Free An Inch of Time by Peter Helton Page A

unloved-looking trees, badly maintained terraces, fallen walls, the odd roofless stone hut and the remnants of wooden shelters and lean-tos. Here and there the winter rains had washed out the ruts worn by vehicles and filled them with grit. I had little confidence in finding Morva or anything much at the end of this track. What if it simply petered out somewhere without the space to turn around? Just as I began to wonder whether it was possible to reverse all the way back to Neo Makriá, the track took a sharp turn and the view opened out into the sun-baked dead end of a narrow valley, not much more than a notch in the mountainside.
    The terraced groves of olives that rose up its sides looked sunken and neglected and were profusely overgrown. Among the wild vegetation that had claimed the valley stood a deserted, half-ruined hamlet. There was a church to my right, its open tower without a bell. I could see about ten or twelve houses with their outbuildings, all showing varying degrees of decay. Only two or three were wholly without roofs; the others looked like complete houses while giving a definite impression of desolation. There was no doubt that the village was uninhabited, abandoned, deserted.
    Not wholly deserted, though. Just then I heard the unmistakable bragging of a cockerel and, turning in that direction, discovered a thin twirl of smoke rising from the chimney of a low but sprawling farmhouse. It stood on the edge of this ruination, surrounded by terraces that looked marginally less wild than the rest of the place.
    Of course, another indication that there was life in the place was the moped, the small Honda motorbike and the little Ford parked at the end of the track. Here it turned into what had once been a cobbled village road, now a ruinous sea of stones that couldn’t be negotiated by any type of vehicle other than a tank. Beside it, a narrow footpath had been trodden through the wild grass and flowers.
    Matilda bounced unhappily over the bumpy terrain under the stand of unruly holly oaks, where I left her next to the car. Journey’s end. As I got out, Derringer shot through the door and disappeared at a gallop into the high grass.
    For a moment I stood at the start of the ruined cobble-road and looked with a painter’s eye, adjusting my palette. With my back to the cars, I could see no evidence that the industrial revolution had ever happened. There were no telegraph poles, cables or electric lanterns, not even an old radio aerial left on a roof. The houses were built of dust-grey stone, the roofs tiled with terracotta weathered to the palest ochre. The wood of the sheds and outbuildings had bleached to silver like bones in the sun. But that didn’t mean I would have no need of brighter colours on my palette because an astonishing profusion of wild flowers in every shade of yellow, pink, blue and purple drifted through the unchecked growth that covered the ground between the many trees.
    A half-hearted call after Derringer produced no results. I could hardly blame him for wanting to escape from what for him had become practically a prison van. I took the goat path towards the house with the smoking chimney. It stood on the far side of the church in its own compound of crumbling walls, towered over by a venerable mulberry and shaded by fig and walnut trees. Nearly all the other trees in sight were olives. As I entered the courtyard, a few chickens scooted into the lee of a wall among piles of new bricks and sacks of cement half-heartedly covered with tarpaulin. The house itself, consisting only of ground and first floor, looked solid and was definitely lived in. Near the front door stood a long wooden table shaded by vines and the fleshy foliage of an enormous fig tree. A multitude of oil and feta tins with their backs to the wall had been planted up with bright herbs and electric geraniums. The open door was nothing but a black rectangle in the strong morning sun.
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