Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
ground to see if one had inadvertently climbed in during the night. They never had. I also made sure that I didn’t turn over rocks inadvertently either; I pushed them first before putting my fingers underneath, though it has to be said that throughout the whole time I was there I never saw a scorpion alive.
But we did have some scorpion visitations. I remember one morning a young lad from the village was brought to the dig house by his father. He was in intense pain, having been bitten on the neck by one of these dreaded arachnids. He had been sleeping alongside the field walls with all the other men when a scorpion had fallen onto him and he had inadvertently swatted it in his sleep, and bang! It had inflicted the bite. The boy had the remains of this arachnid in a screw of newspaper to show anyone who might be interested. But there was nothing we could do, and indeed his dad was quite happy to leave him sitting at the house. He said it was good that the poor chap was getting the experience; it would harden him for later life! This seemed a bit harsh to me, but what could I do. So the lad sat there silently holding a cold compress to his neck all day long without a murmur until in the evening he got up and calmly walked away, apparently none the worse for his experience.
However, on one occasion, in the pitch dark in the middle of the night, one of our dig staff did get bitten and all hell was let loose. It was our very own English rose, Harriet, very well bred and very public school. Our tents were equipped with camp beds and sleeping bags, which
18
incidentally, whenever there was a high wind, which there was every three or four days or so, would fill up with sand blown in from around the Trireme Harbour. It got into every nook and cranny and made sleeping very uncomfortable if you had not swept and shaken everything out before you collapsed into bed.
Anyway this particular night there was a vocal protest from Harriet. One of these little scorpions had got into her sleeping bag some time during the previous day and finding that it couldn’t get out, had stung Harriet on the thigh.
“Oh my God,” screamed one of her tent mates, “Oh my God what are we going to do. Oh you poor thing!”
Others joined in and a full-scale, high-decibel chorus of “Oh my God” developed from the interior of the tent which, of course, woke everyone else up as well.
“No! No! Please don’t worry,” Harriet remonstrated, “Don’t let anyone worry. I’m perfectly alright.”
“Oh my God,” shrieked the girls from the next tent. “Oh Harriet are you OK?”
“Yes, yes! Please don’t concern yourselves. I am fine, really!”
“We should do something. Why can’t we do something? Someone do something. It’s just awful! Truly awful!”
A collective wailing, wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth developed among the troops, except for Harriet herself who lapsed into a stalwart silence the more the brouhaha grew. In the end everyone else except Harriet was genuinely distressed by this untoward turn of events until slowly the commotion subsided and we all went back to sleep.
19
The next morning, Harriet was her normal restrained self. True English phlegm had won through.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
I quickly discovered that swimming was the one great fun feature that was to make my stay at Knidos more enjoyable. For the really keen, there was always the opportunity of a quick dip even before starting work at 6.00 am, though few ever took that opportunity that I know of. It was the swim in the middle of the day that I looked forward to. Lunch, such as it was after a hot and gruelling six hours in the sun, was at 12 o’clock. Then we were free until three, so a couple of hours could be whiled away with a dip or two. For some, the over-keen, this meant just a quick leap into the ancient Commercial Harbour and back to the dig house for a spot of extemporary cataloguing or recreational pottery conservation. But for me the best, and to a great extent, most private time was to be had at one of the beaches facing the Aegean, north west of the site. Here, sheltered below high cliffs, there were two or three tiny coves where, provided there was no wind or heavy swell, a relaxing and contemplative swim could be enjoyed, soothing away the tensions of the daily round.
From the dig house you could walk across the isthmus and then round the north side of the Trireme Harbour and west across the ancient wall below the main part of the site. From here, a track scrambled down to the first of the three coves, then round the point to the second and third. The middle one was my favourite. There was even a small amount of sand to lie on, albeit mixed with sea weed and eroded potsherds. It was a very private little beach, out of sight of the city and used by almost no-one.
It was here that I learned a most liberating experience - to snorkel. What an extraordinary activity that turned out to be. Within a few days I could dive from the surface and swim along the sandy bottom observing the wild-life
20
for what felt like minutes at a time. There were fish moving in and out of the rhythmically oscillating sea-weed, not very big ones its true, but with strikingly variegated colours, and they seemed not to be afraid of me at all. But the thing which really gave me a thrill were the different tints and hues cast in the calm water by the sun – pale turquoises, pastel blues and light pinks reflecting from my outstretched hands as I swam. That, with the silent, twisting wave shadows on the sea floor was truly psychedelic, or at least as psychedelic as I had ever seen. I couldn’t get enough of it, but all too soon the time would come to go back to the dig. By three o’clock we had to be back on site until six. My snorkel-induced out-of-body happening was over for another day.
There were some days of course when the wind blew too hard, the ‘büyük rüzgar’ the ‘big wind’ as the locals called it, and the breakers were pushed relentlessly into the little coves on this north west side of the peninsula. This is a wind I learned more about as time went on, a mischievous wind very well known to those who live in the Aegean, called the ‘meltem’, a summer wind that starts around ten in the morning and which by mid-day can become intolerably strong and dangerous. This wind funnels south and eastwards down the eastern side of the island of Kos during the late morning and hurls itself with a notable fury at the coast on this corner of the Mediterranean. At these times the sea turned a murky brown colour, breaking roughly on the sand and making swimming if not totally impossible then certainly desperately unpleasant. But at this remove I only remember the calm days, when the sea surface was flat and I could enjoy that other-worldly psychedelia.
Once during my stay we made a lunch-time boat trip. We had a volunteer on the dig, Alf, who was the son of the vice-chancellor or some such worthy at one of the universities notionally sponsoring the dig. Alf thus carried more clout with the High Command than any one of the rest of us. He was a large and fearless character and reckoned that since ‘his’ university was helping support the dig he had rights to things we could never have aspired to. Thus
21
one lunch time he persuaded the High Command that he wanted to borrow the zodiac dinghy, ostensibly for a survey of the coast to the east of Knidos. I happened to be passing when he called out,
“Wanna trip to Mycenean Beach?”
Why not, I thought, and hopped into the waiting boat with another two or three of the staff. Alf gunned the outboard motor and we set off at speed across the Commercial Harbour. It was a powerful outboard; one or two of the Management liked to water-ski round and round any new yacht that came into the bay, which incidentally was a source of great irritation to us lower orders because they were wont to do this at mid-day and we had to wait for lunch until they had finished. Anyway, this meant the outboard was large and hence fast. We crossed between the two moles and bounced out across the open sea to one of the headlands in the eastern distance.
After perhaps five minutes or so Alf yanked the tiller and slewed the dinghy very competently into a quiet and very secluded cove with a light shingle beach. He cut the engine and we leapt out and pulled the dinghy onto the shore.
“Welcome to Mycenean Beach,” he cried.
It was idyllic, a totally private beach with a slightly shelving profile