Trouble? All seemed peaceful, as we drove along the edge of the Balad and into the salt-flats. The old slave settlement looked just as listless as it had when I first saw it, so dim-lit and arid, through the windows of the Mediterranean Express. Some small boys were playing football on the waste ground beside the windmills. Away to the west I thought I could distinguish Anna’s villa, in the flank of the hills, and imagined her settling down, now as always, to tea, petits fours and her current novel (she is very fond of thrillers). The usual lonely figures were labouring in the white waste of the salt-pans, and now and then one of the big salt-trucks rumbled by on its way to the docks.
But just as we left the marshes and approached the first rise of the escarpment, Brack leant out of his window again and pointed to something in the sky behind us and there were two black aircraft, flying very low and very fast out of the sea — except for the passing airliners, the first I had ever seen over Hav.
In the event I did not have to clamber to the caves, for one can drive all the way. It is a rough, steep and awkward track though, and most of the Kretevs left their trucks at a parking place at the foot of the escarpment, piling vigorously into the back of Brack’s pick-up and into my Renault. Thus I found myself squeezed tight in my seat by troglodytes when I drove at last into the shaly centre of Palast — which, like so many things in Hav, was not as I expected it to be.
I had supposed it something like the well-known cave settlements of Cappadocia, whose people inhabit queer white cones of rock protruding from the volcanic surface. But Palast is much more like the gypsy colony of Sacramonte in Spain, or perhaps those eerie towns of cave-tombs that one finds in Sicily, which is to say that it is a township of rock-dwellings strung out on both sides of a cleft in the face of the escarpment. Wherever I looked I could see them, some in clusters of five or six, some all alone, some at ground level, some approached by steps in the rock, or ladders, some apparently altogether inaccessible high in the cliff face. Many had tubs of greenery outside, or flags of bright colours, and some had whitewashed surrounds to their entrances, like picture frames.
The flat floor of the ravine was evidently common ground, with a row of wells in the middle. Shambled cars, not unlike my own, were parked at random around it, stocky ponies wandered apparently at liberty, hens scooted away from my wheels. Out of some of the cave doors, which were mostly screened with red-and-yellow bead curtains, heads poked to see us come — a woman with a pan in her hand, an old man smoking a cigar, half a dozen boys and girls who, spotting my unfamiliar vehicle, came tumbling out to meet us. Soon I was sitting at a scrubbed table in Brack’s own ground-floor cave, drinking hot sweet tea with his young wife, whose name sounded like Tiya, and being introduced to an apparently numberless stream of neighbours, of all ages, who came pressing into the cave.
When I say I was being introduced, it was generally in a kind of dumb show. Some of the men spoke Turkish, some a little Arab or French, but the women spoke only Kretev. We shook hands solemnly, exchanged names and inspected each others’ clothes. Here I was at a disadvantage. I was wearing jeans, a tennis shirt and my yellow Australian hat, rather less spring-like now after so much bleaching by the suns of Hav. They on the other hand were distinctly not wearing the jumbled neo-European hand-downs I had expected from the appearance of their market men on the job; on the contrary, they were in vivid reds and yellows, like the door curtains, the women in fine flowing gypsy skirts, the men in blazing shirts over which their long tangled hair fell to great effect. They jammed the table all around me and I felt their keen unsmiling eyes concentrated hard, analysing my every gesture, my every response. Their faces were very brown, and they smelled of a musky scent. Sometimes their ear-rings and bangles tinkled. Whenever I was not talking they fell into a hushed but animated conversation among themselves.
‘They want to know’, Brack told me, ‘what you think of our caves.’ The caves seemed fine to me, if his own was anything to go by. It was far more than a cave really, being four or five whitewashed rooms, three with windows opening on to the common ground outside, furnished in a high-flown romantic mode, tapestry chair-covers and mahogany sideboards, and lit by electric lights beneath flowered glass lampshades definitely not designed by Peter Behrens of AEG. Everything was brilliantly clean: it all reminded me of a Welsh farmhouse, not least the miscellaneous mementoes of Brack’s naval service that were neatly displayed in the glass-fronted corner cupboard. The water, I was told, had to be drawn from the wells, but the electricity came from the Kretevs’ own generator.
It all seemed fine, I said. But was there any truth in the rumour that the caves really joined together, forming a secret labyrinth inside the escarpment? They did not, as I expected, laugh at this. They talked quite earnestly among themselves before Brack interpreted. ‘We don’t think so,’ he said, ‘we have never found one, but our people have always maintained that there is one great tunnel in the mountain behind us, and they say a great leader of our people long ago sleeps in there, and if we are ever in danger he will awake from sleep with his warriors and come out to help us. That is the story.’ What about the treasures of the old Kretevs, the goblets, the golden horses, which I had been told from time to time were picked up on the escarpment? Then they did laugh. No such luck, they said, and when many years before some archaeologists had excavated the barrow-tombs down in the salt-flats, which were said to be the graves of primeval Kretevs, they found nothing inside but old bits of natural rock, placed there, it was supposed, because they bore some resemblance to human faces.
There was a thumping noise outside, and a rumble, and with a flicker the lights came on. Then we had supper. Everyone stayed for it, even the children who had been hanging about their parents’ legs or staring at me from the doorway. It was goat stew in a huge tureen, with fibrous bread that Tiya had made. We helped ourselves with a wooden spoon and ate out of a variety of china bowls, some brought in from neighbouring caves because there were too few to go round. We never stopped talking. We talked about the origins of the Kretevs (‘We came out of the earth, with horses’). We talked about the snow raspberries (not so plentiful as they used to be, but then that made for higher prices). We talked about Kretev art (‘They do not understand your question’) and Kretev religion (‘We do not talk about that’). We talked about earning a living (their goat-herds, their market-gardens, their grassland where the cattle grazed). We talked about their language, but inconclusively; every now and then I heard words which seemed vaguely familiar to me, but when I asked their meaning no bells were rung, and when I invited the Kretevs to count up to ten for me, hoping to recognize some Celtic affinities, I recognized not a single numeral. What were their names again? Around the room we went, but not a name seemed anything but totally alien — Projo (I write as I heard them), Daraj, Stilts, what sounded improbably like Hammerhead. They had no surnames, they said: just the one name each, that was all. They needed no more. They were Kretevs!