They put out their tongues at him and told him he was talking through his hat; so he ran back, collected his two sons and got busy doing a bit of protective magic. I suppose in his excitement he recited the wrong spell, or something, because two great serpents emerged from the sea, came streaking across the plain and made a beeline through the city to his temple. In a trice they had coiled round him and his boys and crushed them to death.
After that, one can hardly blame the Trojans for saying that he hadn't known what he was talking about and dragging the Wooden Horse through the breach they had made in their wall. It is understandable, too, that when night fell they should get down to celebrating the departure of the Greeks. By midnight most of them were as tight as ticks, each telling the others that for years he had made a habit of going out and killing a Greek every morning as soon as he had finished his cornflakes.
Young Sinon, meanwhile, was doing a job that Bulldog Drummond, the Saint and Lemmy Caution would have hesitated to tackle between them. He climbed the topmost tower and stood there waving a flaring torch. The Greek Fleet had gone only as far as the island of Tenedos and was lying in hiding behind it. At his signal that he had got the Trojans where he wanted them, it sailed back. By the time the Greeks were landing on the beach he had run down the stairs three at a time, got into the temple to which the Wooden Horse had been dragged and let Odysseus and
Co. out of their stuffy prison. It was then, apparently, just a piece of cake to open the gates and give the 'Big Hello!' to x^gamem-non and his boys as they came pouring in.
The Greeks didn't have it all their own way. Aeneas and some of the Trojan bloods fought like tigers, but they hadn't an earthly. For hours on end it was blue murder, with the Greeks butchering men, women and children, then looting and burning the houses. Pyrrhus broke into the palace, slaughtered Priam's youngest son before the King's eyes, then slew the old boy on his own altar. Helen was sitting in a corner of the same room feeling a bit off-colour at the thought of what they might do to her, and with some reason. Pyrrhus spotted her and aimed a swipe at her with his sword that should have cut her lovely head off, but just in time Aphrodite gave a flick of her nightdress and turned the blade aside.
By morning everyone was decidedly part-worn, so the Greeks let up with the killing and roped in the surviving Trojans to be shared out as slaves. One is glad to be able to record that brave Aeneas managed to get away and later married a lady named Lavinia, the daughter of an Italian King, with whose help he founded another Troy on the banks of the Tiber. Paris, too, escaped to Mount Ida, and there had the undeserved good luck to be taken back by his wife the Nymph Oenone.
Even after Helen had spent ten years in Troy she was probably still under thirty, so all the odds are that the sight of her would still have made plenty of chaps trip over their own feet in anxiety to make way for her on the pavement. Anyhow, Menelaus took one look at her and said: 'How about forgetting all this nonsense and coming home with me?'
Paris hadn't put up anything like such a good show during the siege as Menelaus had, and I think that sort of thing counts quite a lot with women. They like to be proud of their men. Helen, no doubt, just fluttered those long curved eyelashes of hers and replied: 'You know, Mene dear, I can't think what came over me.
I always loved you best.' And that was that.
* * * *
When Stephanie had finished reading she sat for a while wondering whether Robbie's book would ever be published. His interpolations had given her a few laughs and, in a strange way, the characters of some of the Immortals and Heroes came through; but it was utterly unlike any other book, fiction or non-fiction, that she had ever read, and it was hopelessly amateurish.
Her own English was far from perfect but, even so, she felt that she might be able to improve the punctuation a little and, if he would let her, cut out a lot of the slang expressions with which he peppered his writing. Yet, if he agreed to that, what would be left? A dull and colourless repetition of stories that had been told a hundred times before.
It occurred to her then that she was wasting her time concerning herself about it—at all events, for the present. Unless she could persuade Robbie to abandon his investigation, all the odds were that he would run into serious trouble long before he could finish his book or she have the opportunity of typing more than the first few chapters.
Another hour went by before Robbie joined her. He was bent almost double and, as he collapsed into a chair, he declared that, after climbing and descending the eight hundred-odd steps to the Acropolis, the last twenty stairs from the hall of the hotel up to the lounge had almost finished him. But he insisted that the view from the stronghold had been out of this world, and well worth it.
As the tourist season was now getting under way the hotel was already half full, and among the guests there was a number of Americans. After dinner that evening, Robbie secured a table in the lounge while Stephanie went to her room to get a book. An elderly American with horn-rimmed spectacles paused beside his table and, giving him a friendly but rather worried smile, said in a rich, Southern voice:
'Bad business this about our submarine, isn't it?'
Robbie smiled back, but shook his head. 'I haven't seen a paper for some days, so Im afraid I don't know anything about it.'
'Don't you now!' The American raised a pair of bushy eyebrows in surprise. 'Well, one of our latest atomic subs has got herself cornered under the ice in a bay up on the Arctic coast of Russia, somewhere near Murmansk.'
'Really; what bad luck,' Robbie commented.
'It certainly is. The Russians are accusing us of sending her up there on a spying mission. They've named their price for letting her out—that we should surrender her and her crew.'
'What, with all your latest nuclear stuff in her?'
That's it,' the American nodded glumly. 'And I don't see the President agreeing to that. This looks pretty bad to me. Maybe it's just one more threat to peace that will come to nothing; but if things do blow up I don't want to be caught here. If the news isn't better tomorrow morning, I think I'll telephone Athens to fix me a seat on the next plane home.'
18
The Amateur Photographer
John Foster Dulles's ostrich-like mentality had forced the West into playing the dangerous game of Brinkmanship instead
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of attempting to bring about world disarmament in the days when the United States's superiority in nuclear weapons might well have induced the Russians to listen to reason. This had resulted, ever since Robbie's early teens, in periodic crises that had threatened to usher in a Third World War. Therefore, Robbie took no serious notice of the elderly American's fears that this new cause for friction between the Soviet Union and the United States might develop into the blotting-out of all the major cities of Europe. In fact, on the following morning, while he was dressing to set off with Stephanie for an early visit to Mycenae, he never gave it a thought.
By arrangement, they picked up a private guide outside the Tourist Office at the end of the town and soon covered the twenty-odd kilometres up the slope to the prehistoric capital of Greece. It had once covered a considerable area, but the visible remains were concentrated in three places not very far apart: the Acropolis on the crown of the hill, which contained the palace; the royal burial ground with its adjacent courts some way down the slope and, still lower down, the famous beehive tombs.
As they arrived there by a quarter to nine, they had the place to themselves with little likelihood of coachloads of people on conducted tours arriving for over an hour and a half; so they took their time going round the Acropolis. There was no Temple there with standing pillars so Stephanie found it disappointing, and Robbie was soon irritated by their little guide reeling off facts and figures in parrot fashion. Although he had never before been to Mycenae, he knew so much about the place that he felt he could have done the job better himself.