Tt's a week today since we arrived here, so our hoi. is pretty well over. We must hit the trail again tomorrow morning.'
'Oh no!' Stephanie exclaimed. 'Do let's stay on here a few days longer.'
He shook his head. He had never even hinted to her that he had pledged himself to Athene; so he had, naturally, made no mention of the owl that had hooted on the evening of their arrival and checked his impulse to give in to her plea that he should abandon his mission. But the owl evidently had its nest somewhere up on the cliff behind the hotel. Every evening since, after dusk had fallen, he had heard it hooting. These hoots had been a nightly reminder to him that he must not linger at Navplion for longer than might serve to make the Czechs believe that they had no more to fear from him. Now he said firmly:
'No; and please don't try again to persuade me to throw in my hand. My mind is made up. We are leaving tomorrow morning, so you had better pack tonight.'
There was a quiet authority in his voice that would have been quite foreign to it ten days earlier; so, instead of attempting to argue with him, she asked: 'Where are we going?'
'To Olympia,' he replied. 'It is about two hundred kilometres. That may not sound very much for a day's drive, but the hall porter tells me that four-fifths of the way lies through the mountains, so we ought to allow at least five hours. I hope you won't find it too tiring. If we start at ten o'clock, we should be at Tripolis by twelve. That is the only town of any size through which we pass, so we could take a two-hour break for lunch there and do the longer stretch in the afternoon.'
She shrugged. 'That suits me all right. But why Olympia? I thought all those groups of Czechs you are interested in were taking up their quarters near the sea.'
'They are, and the group that I have decided to try and get a a good look at will be somewhere near Pirgos. I have chosen that lot because it must be ten days since they landed there, so by now they will have had plenty of time to get to work. But I decided against staying in the city, because there is just a chance that Barak, or some of the others who saw me either in Patras or Corinth, might be there. If I happened to run into one of them, it would put them on their guard. Pirgos is only a little over twenty kilometres from Olympia, so I can easily work from there. Also, by staying at Olympia, I can keep going, for what it's worth, my cover that I'm writing a book about ancient Greece.'
The first ten miles of their journey the following morning were easy, as the road was almost flat. It ran in a great semicircle, through Argos right round the head of the gulf. On the far side they passed through the little town of Miloi, on the site of the ancient Lerna, near which Hercules had slain the Hydra; and thereabouts the country was very pretty. There were many plantations of oranges and lemons and, in several places, the road was lined with pepper and mimosa trees. The latter, as Robbie had noticed in several other low-lying parts of the country, had much larger .blossoms than the varieties imported into England, but that was more than offset by the fact that they had no scent.
Soon after leaving Miloi, the road began to rise in a series of sharp curves, and in a quarter of an hour they had climbed over a thousand feet. As the road zigzagged to and fro round sharp spurs of the mountain, they frequently drove back in the direction from which they had come, only on a higher level; so time and again they got an increasingly bird's-eye view of the great gulf that they were leaving behind them, with the little castle of Burzi in its centre and Navplion on its further shore.
For a stretch of over fifteen miles the road was cut out of the mountain side and, even on the most dangerous curves, it had no parapet or row of posts which might have prevented a recklessly driven car from going over. There was not much traffic, and during the first hour they met only two tourist coaches, three private cars and half a dozen lorries. Stephanie drove at a fair pace, but carefully, and Robbie was relieved to see that she showed no trace of nerves when passing other vehicles. For that he gave her full marks, as he found his own muscles tensing slightly every time they approached a blind corner, from dread that a long coach would appear just as they were about to go round it.
By eleven o'clock they were up to two thousand five hundred feet and wisps of cloud, coming down from the peaks on either side that were shrouded in it, drifted across the road. But by that time they had reached the pass and for a few miles there were only gentle gradients. Then once more the way became a succession of hairpin bends, now sloping downward and seeming even more dangerous; for, had the car brakes failed when approaching any of the corners, nothing could have stopped them from going straight over the edge of a precipice.
A little before midday they entered Tripolis, the largest town in the interior of the Peloponnesus and almost in its centre. Like most Greek country towns, the streets were crowded with donkey carts, ageing motor vehicles of all descriptions and shouting peasants trying to keep their herds of goats together. Most of the buildings looked shoddy and there were few of more than two stories; but there was a pleasant, arcaded square in the centre of the town and at a restaurant there they had quite a passable lunch.
They still had two-thirds of the journey before them, and Stephanie was in favour of pushing on; so at about half past one they drove out of the town. After a few miles the road began to twist and mount again and, at a height of over three thousand feet, it took them round bend after bend, through a great area of steep slopes covered with firs. At times the road spiralled downward for some distance until the drop over the edge was reduced to a mere hundred feet, but only to snake up again to still loftier heights.
Up there in the mountains the villages were few, small and very far apart. Occasionally, at the bottom of the valleys, there were patches of olive trees, and small strips of vines or corn, but by far the greater part of the land was wild scrub, upon which only goats could browse, rising to vast masses of barren rock. The scenery was magnificent but, as this was a fair sample of two-thirds of Greece, it could not be wondered at that its people were so poor. The great ranges of barren mountains, shutting off the fertile valleys from one another, explained too why in ancient times there had been so many Kings in Greece. Most of them had, in fact, been no more than petty chieftains, submitting only for comparatively short periods to the overlordship of aggressive monarchs such as Agamemnon and, later, the powerful City States of Athens and Sparta.
Between half-past-two and half-past-three, they passed between peaks rising to six thousand feet on either side of them, and in places the drop from the road to the valley was close on four thousand. The bends seemed to grow still sharper and at scores of them it needed only a small error of judgment on Stephanie's part to send them both hurtling to their deaths. She kept her eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead, but Robbie was free to look about him. From time to time he could not resist the temptation to glance over the unprotected edge of the road down into the valley three-quarters of a mile below, but each time he swiftly looked away again and tried to comfort himself with the thought that coaches, lorries and cars made this journey safely every day and night; so there was really no reason to fear that they, too, would not do so.
Soon after four o'clock, at a place where there was one of the most precipitous drops from the road, they came upon a small township. Why such a spot should ever have been chosen, and how its houses had been built into the almost perpendicular mountainside above the road were mysteries. But it had a cafd with a few tables outside; so they pulled up there to give Stephanie a rest and to have a drink. Opposite the caf6 there were only the road, a strip of pavement and a railing. When they had finished their drinks, they walked across and looked over. There were more houses perched precariously below, and beyond them nothing. A running jump from the front door of any of them would have taken the jumper well over a thousand feet to land in the bottom of the valley.