Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 39

So that’s how I’d got involved. From then on, day after day, I would go down through the city by the old familiar streets to the sea and the storage building where my father kept all his supplies. He didn’t go out into the country much these days, except to inspect the trees and select the best ones. Most of the cutting and harvesting was done by farmers he’d recruited. Every few weeks Eurymachus would organise a cart to do the rounds of the various farms to collect the dried pellets of terebinth resin, which would then be graded and packaged back in our warehouse. It was all very straightforward really. Over the years he had refined the system so it worked mechanically. There was nothing to it, apart from making sure our main clients were regularly supplied – the various temples in the city and some of the bigger villas up at the top of the town who engaged in elaborate rituals for their family gods. And there were the undertakers who needed the incense for their funerals. If it was an expensive ceremony, they would use quite a lot of our resin, both in the house of the deceased and in the necropolis when the body was being interred.

The job that I did turned out to be not particularly taxing, just keeping the books in order and making sure the incense was properly graded and packed. Eurymachus was ‘front of house,’ as it were, looking after the customers when they came to place their orders. He loved drinking sage tea with the older men who came to the warehouse. They used to sit outside in the sunshine

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS