As soon as they were outside the town, he got rid of his arm sling and removed the bandage from round his head, then settled down to enjoy the drive. For some miles they climbed steadily along the twisting way between the two-thousand-foot-high crests of the Onia and Palukoraki mountains, then round bend after bend along a road cut out of the steep hillsides, until at about eleven o'clock they emerged, still several hundred feet above sea level, to see a marvellous prospect below them. It was the fertile plain of Argos, and beyond it the forty-mile-long gulf surrounded for all but a tenth of its circumference, by mountains.
Robbie leaned forward eagerly and exclaimed: 'Look, look! For years I've longed to set eyes on this. In all history there is no more romantic spot. It was from the bay below us that the Argonauts set sail to seize the Golden Fleece.' Pointing to their left front, he went on: 'And down there on that hillock is Mycenae. It was there, a few years later, after Helen had run away with Paris, that Agamemnon vowed he would get her back and organized a muster of the thousand ships that carried the Greeks to the siege of Troy.'
With an indulgent smile, Stephanie remarked: 'I suppose it is the world's greatest romance. There certainly is no other story in which a whole country went to war for ten years to get back a runaway wife. But, after all, we've only Homer's account of it, so I don't suppose it really happened.'
'How can you think that?' Robbie stared at her in amazement. 'Of course, all the bits Homer put in about the gods and goddesses having taken sides and helped or hindered the Heroes is poetic licence. But the siege of Troy is an historic fact. Schliemann Proved that beyond question.'
'Schliemann?' she repeated doubtfully.
'Yes; surely you've heard of him?'
'Was he the German archaeologist who discovered Mycenae?'
'That's right. He was a most extraordinary chap, and his own story was the all-time-high of poor boy making good. From his earliest childhood, he was fascinated by stories of the ancient Greeks; but for years he had to work on a pittance as a grocer's errand boy, a cabin boy and a junior clerk. At night, though, by candle-light in an attic, he taught himself half a dozen languages. At last, he got a job with the great banking firm of Schroder and they recognized his abilities. They sent him to St. Petersburg as their representative, and while there he managed to save enough to set up in business on his own as an indigo merchant. From then on, everything he touched turned to gold. As a contractor, he made a fortune out of the Crimean War; then he went to America, got in on the Californian gold rush and made another fortune. After travelling the world for a while, he came to Greece and in the seventies settled down to his life-long ambition of becoming an archaeologist. He had been disappointed in his early love, so he had never married. However, by then he was getting on for fifty, and he decided he would like to marry; so he wrote to his friend the Archbishop of Athens and asked him to find him a suitable wife.'
'What an extraordinary thing to do.'
'Yes. Still, it turned out all right. She was only eighteen and a lovely girl, but she became devoted to him and was an enormous help in all his undertakings. His first great success was the rediscovery of Troy. As you must know, it is on the other side of the Aegean, in Turkey, not far from the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles; but he disagreed with the professional archaeologists about the actual site. He received a concession from the Turks to dig and put scores of men to work for months, driving a great trench right through a lofty hill. They found the remains of nine cities buried one on top of another, and it turned out that Homer's Troy was the third one down. It was later definitely identified by the remains of great gates and palaces that Homer had described. But Schliemann couldn't find any treasure and everyone was still saying that he was wasting his time, so he decided to throw in his hand. Then, on the very last day, his luck turned. Near what was called the Scaean Gate, he came upon a gold pin; so he sent all his v/orkmen away and that night he and his wife went back there. They unearthed a marvellous treasure—diadems, bracelets, necklaces and over eight thousand rings, all of solid gold.'
'Eight thousand!'
'Yes. But he was in a spot, because to get his concession to dig he had agreed to hand over to the Turkish Government the bulk of any treasure he found. The stuff he had found was absolutely priceless; and it wasn't that he needed the money, but he felt sure that the Turks would melt it down just for its value in gold. As luck would have it, in those days women wore enormous skirts; so his wife was able to smuggle the whole lot out of Turkey and back to Greece under her petticoats.'
'When the Turks heard about that they must have been furious.'
They were. They brought a case against him, and imposed a heavy fine. But he sent them five times the amount of the fine, in order to win back their goodwill; so they allowed him to return to Troy the next year and continue his digging. In the meantime, though, while the law-suit was going on, he had started to excavate Mycenae.'
Stephanie glanced towards their left where, about two miles away, a lofty foothill rose, commanding the entrance to the valley from which they had just emerged. Upon its crest, some ruins could be seen and further down the slope below it several tourist coaches were parked. 'And that,' she murmured, 'is Mycenae.'
That's it,' he agreed, 'and I'm longing to see it. But the horde of tourists now being conducted round it would spoil it for us. We'll be staying in Navplion for several days, anyway; so we'll drive out early one morning, then well have the place to ourselves.' After a moment, he added: 'Still, we might stop for a bit to take in this wonderful view. Let's drive up to the Tourist Pavilion and have a drink there.'
Stephanie turned left into a side road, and a few minutes later they were enjoying big tumblers of iced fresh orange juice on the Pavilion's stoop. For a while they sat in silence, looking out at the blue, sunlit gulf embraced by its long chains of green and brown mountains etched against the pale azure sky; then she said:
'I think Schliemann's story is fascinating. What did he do with his treasure after he had saved it from the Turks?'
Robbie raised his eyebrows. 'Why, he gave it to the museum in Athens. Surely you must have seen it there?'
'Yes, I suppose I have. But there are such cases and cases of gold ornaments and, knowing nothing about archaeology, I'm afraid I didn't take in which came from where. I remember those lovely gold drinking cups, though, and ail those flat gold masks with such curious features. Did they come from Troy?'
4No, they came from here. Excavating Mycenae was Schlie-rnann's greatest triumph. He hit on the Royal burial ground and opened up five or six shaft graves. They contained sixteen corpses and he claimed that one of them was actually that of Agamemnon. Of course, there was nothing to prove it, and it is now believed that they were of people who had lived about three hundred years before the siege of Troy. But out of the graves he got an immense treasure of gold, silver, ivory and precious stones; in fact, by far the greatest treasure that has ever been discovered anywhere in the world. And the ornamentation on these things showed that, in some ways, the artists of the Mycenaean age were superior to those of Athens.'
'A change of fashion could account for that,' Stephanie suggested. 'People always tend to despise the sort of furniture and art their grandparents admired.'
For the third time that morning Robbie stared at her in amazement, then he said: 'But the two civilizations were entirely different. There was a gap of at least four hundred years between the end of one and the beginning of the other. Surely you knew that?'