Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 58

the village. They were sung in the minor key and became more poignant as the evening wore on. The arty lot in the dig house, who were all fond of grand opera, ridiculed them. The raucous singing drifted across the water of the Commercial Harbour, disturbing their enjoyment of the record player. But for me they were among some of the unforgettable sounds of Knidos. And with the music, the men would dance, often with a slow, balanced, twirling motion which as a genre went back hundreds of years. For me, it was magical.

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It was while I was at Knidos in that summer of 1969, in July of that year to be precise, that we heard that man had landed on the moon. We were so cut off where we were that world news rarely penetrated as far as the outer edges of our consciousness, and being none the wiser, we were happy not to know about floods in India and the progress, or lack of it, of the war in Vietnam. But one of the High Command kept a radio and could tune in to the ‘Voice of America’, and this was the chink in our otherwise hermetically sealed, news-free armour. We had been blissfully unaware of moon probes, Saturn V rockets or Apollo missions. The nearest we got to Apollo was that we had a temple dedicated to the same god half way up the mountain - the real Apollo, that is, if there is such a thing!

One evening, with the Çayhane extravaganza approaching full swing, complete with terpsichorean twirling and unrestrained musical accompaniment, someone came out of the shadows from the Dig House and bawled a few words above the din. This was an event so alien that the party took a while to wind down to a halt, musicians slowly stopping one by one in mid phrase and dancers being caught, literally, on the hop. It was like a wheezing bagpipe slowly expelling air and eventually falling silent. In the ensuing uncharacteristic quiet and to our surprised and questioning faces the messenger spoke. The message was delivered.

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