Plenty of G’s brethren were about as we climbed back up the steep and unmade road. They were crowding onto the track munching thistles and several times we had to shoulder our way through them. Inquisitive noses and their strange goaty eyes peering through the open passenger door window.
The same hamlet appeared that we’d passed the day before.
On we went. The road shining like a river of gold in the early sun. A red squirrel darted out towards the car but thought better of it. A hunter with rifle over his shoulder disappeared through a hedge.
Up and up now over cobbles that set everything rattling including my crowns.
A helpful chap said I could park next to his restaurant and I did the rest on foot. Steeply through narrow alleys lined with tourist tat.
It was early. Just after eight. ‘I am the first?’ I asked the man in the ticket office. He nodded gravely, ‘You are first.’
The Temple of Athena is the crowning glory of the antique site of Assos. The walls are the most intact structures but even they had been raided to build a castle down the coast.
A finely made path of local stone ran for a kilometre down to the agora, gymnasium and baths. There in the settlement’s meeting point, were the remains of shops on three levels. The Greeks had shopping malls thousands of years before ours appeared in Bath in Georgian times.
I went back up to the temple. A whip thin freckled snake curled ahead of me and disappeared down a crack, probably thinking, ‘Bloody tourists and at this time in the morning? I was barely getting warmed up!’
I was still alone. A light breeze took the edge off the building heat. I sat in the shade of an oak – strange with holly-like leaves but definitely an oak with acorns – and gazed out over the glittering sea.
There are moments like this when you are confronted with such beauty that you can’t open your eyes wide enough. No photograph could capture it. You want to drink it in. As Joe Orton said, ‘An experience for the retina and no mistake.’
I sat there gazing out over the olive trees running to a small peninsula, surrounded by light with the harsh bounce of diamonds playing on the Aegean.
Again I thought, you will never be here again. It will never be the same. This to me is the essence. The transitory nature of things in an always-on, immediately accessible world. It can’t be bought. They can never take this away from you. Whoever they may be.
As I wandered out through the turnstiles, the soft whirr of the slush puppy machines returned me to that imperfect world.