Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 19

CHAPTER THREE

GETTING THERE

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before; advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.

Aristophanes

I had been invited to join the excavations at Knidos by Mark, the Expedition’s assistant director, in the basement coffee lounge of the Institute of Archaeology in London one showery afternoon during the previous winter. They needed a field surveyor, he said, someone who could make plans and sections of the excavated areas ready for publication. I was at that time making a living by drawing book illustrations for archaeological publications to get me through my PhD so I suppose it made some sense. But I had no idea about the site; in fact I didn’t have much experience of field survey either but I was sure I could pick it up as I went along; at least, that’s what I suggested at the time.

So that was why, the following June, I was negotiating my way to Knidos at the beginning of the dig, on my own. I had not expected it to be all that easy either, Knidos being so far off the beaten track, but I followed Mark’s advice on how to get there. I spoke not a word of Turkish, so the notion of trying to make my destination understood locally had caused me some anxiety, to say the least. But I did fly, for the very first time as it transpired, from London to Athens and buoyed up by that excitement next evening I took a ferry from Piraeus to Rhodes, sharing a cabin with a rather disagreeable gnome of a mathematics teacher from Kos. He disembarked there at dawn amid a clangour of dockside paraphernalia. The ship had then throbbed out of the harbour again and south across the Ceramic Gulf. At eight o’clock in the morning I went on deck. The sun was already quite high in a cloudless sky and for the first time in my life I beheld the azure blue of the Aegean Sea in all its beauty. What had I been doing in cold, rainy Britain all this time, I thought?

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