"The Magus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowles John)

10

This was the first event.

It was a Sunday in late May, blue as a bird’s wing, fresh, hot, in mint condition. I climbed up the goatpaths to the island’s ridge-back, from where the green froth of the pine tops rolled southwards two miles down to the coast. The sea was a pure veronica blue, stretching like a silk carpet across to the shadowy wall of mountains on the mainland to the west. These mountains reverberated away south, fifty or sixty miles right down to the horizon, under the totally uncontaminated sky. It was a blue world, vast and stupendously manless, and as always when I stood on the central ridge of the island and saw it, I forgot most of my troubles. I walked along the central ridge, westwards, between the two great views north and south. Lizards flashed up the pine trunks like living emerald necklaces. There were thyme and rosemary and other herbs, and bushes with flowers like dandelions dipped in sky, a wild, lambent blue.

After a while I came to a place where the ridge fell away south in a small near-precipitous bluff. I always used to sit on the brink there to smoke a cigarette and survey the immense expanse of sea and mountains. Almost as soon as I sat down, that Sunday, I saw that something in the view had changed. Below me, halfway along the south coast of the island, there was the bay with the three small cottages. From this bay the coast ran on westwards in a series of low headlands and hidden coves. Immediately to the west of the bay with the cottages the ground rose steeply into a little cliff that ran inland some hundreds of yards, a crumbled and creviced reddish wall; as if it was some fortification for the solitary villa that lay on the headland beyond. All I knew of this villa was that it belonged to a presumably Well-to-do Athenian, who used it only in high summer. Because of an intervening rise in the pine forest, one could see no more than the flat roof of the place from the central ridge.

But now a thin wisp of pale smoke curled up from the roof. It was no longer deserted. My first feeling was one of resentment, a Crusoelike resentment, since the solitude of the south side of the island must now be spoilt and I had come to feel possessive about it. It was my secret province and no one else’s—I permitted the poor fishermen in the three cottages—no one else risen beyond peasanthood had any right to it. For all that I was curious, and I chose a path that I knew led down to a cove the other side of Bourani, the name of the headland the villa stood on.

The sea and a strip of bleached stones finally shone through the pines. I came to the edge of them. It was a large open cove, a stretch of shingle, the sea as clear as glass, walled by two headlands. On the left and steeper, the eastward one, Bourani, lay the villa hidden in the trees, which grew more thickly there than anywhere else on the island. It was a beach I had been to before two or three times, and it gave, like many of the island beaches, the lovely illusion that one was the very first man that had ever stood on it, that had ever had eyes, that had ever existed, the very first man. There was no sign of anyone from the villa. I installed myself at the more open westward end of the beach, I swam, I ate my lunch of bread, olives and zouzoukakia, fragrant cold meatballs, and I saw no one.

Sometime in the early afternoon I walked down the burning shingle to the villa end of the cove. There was a minute white chapel set back among the trees. Through a crack in the door I saw an overturned chair, an empty candlestand, and a row of naively painted ikons on a small screen. A tarnished paper-gilt cross was pinned on the door. On the back of it someone had scrawled Agios Demetrios—Saint James. I went back to the beach. It ended in a fall of rocks which mounted rather forbiddingly into dense scrub and trees. For the first time I noticed some barbed wire, twenty or thirty feet from the foot of this slope; the fence turned up into the trees, isolating the headland. An old woman could have got through the rusty strands without difficulty, but it was the first barbed wire I had seen on the island, and I didn’t like it. It insulted the solitude.

I was staring up at the hot, heavy slope of trees, when I had the sensation that I was not alone. I was being looked at. I searched the trees in front of me. There was nothing. I walked a little nearer the rocks above which the wire fence ran through the scrub.

A shock. Something gleamed behind the first rock. It was a blue rubber foot-fin. Just beyond it, partially in the thin clear shadow of another rock, was the other fin, and a towel. I looked round again. I moved the towel with my foot. A book had been left beneath. I recognized it at once by the cover design: one of the commonest paperback anthologies of modern English verse, which I had myself in my room back at the school. It was so unexpected that I remained staring stupidly down with the idea that it was in fact my own copy, stolen. I picked it up to see.

It was not mine. The owner had not written his or her name inside, but there were several little slips of plain white paper, neatly cut. The first one I turned to marked a page where four lines had been underscored in red ink; from “Little Gidding.”