The Larissa interlude was lost and worthless — he was now in Kalambaka at the Divani and it was morning. Meeting those two mountain climbers, Seymour (with his pot gut and Slavonic-thunder-god face) and William (a classic Centaur) last night at Cafe Zeus was a lucky break. Mason trusted the calmness of their eyes. Seymour, drunk by ten, sang Leadbelly: “Green corn, come along Cholly!” He was good. Feeling chipper, Mason gave him a voodoo warning, “You sprinkle goofy dust around my bed/ You might wake up and find your own self dead.” The point: in the morning (this one) they were going to climb to the untouched, secret cave of an ancient monk called Hecrate, Knower of All Truth. Legend had it he'd left (in some form other than writing) a “text” which addressed itself to the problems of the soul's relationship to the body and the body's to the group of other bodies beyond itself. Mason was not getting his hopes up but he was damned sure interested…. (Late yesterday, on arriving in Kalambaka, he'd followed his nose and driven up a road through the Meteora Rocks because those ancient hermits might've held part of the question if not the answer. He parked near Varlaam Monastery: a giant eagle's nest perched at the top of a peak. On a swing-bridge a group of German tourists were being conned by a Hindu maker-of-little-wood-images of Ereshkigal. Mason looked up through the monastic aura and saw, from the embankment, a delivery man loading a satchel of goods for the monks. He watched the guy wheel it over on a pully. The bundle reached a tiny opened window. Hands jutted out but rather than capturing the supplies upset them: meat and milk, eggs and bread, turned into birds with broken wings. Mason uncrossed himself and moved on, deciding against entry. At nearby Monastery Hagios Stephanos he cornered a nun and told her his name. She said, “So?” He whispered, “Be in love and you will be happy. Be mysterious.” He knew she was wise to him when she responded: “You are a relief in bad wood: esoteric, sarcastic. Go cast yourself in Tamanu.” Three alarmed nuns approached them and stopped a few feet away. Carpenters in the background were hammering on the facade of a nun's dwelling. He turned and ran. Driving down: no time for sentimental reflection. All experience was a smooth swift surface. Really? The fourteenth century couldn't be trusted! He was sure now there was no difference between the Garden of Eden and Hell. After a few drinks down in the town he sped back up and parked on the road near Monastery of Metamorphosis. The dusk-sky was a traffic jam of old cars with their headlights on. Mason didn't expect the real Transfiguration. Nor any help from the monks. But he was surprised! He was led to the Charnel House of skulls and thigh bones. The guard told him to take his time. Once the door was closed, Mason sat on the floor and picked up a dusty skull. He placed his ear to the thing. It spoke: “Do not eat of the turpentine tree.” He put it down and took up another. It too spoke: “Do not trust the cult of the gods.” He lifted yet another to his ear. Its message: “Father Divine is the supplier and satisfier of every good desire.” After listening to eighty-eight cryptic messages similar to the first three, Mason gave up. On the way out he left a donation of a hundred bucks. From there, he stumbled on through farther gloom to baroque icons. He tried to kiss them through the glass, he placed his ear to the cases: nothing! In the museum a shabby man who said he was from Phigaleia wouldn't leave Mason alone. He kept explaining Truth and Reality. According to him both had been documented in the ninth and twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mason finally gave in. “But what about transfiguration?” A group of tourists came in with a guide and scattered the man's response. The guide said, “The manuscripts in this room were restored after the war with money from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation in America.”)
Mason, Seymour and William went up in the jeep. The air was fresh, clean, even sweet. Sky was a honeymoon, a tapestry of fauves gaiety! In the climb, Mason was in the middle. Just in case. Progress was slow. Inch by inch. They stepped upward, testing rocks that looked like underwater roots, fuzzy rocks, slick ones. Mason did'nt dare look back nor down. His hands reached, alternately, for a bright forest of flowers and a grove of weeping spruce. One way to transform the harshness! He kept reaching! When he thought he was grasping leaves of hemlock, his fingers curved around steep stonerock. Then, unbelievably, they made it! And what a grand view! There was Varlaam over there — and in this direction — there was Hagios Stephanos! Then they turned and entered the cave. Mason was still in the middle. He held his breath: an old habit left over from early childhood, perhaps infancy. Darkness. The three men stood together in darkness. Strangers. Nervously, Seymour cracked the first corny joke. Then Mason said, “There are thirty-eight types of ants in Jerusalem.” William snickered then spoke: “The Royal Poinciana is the most flamboyant tree in the world.” Mason said, “I'll buy that!” Seymour then clicked on his flashlight. “No!” hissed William, “Let's wait for night vision!” Mason's night-vision had already come. He saw the full contents of the cave the second before the light went on: there was nothing but dust, dust, dust—and dust!
He drove through the mountains and small villages and towns up to Delphi. Herds of goats got in the road but Mason was patient. He arrived at mid-afternoon. Hazy, hot, pretty. Nobody here rolled out a red carpet: he wasn't expecting to meet a man named Menekrates nor one called Dionysos. Mason was alone. His heart beat too fast as though something was about to happen. He was afraid. He threw his luggage on the bed and went down for a drink. For a change: gin and tonic. Finished, he walked: tourism up the ass. But cute. Real gentle: not mean to strangers. And cheap drinkable wine, he later discovered, in an effort to avoid getting drunk: Athos — made by monks. A tremor of fear swept through him. He saw double. Closed his eyes…. In the night while struggling with a griffin then a sphinx he was awakened by the gawdawful cry of some beast in its struggle to escape wooden walls — which woke all the dogs and the barking went on till dawn. Mason sweated it out in the air-conditioned dark. Was this damnable hotel below the earth!… A relief when first light came. It was on the hillside site of the classical past, the archaic stones, that he stumbled and cut his hand on the wing of a shredding woman-lion. Caught in a brief morning shower, he found the stadium at the top nevertheless. Above and below were the winding slopes and nerve-system of Parnassos. Before the Oracle he had spread himself on the ground. Unaware that he was not alone he kissed the earth. A little girl giggled. Mason leaped to his feet. Stumbling over a sudden line of peasants trudging up the narrow path with sheep and goats under their arms, he dashed down through their ranks. The smell of blood lifted behind him through the trees toward the iron clouds. Below, he saw the tourists' buses arriving. Apollo's shrine was the bone structure of a dinosaur, below: its hymn was not in honor of Chicago. No sanctuary for Mason here? Mason paused before the guardian of the Temple. His body did not suddenly merge with his soul, nor separate. The sky was clearing as he drove up to Arahova — only ten minutes up from Delphi. He poked around this village of weavers looking at the tapestries. In one dingy shop he spotted a table cloth with an interesting design: at its center there was an elusive cunt-shaped structure. While the clerk was trying to pressure him into buying the thing he picked it up for a closer look at the paradigm. It changed before his eyes: an old T-Model Ford was smashed into a huge rock at the edge of a cliff. That was it. Maybe he was still back there drunk as Blackface Hermes or needed to push on to Glarentza fast. Something was going wrong with his eyes; his mind perhaps. Was the boulder meant to reveal something? He put the damned thing down. He turned to leave the shop. The clerk held him by the shoulder. Pleading. Mason looked back at the cloth: the center had changed again: this time to a fat cow on a table in a speakeasy. Beneath the circular picture was the word “Oxford.” When Mason got back to his car a little boy leaped from it and ran. A woman stuck her head out of an apartment window overhead and called, “Herakles!” As he drove back it became increasingly clear that the separation of body and spirit was going to remain a problem. Oneness was lost somewhere back there in the ruins. May as well move on, buddy. Make the best of it. Unless, uh, unless you're ready to search in the remote depths of Africa…. But for the moment live with the erosion. You have no choice. You don't have to be deterministic to dislike the present tense.