During the past two days, he had found it utterly impossible. But now he had to make up his mind whether to return to England, as his uncle wished, or remain on in Greece. Whichever way he decided, he must now begin making arrangements in earnest, for he had to be out of the Embassy before the end of the week.
It was a lovely day, and he badly needed a change of scene; so he rang up a garage from which he sometimes hired cars, and asked them to send one round. When it arrived, he told the man to drive him out to Sounion. There, he felt, on the headland between sea and sky, at the southernmost point of the peninsula of Attica, would be as good a place as any for him to think things out.
Within five minutes, the car had passed Hadrian's Arch and swung into the broad, straight boulevard that leads to the coast; but when they reached the Gulf, instead of turning right towards the Piraeus, it turned left and passed the Athens Airport at Phaleron. The road then followed the shore, twisting in and out along a score of charming bays in which blue seas broke on golden sands. Here and there, for some fifteen miles, there were clusters of villas, small hotels and cafes. These, later in the year, would be crowded with Athenian holiday-makers, but for the last thirty miles modern buildings were comparatively few and the rugged grandeur of the scene hardly differed from what it must have been in the days of the ancient Greeks.
It was a little after twelve o'clock when the car turned inland, ran up a steep, twisting road and deposited Robbie at the Tourist Pavilion below the headland. In front of it was an array of tables under gay umbrellas, but only one coachload of tourists was scattered among them enjoying iced drinks or an early lunch. In the kitchen of the restaurant, he found that a fisherman had just brought in a catch of kalamarakia so he ordered a dish of the baby squids to be put aside for him and fried at a quarter past one. Then he set out to trudge up the last half mile to the temple of Poseidon, which crowns this lofty promontory.
The temple was built in the Great Age, under Pericles; it is made of pure white marble, and twelve of its original nineteen Doric columns are still standing. To either side of it, the coast falls away, so that it dominates the scene for many miles around. In the background, the green slopes of olive groves and vineyards merge into the brown of uncultivable land broken by stony outcrop, then rise to rocky heights, sharply outlined against a bright blue sky. To the east, south and west, the much darker blue of the sea again meets the sky, broken only here and there by a fleecy white cloud. Seen from whichever angle, the Temple presents one of the loveliest sights in all Greece.
But today Robbie had no eyes for its beauty. Walking past it to within a few yards of the edge of the cliff, he sat down there and, pulling a long stem of wild grass, began to nibble at it. Apart from a few tourists strolling round the ruin in his rear, the place was deserted, and the only sound was the ceaseless pounding of the surf on the rocks far below.
Although he had told Luke during their midnight talk that, if he escaped arrest, he wanted to continue with his self-imposed mission, he had been so scared during the past two days by the results of his initial efforts that he had almost decided to return to England. But now that harrowing episode appeared to be behind him, and he was once more greatly tempted to make use of the information he had secured.
The fact that it was a leaf from Athene's sacred tree blowing through the open window that had led to his coming by the list of places at which groups of Czechs were shortly to begin their operations seemed to him positive evidence that the goddess was keeping a watchful eye on him. Perhaps, indeed, it was she who had in some way influenced events so that he might remain free to carry on the quest with which she had charged him. If so, and he now abandoned it, he might well become the victim of her wrath. There was also the personal side of the matter. This was the one chance he had to prove himself as good as other men. If he rejected it, no other might come his way, and that would mean the acceptance for life of a shaming inferiority.
Before he had been sitting there for fifteen minutes, he had decided that he would stay in Greece.
The next question was how should he set about resuming his mission? Having 'cooked his goose' with the Czechs, it was clear that he could not hope to get anything more out of them by remaining in Athens. He must, then, go to some of the places where they were about to commence work, and endeavour to find out what they were up to.
This idea immediately appealed to him because, although he had been in Greece for a year, he had had no opportunity to see anything of the country except in the vicinity of Athens. During the past summer, he had longed to visit some of the shrines such as Delphi and Olympia, made famous by his beloved gods. However, he had then still been too nervous of having to talk to the groups of strangers with whom he would have had to travel in the long-distance buses used for conducted tours. As he could not drive a car, he had been unable to make such trips on his own.
This last objection still held, if he meant to visit a chain of places some of which were several hundred miles apart, and yet remain mobile. The railway system in Greece made transit by it from one coast town to another extremely difficult and tedious. It then occurred to him that he could quite well afford to hire a car and driver. To conceal from the driver the true purpose of his journey, he could say that he was collecting information for his book. Some further thought produced an improvement on this idea. It would be greatly preferable to have an educated companion with him as driver, instead of an ordinary mechanic. Why should he not secure a secretary who would also act as chauffeur? When they broke their journey for a day or two, he could give the man some typing to do, and that would materially strengthen his cover as an author writing a book on the gods and their temples.
By the time he had walked back to the restaurant, he was so pleased with his plan that he treated himself to a half bottle of St. Helena—a white wine from Aechia that resembles a good quality hock and is one of the most expensive wines in Greece— to wash down the squids. Having rounded off his meal with a huge, sun-ripe orange, he sent for pencil and paper and set about drafting an advertisement.
After much sucking of the pencil and several false starts, he produced the following:
Young gentleman requires chauffeur who will also carry out light secretarial duties while driving him on tour of Peloponnesus. Good pay, all found. No interviews given. Write qualifications fully to Robert Grenn, British Embassy.
He had inserted the phrase no interviews given as an afterthought as he feared that, if a number of applicants queued up in the hall of the Embassy to see him, his uncle might be annoyed.
As there was no point in his getting back to Athens until the newspaper offices re-opened, he spent the next hour up on the headland again, thinking about his book; but soon after four, he was back in the capital, handing in his advertisement at the offices of Kathimerini, for insertion next day in the Personal Column.
Before returning to the Embassy, he walked down Korai Street with a view to making a swift reconnaissance of the building site in which he had hidden the brief-case, for he was contemplating a return there after dark that night to retrieve it. As he strolled past, the low barrier of crossed poles over which he had jumped proved no obstruction, now that it was daylight, to his seeing the whole of the ground floor. It seemed much larger than when he had crouched there in the dark. There were at least twenty of the square, concrete pillars, and it might have been near any one of a dozen of them that he had hidden the brief-case. Yet worse, since Saturday, the workmen had completed the boarding over of the floor, so, even had he known near which pillar to look, it would have meant bringing implements to lever up the planks before he could retrieve his prize. To attempt to pull up half the floor was obviously out of the question.