but when a goatherd showed me a path, pointed to the top of a hill, and constantly repeated the word palaio- polis, I knew that he was showing us the way to an ancient city. We walked uphill beside a stream until we came to a quiet reach where in ancient days many bathing pools had been built. Although the stones were weatherworn and stiff grass grew in the cracks, I could count a dozen of these pools; after a ten days’ voyage and a warm climb we could have beheld no pleasanter or more welcome sight. Andy and I plunged in at once, and washed ourselves clean with the fine sand; the two ladies also undressed and bathed in another pool behind a screen of bushes. I heard Giulia splashing and laughing with delight.  
    With the soft breeze murmuring through shiny green laurel leaves and Giulia’s laughter ringing in my ears, my fancy peopled these pools with the nymphs and fauns of legend, and I should have felt no surprise if the goddess Aphrodite herself, in all her glory, had stepped toward me from the thicket.
    When we had eaten, Andy remarked that he felt drowsy, and Johanna too, after a hostile glance at the rocky crag and the dense pine forests on its slopes, began to bewail her swollen feet.
    So Giulia and I set forth alone together on an arduous climb to the summit. We found there two marble columns whose capitals had fallen to the ground and been buried under sand and grass. Behind them stood the bases of many square pillars and the ruins of a temple doorway. Among the ruins of the temple itself a larger-than-life-size statue of a goddess stood on a marble pedestal. She gazed upon us in regal beauty, her limbs covered by the thinnest of veils. The temple had fallen in ruins about her, but still in her divine loveliness she surveyed us mortals, though one thousand, five hundred and twenty-seven years had passed since our Saviour’s birth.
    But I was thinking neither of my Saviour nor of the excellent resolutions that had moved me to undertake my long journey. I seemed transported into the golden, pagan age when men knew neither the thorns of doubt nor the anguish of sin; in the face of this potent spell I should have done well to flee. I know I should have fled, but I did not. I did not, and more swiftly than I can write the words we had lain down to rest in the warm grass. I caught Giulia in my arms and besought her to uncover her face, so that no chilling estrangement should linger between us. My boldness was encouraged by the conviction that Giulia would not have been so ready to come with me to this lonely place unless in her heart she had shared my desire. Nor did she resist my lips and hands, but when I would have torn the veil from her face she grasped my wrists with the strength of despair and begged me most movingly to desist.
    “Michael, my friend, my beloved, do as I say. I too am young, and we live but once. But I cannot uncover my face for you, for it would part us. Why can you not love me without beholding it, when all my tenderness awaits you?”
    But I could not be content. Her resistance made