1 (continued)
Pavlos put away the photos and shouldered his backpack. Pain resumed at once, spreading from chafed shoulders down his spine and arms. For the ten-thousandth time he wondered what masochism could drive a man who wasn't in the army to put forty pounds on his back and go places a donkey would refuse.
When he reached the chosen site he took out his machete, looped its thong from his right wrist, and began climbing.
No classic ascent, this. None of the clean exhilaration of a challenge with goldline, harness, and carabiners against a bare rock face. The danger here would not be from a single fall -- likely to be broken by shrubbery -- but from jagged rocks, nasty thorns, poisonous snakes, and plain agony. Cerebration would not help so much as watchfulness and stoicism.
At first the hillside was steep. The foliage was thick enough to bar his path, but too poorly rooted to use for support. It came free of its roots in his hand, leaving him teetering on the crumbling soil. Finally he hit on the technique of tearing the bushes loose on purpose, opening a path to crawl through.
Soon, however, the slope flattened just enough to give the roots leverage. He found himself again and again forced to take detours... every one of which led him inevitably downward. Finally, he had to lay on his stomach to worm among the burrows and insect nests, shoving upward by brute force.
It was neither a time nor a place for finesse.
He hacked at roots with the short machete. The tough, springy bushes bled a gooey yellow sap that soon coated his hands with a cloying, binding stickiness. Perspiration ran in clammy streams along his sides, under the leather jacket. The sun burned down through a muggy haze. The smell of his own sweat mingled with the evil stench of the thorn shrubs.
Repetition soon became automatic. Reach, pull, hack, hack again, and again, until the plant tears free... keep flat, crawl through the gap, ignoring the jutting rocks and jagged root stumps... reach, pull, set your legs, hack... hack... hack...
Shortness of breath made him regret his lost youth.
He kept his mind on only one idea. Take no detours! Every easier path inevitably led downward. It became easy to tell which way was the right one. Pavlos looked for the worst, most miserable path. It was invariably correct.
Mercifully, just as he thought he could endure the smell, the ache, the heat, and the confinement no longer, he reached a patch of open rock. It was not more than one meter by two, but he fell across it and rolled out of his pack with a groan of relief.
With trembling fingers he pulled out one of his canteens. He filled his mouth, swished the water around, then spat onto his hands and rubbed them on his pants to dislodge some of the sap.
Pavlos squinted at the painfully bright, hazy sky.
He wondered if Frank was overhead. If he were using the spy telescope, and happened to have a spare moment to look this way, Frank might see him right now.
Pavlos waved languidly at the sky.
Probably not, he thought. Frank wasn't going to risk getting in trouble until I called from the top.
There was a small transceiver in his backpack that, Frank promised, would be able to reach the Platform whenever it passed within line of sight. As executive officer of a five-man crew, he would be able to arrange several hours alone with the equipment, while the others slept.
It hurt a little, in a wry fashion, to think of the astronaut whizzing overhead in weightless, air-conditioned comfort, pondering his theories of "accessibility of terrain." Pavlos knew that inaccessibility was, like the texture of a woman, known only through intimate contact.
Right now he was being intimate with inaccessibility in a manner that made him think of the Anglo-Saxon expletives he had learned over the years.
One hundred meters, that was all the distance remaining. Pavlos crawled with a sense of dogged martyrdom. He was sure two fingers of his left hand had been sprained, if not broken, by a falling stone from a rockslide he'd set off. The other aches were innumerable.
The ascent became a melding of miserable repetition, he would grab, pull, hack, then use the root as a support as he searched for footholds on the flaky slope.
His mind meanwhile walked a random path among fantasies of what he would find at the top.
A pre-Constantinian hermitage, perhaps... or even a monastery, untouched for fifteen hundred years because nobody ever happened upon it in all of that time.
Or maybe this was one huge tell -- a solid ruin from some ancient fortification. It did defend itself well. Not by steepness or remoteness or height but by sheer unpleasantness... a nastiness that deterred even goats.
By the frogs of lower heaven, why not go all the way! This is, perhaps, a covered-up installation of visitors from outer space, who buried one of their starships here when they ran out of tapioca to power it!
Pavlos's foot slipped and the root he clutched barely held as he scrambled, face buried in the gritty dirt. With a mighty strain, he lifted himself within range of another foothold. It held.
Probably, he thought somewhat dizzily, I will find a helicopter landing pad, guard dogs, and an oil tycoon who will have me arrested for trespassing.
Pavlos hardly noticed when the slope began to flatten.
In fact, he felt a momentary panic when his hand reached out for another root and grabbed, instead, only air and then grass.
Cedars formed a pocket forest at the center of the plateau. The grass surrounding the grove was a subject for speculation. It was thicker and more lustrous than one might expect in this terrain, yet it did not appear to be tended, either. Pavlos saw no sign of a helicopter landing pad.
Not on this side, at least. Who could tell what he would see once the spots cleared from in front of his eyes?
He knew he looked hardly presentable for knocking on someone's front door. He itched all over. Somehow removing his leather outer garments and tending his wounds had changed the pain from a general background roar that could be ignored to a set of isolated screaming sensations. He had been injured on other expeditions, of course. Often far worse. But never had he felt so generally abused.
Pavlos took one last swig from his canteen, then hoisted his pack.
"All right," he mumbled, fighting off dizziness. "This had better be worth it."
The air was cleaner up here, almost tasty. The smell of the cedars was sweet and pleasant. He entered the grove and almost at once saw the outlines of the building through the trees.
He paused for a moment, struggling not to fall to his knees. It couldn't be true!
It was pure beam and column construction. Not an arch could be seen. The columns were Doric, or even pre-Doric -- chaste, simple, unadorned, but beautiful. Their rounded contours might almost be Minoan.
And the beams resting on the columns! Where a Doric entablature was strictly sectioned into the three horizontal bands, here there was only one, carved in intricate figures that seemed to march upon a protruding lip, like the rim of the door lintel of a Cretan palace.
The structure was obviously designed to stand open to the wind, yet someone after the original builder had chosen to close off the interior in a crude fashion. The openings between the columns were blocked by slabs of white marble, roughly mortared; the flaking remnants of ancient paint still clung in spots.
Pavlos walked forward slowly, silently, as if in fear the sounds of his footsteps would blow it all away. He felt telescoped as he approached -- the marble seeming to come to him, like the advancing of a dream.
No graffiti... no carved names and dates. The figures of heroic horses and feathered men in combat using spears and rounded shields, these bore no defacement other than that which Time itself had meted.
The warriors, some plumed, some naked to the waist, were of many types. Pavlos saw some that were clearly Minoan and he felt his heart leap. There were others... Egyptian of the Old Kingdom, for certain, and.... Akkadian?
Pavlos approached one of the columns. Gently, he reached out and touched it.
The marble had taken pits and tiny scratches over the centuries. It felt rough, in its underlying smoothness. To him, it had the texture of durability.
The wind sighed through the cedars. It seemed to be speaking to him with the voices of ancient men and women.
"Well, hero. You are here at last. Come, and you shall tell us of the changes in the world outside."
Pavlos shook his head to clear it. The words had seemed so real.
"Come, hero!"
He turned. Standing at the far end of the row of columns was a woman. She wore a simple garment, bound by a rope belt. Her black hair was braided, though not with great precision.
She smiled, and held out her hand in a gesture of welcome. But as Pavlos felt himself begin to walk -- numbly and only partly, it seemed, at his own will -- he thought he heard a quiet "clicking" sound, and the sunlight glinted hard into his eyes... reflected bitterly by the golden thimble she wore on her finger.
Continue to 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
The Real Culture War
