Hours passed before the travellers came near to the stone pillars, which from a distance had seemed to rise perpendicularly out of a sea of foliage. The sun was now high in the sky and beating down upon them. Closer up, it was clear that a labyrinth of smaller rocks and outcrops of stone had to be negotiated before the party could reach the foot of any of the main pinnacles. They began to clamber amongst the ruined architecture of the rocks, moving in and out of the shade the stone columns offered. Here and there, groves of mulberries and cypresses covered the ground between the pillars. Some small trees had even found a means of twisting their roots into crevices in the near-vertical rock and were growing green against the darker colours of the stone. Often the roots were invisible from the ground and it seemed as if the trees were suspended in the air, floating high above the travellers’ heads.
After a short time, Adam stopped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he pointed with the other towards half a dozen black smudges up on the rock. ‘There are caverns further up there,’ he said. ‘There is a ladder of some kind as well.’
Below one of the dark holes that peppered the cliff, a rickety wooden structure that could only be a ladder stretched down from the cave entrance to a ledge some sixty feet beneath it. It looked like the backbone of some strange creature that had died and rotted on the rock face.
‘It is for a holy man,’ Rallis said. ‘He has turned his back on the world. He lives in the cave with only the eagles above him.’
‘Good Lord, man.’ Adam was shocked. ‘Are you telling us that someone spends his life up there?’
‘He prays there night and day. He beseeches the Lord to grant his soul eternal rest. Many have done so before him.’
‘Much good it must have done them. Living like benighted troglodytes in holes in the rock.’ Fields snorted with disgust, as if to suggest that this was only what he expected from those who adhered to the Greek version of Christianity. ‘These monks are but a few steps away from pagan nature worship. Who knows by what process of reasoning they have persuaded not only themselves but others that they are leading holy lives?’
The travellers moved on, Adam looking back at the cavern entrance and wondering what could possibly drive a man to make his lonely home within it. They fought their way through tangled bushes and past fallen boulders. Eventually they emerged from the maze of rock and vegetation and stepped onto a square stone platform at the foot of what seemed a sheer cliff face.
‘Up there. That is Agios Andreas,’ said Rallis.
The others craned their necks upwards and could just catch a glimpse of a building perched on the top of the cliff.
‘How the devil are we to reach it?’ Fields asked.
The lawyer made no reply but nodded briefly to Andros. The giant Greek took several steps to the side, hauled out the ancient musket he kept strapped to his waist and fired a single shot into the air. The sudden sound of it, reverberating and echoing against the rock, made Adam start with surprise. For a moment, as the echo died away, there was no response. Then, from far above, like the cry of a bird circling in the air, came a voice. As they all strained their necks in peering up at the monastery, they could see what looked like a wooden shed projecting sideways from the rock. Adam could just glimpse a grey-bearded face staring down at them from some kind of door or window in it.
‘He is asking who we are and what we require,’ Rallis said, before shouting back at the monk in Greek. Adam could make out only the words for ‘travellers’ and ‘friends’.
The monk disappeared briefly from view, but within a minute, he had returned and this time he was accompanied by two others, both similarly swathed in grey hair. All three were now calling down to the travellers and, as they did so, the door in the shed opened and a rope was flung out. Adam could see that the rope ran through a pulley, which was itself attached to the roof of the shed. Slowly the rope descended the cliff face until one end reached Adam and his companions below. Attached to it by an iron hook was a net. Rallis moved forward and unclasped the hook.
‘They are fishers of men, these monks,’ he said, spreading the net on the ground.
‘Are we to be their fish?’ Adam asked.
‘It is our only way to the monastery. Each of us must sit in turn in the net. The net closes around. The hook is attached. The monks pull us up. It has been so for many hundreds of years.’
‘Have they lost many fish in those hundreds of years?’
Rallis shrugged. ‘Some, but not many.’ He spoke briefly to Andros. The Greek shrugged off the white capote he wore around his huge shoulders and placed it in the net.
‘Who will be the first to ascend the rock?’ Rallis asked.
‘Here is your chance to demonstrate your daring, Quint.’ Adam gestured at the net. ‘The monks await us.’
‘I ain’t going up in that contraption.’
‘You have heard what Rallis has said. It is the only way we can get to the monastery.’
‘I ain’t being ’auled up in the air in a bleedin’ net. It ain’t natural.’
‘Nor is descending into the bowels of the earth on the new underground railway from Paddington. But back in London I have known you to do it. Not once but several times.’
‘Down in the ground ain’t the same as up in the air.’
‘Come, Quintus,’ Fields said, ‘one of us must be the pioneer in this venture. Why should the honour not be yours?’
Quint scowled at the professor, as if to suggest that the honour was one he would gladly relinquish, but at the same time he seemed to decide that further argument was fruitless. He moved to sit cross-legged on the capote, looking miserable but resigned to whatever fate might throw at him. Rallis took one of the corners and hung it over the large iron hook on the end of the rope. He did the same with each of the other corners until Quint was trussed like a turkey in the netting which dangled from the hook. He clung to the rope with his hands while both feet protruded through the holes. Rallis waved and shouted to the monks above and the net began its ascent. Almost immediately it began to spin and twist but slowly it moved further and further up the grey flank of the rock.
‘Give our greetings to the abbot, Quint,’ Adam called. ‘Tell him we shall all join him for dinner.’
The distance from the ground to the monastery was more than 200 feet and, after only a short while, brief gusts of wind began to send man and net spinning around. There were shouts of alarm from below but Quint maintained a stoical silence. Looking up so far, Adam could not be certain but he thought that, at one point, he saw small plumes of smoke issuing from the tangled bundle. By some acrobatic feat, he decided, his servant had managed to light his pipe. After less than ten minutes, Quint’s ascent was complete and he disappeared from sight.
The monks’ net returned to the ground and Adam was the next to be hooked into it.
‘You may wish to close your eyes,’ Rallis said. ‘It prevents the giddiness.’
‘I think I shall keep them open. I have a fondness for seeing where I am going, even when I am curled up like a hedgehog.’
The monks above began to turn their windlass and Adam was tugged upwards. As he left the ground and was swiftly hauled a hundred feet into the air, he began to reflect on the ridiculousness of the position in which he found himself. There was little time, however, for such thoughts. He reached a point where, through the net, he could just catch a glimpse of his comrades below. At that moment the rope seemed to slip through monastic hands. Abruptly, he fell several feet before control was regained and he came to a halt with a stomach-turning jerk. He was still recovering from this shock when he heard the sound of a gun. His first assumption was that Andros had, for some reason, fired his musket again. It was only when a bullet ricocheted off the rock face that he realised someone was shooting at him. Twisting and spiralling in the monks’ net, he was a more tempting target than a fish in a barrel. He heard the sound of another shot and flinched. The rock above his head shattered and splinters of stone cascaded into his hair and onto the shoulders of his jacket. Spinning in the trap the net had become, he strove to look first up at the monastery and then down to the ground below him. Shouts came from both directions. In his frantic efforts to see what was happening, Adam set the net spinning back and forth.