‘What are you doing out here?’
‘I could not sleep.’ Both men were speaking in fierce whispers. ‘I came outside to look at the stars.’
As Adam approached the Greek, he thought he saw, for the briefest moment, a light flicker far out in the night but no sooner did he look more intently in the direction from which it seemed to come than it disappeared.
‘I have been picking out the shapes in the sky,’ Rallis said. ‘I have forgotten what you call them in English.’
‘The constellations.’
‘Con-stell-a-tions.’ The Greek repeated the word, drawing out each syllable, as if this would help him now to remember it. ‘It is from the Latin, of course. “Stars together”, I think. But I have had enough of astronomy for the night and we will be disturbing our companions. Let us return to our beds. There is time yet to enjoy some more sleep.’
‘Maybe he just went outside to water his nags,’ Quint suggested the following morning when Adam told him of his encounter. Breakfast had been the swiftest of meals and the travellers were on their way less than forty minutes after rising. They had now left their resting place many miles behind them. Quint was leading the largest and most temperamental of the mules. His master was walking beside him.
‘He claimed that he could not sleep,’ Adam said. ‘He was tempted outside by the beauty of the night.’
‘Well, he ain’t going to say, “Don’t mind me, Mr Carver, I’m just ’aving a piss,” now, is ’e? He ain’t that kind of a bloke.’
‘No, that is true. We do not all have the obsession with bodily functions that marks you out, Quint. But I did not get the impression that it was either the delights of nature or its demands that had driven him from our humble shelter. There was something else.’
‘What was ’e doing then?’
‘Looking out into the darkness.’
‘What the ’ell for?’
‘I do not know. A sign that someone else was out there?’ The professor’s suspicions about their travelling companion returned to Adam’s thoughts. ‘Do you suppose that our Greek friend has arranged for others to be following us?’
There was no opportunity for Quint to reply. As he opened his mouth, Adam reached out his hand to indicate that his manservant should be silent.
‘Hush, Quint. What is that?’
A rhythmic drumming noise could be heard, echoing across the plain. At first, Adam thought the sound had only the one source but, as he continued to listen, it seemed as if it was travelling towards them from all the points on the compass. He found himself unable to guess what the drumming was or to judge exactly the direction from which it was coming. He turned and looked back at the professor but Fields, equally baffled, shrugged his shoulders.
‘It is the semandron,’ Rallis said, noticing their puzzlement.
‘Ah, the semandron,’ Fields said. ‘Of course. I have read of it but I have never before heard it.’
‘What is it?’ Adam asked. ‘I confess that I have never heard the word before.’
‘The Greek Christians at these monasteries use it in place of bells, which were long forbidden to them by the Mahometans.’ Fields dismounted from the mule he had been riding and stood by its side, listening to the echoing percussion of the semandron. ‘It is a long wooden bar which they strike with hammers. It has something of a barbaric note, I feel.’
‘It means that we are drawing close to the monasteries,’ Rallis said. ‘The sound of the semandron can travel many miles but I think, from its loudness, we must be near to them.’
Andros, pulling the last mule up a slight slope, joined them. All five men stood in the shade cast by a small grove of wild apple trees at its top and listened.
‘Ain’t a cheery sound, if you ask me,’ Quint said. ‘It fair puts the wind up you.’
‘It is calling the faithful to prayer, Quintus.’ Fields was standing almost on tiptoe, straining to locate the source of the drumming.
‘Sounds more like it’s calling ’em to the grave.’
As they spoke, the monk striking the semandron ceased to do so. The percussive noise came to an end and only the booming echoes of the final blow continued to reverberate in the air.
The men began to descend the slight rise. Emerging from the trees, they were thrust once more into the glare of the sun. Eyes dazzled, they could barely see the plains stretching ahead of them. Rallis was the first to recover his sight and his bearings.
‘The monasteries of Meteora, gentlemen,’ he said, throwing out his arm to point to the north-east. ‘The monasteries that float in the air.’
Across the plain, perhaps two miles away, they could see some twenty or thirty outcrops of rock which arose, like giant stalagmites, from the ground and pointed towards the sky. Pyramids, obelisks, columns and monoliths of all shapes and sizes reared up from the ground. At this distance they looked like trees in some gigantic petrified forest. A village rested beneath the rocks, the roofs of its houses just visible amidst the shadows they cast.
‘The monasteries are all in the village?’ Adam was surprised. He raised his hand to his brow to shade his eyes, eager to make out more of their destination.
The Greek laughed.
‘No, Adam. You must cast your eyes further up to heaven. That is just Kalambaka. The holy monasteries are much higher.’
Rallis pointed a finger at the shadowy buildings of the village and then raised it slowly to the sky, as if tracing the passage of a bird from one of the roofs to the pinnacle of one of the giant stalagmites.
‘There,’ he said. ‘There is one of the monasteries we seek. I think it is Agios Stefanos although I cannot be certain from here. The other monasteries may be hidden from our view here.’
Adam stared in disbelief. At first, he could see nothing but the needle of rock itself. Only as his eyes grew accustomed to the distance and to the light could he make out what might have been a building perched precariously on its point. As he continued to look, he realised that there were others clinging to the sides or the summits of these strange stone obelisks.
‘ “Mountains that like giants stand/To sentinel enchanted land”,’ he quoted.
‘Scott had not such prodigies of nature as these in mind,’ said the professor. ‘He was, as usual, singing the praises of his native land, was he not? And the Scotch, for all their boasting, have nothing to match this.’
‘They’re like bloody great skittles in a giant’s bowling alley,’ Quint said.
‘More like the buttresses of some bizarre cathedral.’ Adam continued to gaze in astonishment at the sight before him. How, he wondered, had he never before heard of this phenomenon of nature? ‘Mr Ruskin himself would delight in their Gothic charms. But, surely, there is no mention of these extraordinary rocks in any ancient text.’
‘The Greeks of Plato’s day had little time for the wonders of the natural world, Adam,’ Fields said. ‘Who would know from their literature that in Athens the Lykabettos rises higher than the Acropolis?’
‘The monks must be like the stylites of bygone centuries.’ Adam was still lost in admiration of the rocks. ‘Perched upon their pillars far above the temptations of the world.’
The professor was unimpressed. ‘They are pious fools,’ he said, ‘wasting their lives in such isolation.’
‘There are few of them left in Meteora,’ Rallis said. ‘Once there were hundreds of monks here. Now, I am told, most of the monasteries are deserted. And those that do still have inhabitants have but a handful. Even the Grand Meteoron, the holiest of them all, has only a score and most of them are old men.’ He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘But now we have seen our destination from afar, we must hasten to reach it.’