My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart

Author:Mary Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

11

That ground will take no footprint. All of it Is bitter stone …

EURIPIDES: Electra.

(tr. Gilbert Murray.)

THE corrie did not lie at any great height. Arachova itself is almost three thousand feet above sea level, and we had climbed no more than eight or nine hundred feet in all since we had left the village. We were still only in the foothills of the vast highland of Parnassus, but we might have been lost, a million miles from anywhere. Since the village had dwindled out of sight we had seen no living creature except the lizards, and the vultures that circled and cried so sweetly, high in the dazzling air.

The place wasn’t, properly speaking, a corrie. It was a hollow scooped out of a line of low cliffs that topped a steep, mile-long ridge like the crest along a horse’s neck. From a distance the cliff looked fairly uniform, but on approach it could be seen that it had been split and torn into ragged bays and promontories where half a hundred winter torrents had gouged their headlong way down the mountainside.

Here and there lay evidence of a swifter and more wholesale violence. Earthquakes had wrested great chunks from the crag, quarrying back into the limestone face, throwing the enormous debris down, so that for hundreds of feet below the jagged cliffs, a loose and sometimes dangerous scree valanced the sloping hillside.

As we neared the edge of this Stephanos turned aside, into a short steep detour that took us out above the level of the clifftop, and we approached the line of crags at a long slant that brought us eventually to the edge.

The old man stopped then, leaning on his crook, and waited for us to come up with him.

Simon stood beside him, looking down.

‘This is the place?’

‘This is the place.’

It could have been a quarry hacked out of the cliff-face during countless patient years. It had probably taken five seconds of earthquake for the Earth-Shaker to tear that semicircular scar back into the cliff and fling the wreckage down before it in still formidable walls of jagged rock. The result of the earthquake’s action was to make a roughly circular hollow, a sort of irregular crater some seventy yards across, which was walled to the north by the living cliff on which we stood, and shut in almost completely for the rest of its diameter by the vast sections of tumbled rock.

The centre of the crater floor was clear, but the encircling walls were piled in the now familiar way with red dust and rock-debris. In spring, I thought, it would probably be beautiful, for it was sheltered, and I could see the dead remains of some scrubby plants and bushes where the melting snows and then the rain must have fed some alpine vegetation. Below us clung the lovely green of a little juniper, and just beside my feet the rock held two thick bushes that looked like holly, but which bore, incongruously, acorns with enormous cups as prickly as seaurchins.

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