Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 30

one lunch time he persuaded the High Command that he wanted to borrow the zodiac dinghy, ostensibly for a survey of the coast to the east of Knidos. I happened to be passing when he called out,

“Wanna trip to Mycenean Beach?”

Why not, I thought, and hopped into the waiting boat with another two or three of the staff. Alf gunned the outboard motor and we set off at speed across the Commercial Harbour. It was a powerful outboard; one or two of the Management liked to water-ski round and round any new yacht that came into the bay, which incidentally was a source of great irritation to us lower orders because they were wont to do this at mid-day and we had to wait for lunch until they had finished. Anyway, this meant the outboard was large and hence fast. We crossed between the two moles and bounced out across the open sea to one of the headlands in the eastern distance.

After perhaps five minutes or so Alf yanked the tiller and slewed the dinghy very competently into a quiet and very secluded cove with a light shingle beach. He cut the engine and we leapt out and pulled the dinghy onto the shore.

“Welcome to Mycenean Beach,” he cried.

It was idyllic, a totally private beach with a slightly shelving profile and the sea this side of the peninsula so quiet, a gentle susurrus of wavelets running along the water’s edge. Apparently a sherd of Mycenean pottery had once been found here, hence the name of the beach, which implied there had once been a Bronze Age presence near Knidos, but a very cursory look at the shore showed no further sign of any ancient merchant venturers from the Argolid that day, so we lay on the beach and dozed in the heat punctuated by the occasional dip in the warm, pristine sea. After an hour or so we all jumped in the dinghy and roared back to camp. That ‘survey’ was over, at least.

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