Next morning, when the papers came in from the daily aircraft, the news was still good. Delegations of United States and Soviet statesmen were on their way to Delhi to submit their respective cases to the mediation of the Indian Prime Minister. Hastily Robbie and Stephanie scanned the other sheets, then went through them carefully, but they held no mention of their own affair.
They were already in bathing things, which they had bought the afternoon of their arrival; so they went out to the beach. As they emerged from their first swim Robbie was far from pleased, but not surprised, to see Mr. Mahogany Brown appear. With an affability too polite to be resented, he settled himself beside them and began to talk amusingly of other pleasure resorts at which he had stayed. As they were posing as a married couple but in fact had never before been to a famous holiday beach together, they had to conduct their side of the conversation with considerable care, but the American did not appear to think it strange that they had never been to any of the places he mentioned.
Just before lunch they went in for their second swim, and Robbie at least had the satisfaction of showing that, although he was no good on a dance floor, he was much the better man in the water. As they came out Mr. Brown, who by then was calling Robbie Max and Stephanie by the name she had given herself, Julie, asked them if they had yet been along to the old city. On their replying that they had not, he declared:
'But it's a "must"! The place those old Crusaders built there is real history, and the greatest sight in the whole Aegean. I've hired a car for my stay here, and I'll run you down there this afternoon.'
To have refused would have been not only churlish but stupid, so by three o'clock they were on their way there with him. Although they had already seen the castle and the walls of the old city from a distance, they found the third of a square mile within those walls both fascinating and astounding.
Part of the fascination lay in the narrow streets and alleys in the lower part of the city, adjacent to the harbour, where for four hundred years the Greek population had lived under Turkish rule. Coppersmiths, leather workers, cobblers and tailors still plied their trades there, as they had done for a thousand years, in small, windowless shops. There could have been no greater contrast to the new town erected by the Italians outside the walls.
But the upper part of the city held far greater interest. There lay the great stone palaces in which the Crusaders had lived.
After being driven from the Holy Land early in the fourteenth century, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem had made Rhodes the bastion of Christianity against the Infidel and, although within sight of Turkey, they had held the island for over two hundred years. In 1480, the Sultan Suliman I had brought an army of two hundred thousand men against it, yet had been forced to abandon the siege after losing nearly half his troops. It had not been until forty years later that the Knights had abandoned Rhodes, and then upon honourable terms.
The Knights had been of several nationalities, among them French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Each group had been termed a 'Tongue' and had lived in their respective 'Inns' as the stone palaces in the Street of Knights were called, while their Grand Master had lived in state in the enormous castle. A great part of the castle had been allowed to fall into ruin before the arrival of the Italians, but their Governor, de Vesci, had made it his life-work to restore it. Mussolini had provided him with many millions of lire to carry out this task; so the battlements again towered up in all their pristine glory against a background of bright blue sky.
The most staggering thing about this fortress city was its walls. They extended for three miles, completely encircling the city and being strengthened by more than a dozen great protruding bastions. In most places, they were a hundred feet in height and over forty feet broad at the top; so that along their now grassy surface four or five cars could have been driven abreast.
While Robbie, Stephanie and Mahogany Brown were making the tour of the city and the vast ramparts, they naturally talked in English about the extraordinary achievements of its mediaeval builders. Stephanie expressed herself well but, being Czech, had a marked accent. Robbie, however, having temporarily forgotten that he was supposed to be a Swiss, lapsed into his normal speech. As they came down from the wall to the broad quay outside it enclosing the harbour, the American suddenly turned to him and said:
'For a foreigner, Max, you speak remarkably good English.'
Robbie was completely nonplussed, but Stephanie stepped into the breach and said quickly: 'That is not surprising. He was at school in England.'
That evening after dinner, Robbie again had to watch Mr. Mahogany Brown—now 'Henry' to them—and Stephanie obviously enjoying themselves as they danced together. He would have given a great deal to break the association but, short of being deliberately rude and probably also upsetting Stephanie, he could think of no way of doing so. And before they parted for the night, it had been agreed that next day Henry should take them in his car to Lindos.
On the Friday morning the paper reported that the statesmen from East and West had met in Delhi and that, at the opening of the proceedings, the heads of both delegations had made conciliatory speeches. Everyone was much cheered by this; guests at the hotel who had been talking of curtailing their holidays, to get home in case of trouble, decided to stay on, and the management was receiving numerous cables from people who had cancelled, renewing their bookings.
There was, however, a disturbing paragraph on an inside page of the paper headed 'British Ambassador's nephew wanted in connection with death of Czech official'. The letterpress beneath it read:
Tn a police statement, it has now been disclosed that Mr. Cepicka, an official of the Czechoslovak Legation, did not meet his death as a result of the car collision which occurred some miles from Vitina on the evening of Saturday last, but that he subsequently died from other causes. Mr. Robert Grenn, the nephew of Sir Finsterhorn Grenn, C.M.G., is known to have been present at the time of Mr. Cepicka's death, but has not been seen since, and the police are anxious to take a statement from him.
It was earlier reported that Mrs. V&clav Barak, the wife of another official at the Czechoslovakian Legation, who was travelling with Mr. Grenn, had gone over the precipice in their car; but no human remains have been found in the burnt-out body of the car. It is possible, however, that Mrs. Barak's body was thrown clear and is lying still undiscovered among rocks or scrub somewhere on the mountain-side. The search for her body continues.'
It was in order to see the morning paper that Robbie had stipulated that they should not start for Lindos before half past eleven. But now they settled themselves in Henry's car, Stephanie beside him and Robbie, with a well-stocked picnic basket, in the back, and set off.
The ancient town lay less than sixty kilometres away, down the east coast of the island; so they reached it by half past twelve. The town itself, lying in a bay behind the shelter of a great headland, was small but picturesque. It had a number of mediaeval houses, in some of which the many-generations-old craft of tile painting by hand was still carried on, but the streets were so steep and narrow that they had to leave the car down in the square.
Up on the headland, dominating the scene for miles round, stood the well-preserved ruins of another vast Crusaders' castle. After twenty minutes' muscle-testing walk up paths with a gradient of one in four, they passed through the huge portico. Mounting still higher, they made the round of this impregnable fortress which rose, on its far side, from cliffs that dropped sheer nearly four hundred feet to the sea below. It was unique also in that, nearly two thousand years before the Crusaders built their castle, the site had been that of a splendid temple, the remains of which still stood in the centre of the castle. On its highest platform of rock, a broad flight of steps led up to a row of Doric columns, clear-cut against the brilliant blue of the sky.