Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 29

for what felt like minutes at a time. There were fish moving in and out of the rhythmically oscillating sea-weed, not very big ones its true, but with strikingly variegated colours, and they seemed not to be afraid of me at all. But the thing which really gave me a thrill were the different tints and hues cast in the calm water by the sun – pale turquoises, pastel blues and light pinks reflecting from my outstretched hands as I swam. That, with the silent, twisting wave shadows on the sea floor was truly psychedelic, or at least as psychedelic as I had ever seen. I couldn’t get enough of it, but all too soon the time would come to go back to the dig. By three o’clock we had to be back on site until six. My snorkel-induced out-of-body happening was over for another day.

There were some days of course when the wind blew too hard, the ‘büyük rüzgar’ the ‘big wind’ as the locals called it, and the breakers were pushed relentlessly into the little coves on this north west side of the peninsula. This is a wind I learned more about as time went on, a mischievous wind very well known to those who live in the Aegean, called the ‘meltem’, a summer wind that starts around ten in the morning and which by mid-day can become intolerably strong and dangerous. This wind funnels south and eastwards down the eastern side of the island of Kos during the late morning and hurls itself with a notable fury at the coast on this corner of the Mediterranean. At these times the sea turned a murky brown colour, breaking roughly on the sand and making swimming if not totally impossible then certainly desperately unpleasant. But at this remove I only remember the calm days, when the sea surface was flat and I could enjoy that other-worldly psychedelia.

Once during my stay we made a lunch-time boat trip. We had a volunteer on the dig, Alf, who was the son of the vice-chancellor or some such worthy at one of the universities notionally sponsoring the dig. Alf thus carried more clout with the High Command than any one of the rest of us. He was a large and fearless character and reckoned that since ‘his’ university was helping support the dig he had rights to things we could never have aspired to. Thus

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