Decision at Delphi Read Online Free PDF Page B

sailed away from the Piraeus, Athens port. Its white columns gleamed on top of its high hill in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the cold winter sky, serene and beautiful, aloof from the occasional belches of artillery fire on the other hills of Athens or from the black pillar of smoke sent up by a burning building in Piraeus itself.
    As he copied the address carefully, he had another pessimistic moment wondering if perhaps Alexander Christophorou’s family had moved. But this whole attempt to get in touch with Christophorou was a gamble; what had he to lose? So he sealed the envelope, picked up his coat for a late stroll on deck, and made his way to the purser’s office.
    One of the assistant pursers was still on duty, filling up another batch of forms, looking doggedly martyred as he worked to the muffled throb of music from the ballroom. “Gibraltar,” he explained, pointing to the small pile of passports and landing cards on his desk, and he. sighed. “Let us hope it will be calm, and the passengers for Spain will leave us gracefully. A little ferryboat comes out to take them away. But perhaps you have seen it?”
    “No, I’ve never seen it.”
    “You have never seen Gibraltar?”
    “Yes, I’ve seen Gibraltar.”
    The assistant purser was puzzled, and then blamed it on the difficulties of the English language. “This time, you must go on deck and watch. It can be very amusing.”
    “I’m sure it is. Sorry to trouble you about this airmail stamp. Are you sure it is sufficient?”
    “You would like to pay more?” The young man reweighed the letter. “I am sorry. I must disappoint you.”
    “Molte grazie.”
    “Prego. And do not miss Gibraltar tomorrow!” Then he looked concerned as he noticed Strang’s overcoat. “You are not going to dance?”
    Strang shook his head, smiled reassuringly to show he had no criticism of the band or the floor or his hosts’ indefatigable hospitality, and bade the assistant purser goodnight.
    On deck, there was a freshening western wind which seemed to blow the ship through the darkness toward the narrow gap between Europe and Africa. This was a journey he had made, on convoy duty, at least half a dozen times during the last year of the war. Oil tankers, ships with food and clothing and medical supplies, had moved like a straggling herd of arthritic sheep poked and prodded by their darting escorts through the narrow passage into the Mediterranean. As he looked over the black rolling water of the Atlantic, wave swallowing wave, he admitted why he had chosen to come by ship. Not for any of the reasons he had given his friends so easily that he had almost come to believe them himself; only for one, hopelessly sentimental reason. He was no longer nineteen years old, onboard a small destroyer trying to outwit a pack of German submarines. But looking at the cold, impersonal sea covering this giant stretch of burial ground, he tried to ignore the lighted deck, the rise and fall of distant music. Gradually, the dark horizon lined up before his eyes; and, watching the constant surge of water beat against the wall of black sky, he could almost recapture the emotions of fifteen years ago. Almost. Emotions could be remembered only vaguely, at best. All the variables, the textures, the proportions of feeling that made them so overwhelming once became blurred with time. Too much happened to most of us: the clouds of glory and the vision splendid died away.
    He turned on his heel and went below. It was always a mistake to try to breathe life into the past; the man of thirty-four was not a youth of nineteen. He wished now that he had never mailed that letter to Alexander Christophorou. He actually did go back to the purser’s office, but it was closed. The letter was beyond recall.
    He overslept next morning, and arrived on deck almost at the end of the Gibraltar halt. The liner was anchored in the wide circle of bay, with the Rock rising bluntly at one end of the horseshoe of land,