Free My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart

‘I’ll tell you about that, if I may. But not just at this moment. Here’s Delphi, I’ll leave you and the car at your hotel, and I’ll meet you on the terrace here in half an hour. Right?’
    ‘Right.’ The car drew up where it had stood before. He came round and opened my door for me. I got out, and when I would have turned to repeat some words of thanks for his help in my afternoon’s quest he shook his head, laughed, raised a hand in farewell and vanished up the steep lane beside the hotel.
    With a feeling that things were moving altogether too fast for me, I turned and went indoors.

5
    But enough of tales – I have wept for these
things once already
.
    E URIPIDES :
Helen
.
    (tr. Philip Vellacott.)
    A NY fears I might have had that Simon’s melancholy pilgrimage would be allowed to cloud my first visit to Delphi were dispelled when I came down at length to dinner, and walked out to the hotel terrace to find a table.
    Seven-thirty was certainly an outrageously early hour for dining in Greece, and only one other of the tables under the plane trees was occupied, and that, too, by English people. Simon Lester wasn’t there yet, so I sat down under one of the trees from whose dark boughs hung lights, which swung gently in the warm evening air. I saw Simon then below the terrace railing, making one of an extremely gay and noisy group of Greeks which surrounded a fair boy in the garb of a hiker, and a very small donkey almost hidden under its awkwardly loaded panniers.
    The fair young man looked very much as if he had just completed some arduous trek in the wilds. Hisface, hands, and clothes were filthy; he had a generous stubble on his chin, and his eyes – I could see it even from where I sat – were bloodshot with fatigue. The donkey was in rather better case, and stood smugly beside him, under its load of what appeared to be the paraphernalia of an artist – boxes, roughly wrapped canvases, and a small collapsible easel, as well as a sleeping bag and the rather unappetising end of a large black loaf.
    Half the youth of Delphi seemed to have rallied to the stranger’s welcome, like the wasps to my honey-cake. There was a great deal of loud laughter, atrocious English, and backslapping – the last an attention which the stranger could well have done without. He was reeling with tiredness, but a white grin split the dirty bearded face as he responded to the welcome. Simon was laughing, too, pulling the donkey’s ears and exchanging what appeared to be the most uproarious of jokes with the young Greeks. Frequent cries of ‘
Avanti! Avanti!
’ puzzled me, till I realised that they coincided with the jolly slaps under which the donkey, too, was reeling. At each slap a cloud of dust rose from ‘Avanti’s’ fur.
    Eventually Simon looked up and saw me. He said something to the fair boy, exchanged some laughing password with the Greeks, and came swiftly up to the terrace.
    ‘I’m sorry, have you been waiting long?’
    ‘No. I’ve just come down. What’s going on down there? A modern Stevenson?’
    ‘Just that. He’s a Dutch painter who’s been makinghis way through the mountains with a donkey, and sleeping rough. He’s done pretty well. He’s just here from Jannina now, and that’s a long way through rough country.’
    ‘He certainly got a welcome,’ I said, laughing. ‘It looked as if all Delphi had turned out.’
    ‘Even the tourist traffic hasn’t quite spoiled the Greek
philoxenia
– the ‘welcome’ that literally means “love of a stranger”,’ said Simon, ‘though goodness knows Delphi ought to be getting a bit blasé by now. At least he’ll get the traditional night’s lodging free.’
    ‘Up at the studio?’
    ‘Yes. This is the end of his trek. Tomorrow, he says, he’ll sell Modestine – the donkey Avanti – and get the bus for Athens.’
    I said: ‘I thought when I saw the easel and what-not that he must be your English painter friend from the studio.’
    ‘Nigel? No. I