IV.

Lindos received me drenched in sunlight.

That is the detail which memory, in its perversity, has preserved most sharply. I did not arrive beneath a storm, nor in any theatrical gloom suited to the errand on which I now know I had come. The morning was clear; the sea lay blue and bright beyond the white houses; goats moved on the slopes with bells at their throats; women called to one another from doorways; and above all, the Acropolis rose with such splendour that for several hours I was almost ashamed of the darker associations I had brought to it. There are places where antiquity seems reduced by sun and height to its noblest outline. Lindos, seen from below, was such a place.

That first impression was a mercy. Like most mercies, it did not last.

In Rhodes City the deer had followed me in bronze, stone, postcard, rumour, and civic ornament. At Lindos, where I had most expected some echo of them, I saw none. The omission troubled me only later. At the time I thought merely that each place kept its own emblems, and that I had begun, as scholars do, to force patterns upon things innocent of them.

I spent the early part of the day in the proper manner. I climbed slowly, stopping often, partly from heat and partly from the scholar’s compulsion to delay arrival by cataloguing every approach to it. The village below, with its whitewashed walls and narrow ways, seemed less built than grown from the rock. Above it stood the old fortifications, the later works of the Knights resting upon earlier foundations, and beneath those the memory of the sanctuary of Athena Lindia, whose cult had once drawn worshippers across the Greek world. Temple, fortress, watchpost, ruin: Lindos held each name without surrendering wholly to any one of them.

At another time I would have been content for days with its visible past. Yet the pattern I had followed from the city had infected my sight. I no longer saw simple succession. Where one age repaired another, I asked what weakness had required repair. Where a wall turned strangely, I asked what it avoided. Where a pious symbol appeared in a military place, I asked whether piety had been ornament, protection, or disguise.

My first inquiries produced little. The local men were willing enough to discuss the ruins so long as I asked the questions visitors were expected to ask. They spoke of the goddess, the Knights, the views, the sea, the old processions, the old wars, the Italian officers who had come with papers and measuring instruments. They were proud, cautious, hospitable, evasive. Several warned me against the heat. One warned me against loose stones. One old man, when asked about repairs beneath the fortress, said only that certain families had duties when old masonry cracked; then he looked ashamed of having said even that. None warned me against the lower works, which was itself a warning.

By then I had learned to listen not only to speech but to its absences. When I asked about cisterns, the answers shortened. When I asked about chambers beneath the fortress, men remembered business elsewhere. When I mentioned an Ottoman note concerning a “lower fastening,” one man laughed and said the Turks had written many foolish things. His laughter ended before his sentence did.

The guide I eventually engaged was not the man recommended to me. That one, upon learning the direction of my interest, declared himself suddenly needed by an uncle in another village. In his place came a younger fellow called Manolis, quick-eyed, narrow-shouldered, and eager for money with the theatrical indifference of one who does not wish his eagerness noticed. He had some Italian, less French, and a Greek so local in its turns that I sometimes understood him only by gesture. But he knew the Acropolis, or claimed to, and more importantly he knew what parts of it people preferred not to know.

“You want old stones,” he said.

“I want stones below old stones.”

He spat into the dust as though clearing an unpleasant taste from his mouth. 

“Below, all stones are old.”

We began near a portion of wall where repairs of several periods could be distinguished by even a careless eye. Hellenistic masonry, Byzantine adaptation, Hospitaller reinforcement, later patching: each had left its signature. Manolis showed me, with the pride of a man unveiling contraband, a half-choked passage behind a fall of stone and thorn scrub. It descended only a few yards before ending in a blockage of rubble, but along its right-hand wall I saw the first sign that I had not imagined the pattern.

It was a stag, cut shallowly into the stone.

Not the civic deer of postcard and harbour, not the proud animal which guides show to visitors as the island’s charming device. This was a rude thing, angular and urgent, scored with a blade by someone who either lacked time or had run out of courage. Its antlers had been exaggerated until they resembled branching lightning. Between them was the same vertical mark I had seen above the blocked stair in Rhodes City: eye, flame, wound, or all three.

I touched it before I could stop myself.

The stone was warm from the day, but in that cut my finger found a coolness that seemed impossible. Manolis watched my hand and said nothing.

“How old?” I asked.

He shrugged too quickly.

“The Knights?”

Again the shrug.

“Before the Knights?”

He looked away toward the sea.

“There were always men here.”

That answer, which would once have pleased me as a rustic philosophy, now struck me as another door closing softly.

For two days I worked above ground. I copied what marks I could find, compared walls, sketched the relation of blocked spaces to older structures, and traced references from my notes against the actual terrain. No map emerged. What accumulated instead was a pressure. The Acropolis seemed to contain, beneath its visible history, a second architecture implied by avoidance. Certain places had been repaired repeatedly; certain fractures sealed with greater care than their importance warranted; certain lower apertures filled not once but many times, and with materials belonging to different ages. Here a Greek block turned inward where no visible structure required it. There a Hospitaller wall thickened around nothing. Elsewhere an Ottoman repair used stones so carefully fitted that the work seemed less intended to support than to forbid.

On the second evening, as the sun lowered and the sea took on a metallic glare, I found the inscription.

I should not say found. A fragment of it had been visible, perhaps for years, to anyone willing to scrape away the crust of dust and lichen beneath a later repair. But finding is often no more than looking wrongly in the right place. The letters were worn, incomplete, and partly obscured by a crack which had split the stone with almost surgical cruelty. Yet there it was, or enough of it to justify Nikolaidis’ copy.

The words concerning Helios were fragmentary. Then came the line whose shadow had drawn me from Rhodes City:

— not to raise what is held from the sun —

The Greek was uncertain. It may not have said “raise.” It may have said “release,” “stand,” “restore,” or “bring upward.” It may not have said “held” but “kept,” “bound,” or “restrained.” I give the sense, not the philology. Yet as I knelt there I felt no doubt. It was an instruction.

Above it, nearly effaced, was a shape I first took for a solar disk. Only when the raking light changed did I perceive that the disk was interrupted by something within it: a slender, vertical absence, like a pupil cutting the sun in two.

I remember laughing then. Helios, the Colossus, the radiant guardian, the bronze wonder imagined by centuries of travellers—all that upright splendour had been built, in men’s minds, upon a warning not to raise something into light. The most famous absence in the world had concealed another absence beneath it.

For the first time I wondered whether the sun had served as boundary as well as splendour. 

That night I dreamed of antlers scraping stone.

I woke before dawn, heart hammering, with the certainty that something had moved under the hill. Nothing in the room confirmed this. The shutters were still. The air was cool. Manolis, asleep in the adjoining space, snored with the peaceful vulgarity of the unburdened. Yet from somewhere below or within the rock came a faint vibration which reached the bones without ever quite becoming sound. It passed after a few seconds. A tremor, I told myself. Rhodes knew earthquakes. Stone remembers them even when men pretend not to.

At breakfast Manolis refused to meet my eyes.

“You felt it,” I said.

“Go back to the city.”

“Why?”

“There are old places. They move.”

“Stones settle.”

He drank without looking at me.

“Then let them settle.”

After that he would guide me no farther. Before leaving me, however, he spoke in a low voice to a boy who had been waiting near the doorway. I did not catch the words. I noticed only that the boy passed the village and ran down the road toward Rhodes City. I was irritated by this at the time, imagining some village gossip had been set loose ahead of me. I did not understand that it might be more useful than any message I could have sent.

It was then that fortune, or the thing which imitates fortune when a man is already lost, provided the Italian officer.

Vezzi had come to Lindos with two labourers, a soldier, instruments, and the cheerful conviction that all obscurity is temporary. He was not cruel, nor stupid, nor even especially arrogant except in the common professional manner of men trained to believe that everything yields eventually to measurement. He had been ordered to examine substructures beneath portions of the old fortification: cisterns, cavities, possible storage spaces, foundations, and faults which might affect future works. I do not know whether he had seen the Ottoman warning I had copied, or another like it. If he had, he gave it no weight. To him, “lower fastening” meant bad translation, “not dry” meant seepage, and local reluctance meant laziness inflated by superstition.

He possessed, in another discipline and under another flag, the same confidence that had brought me to Rhodes. That was why I disliked him then.

When I asked to accompany him, he was amused.

“You scholars only like darkness when it holds secrets,” he said.

“And engineers only like it when they can light it up.”

He laughed and granted permission.

I carried my satchel with me, though Vezzi advised me to leave it behind. I told him I might want to sketch. He made a little bow and said that if the tunnel killed me, posterity would at least have a drawing.

We entered shortly after noon through a partially cleared opening near the lower works, where labourers had removed a fall of stone from what Vezzi believed to be an old cistern access or service passage. Two local workmen accompanied us at first, along with a Sardinian soldier carrying rope and lamps. Manolis watched from a distance and would not come closer. I remember seeing him cross himself, then perform another gesture I did not know, older or merely local, with two fingers against his throat.

The passage smelled of hot dust at its mouth, then damp, then something else.

At first there was nothing extraordinary. We descended by cramped steps into a corridor of mixed masonry where repairs from different periods leaned upon one another like old enemies too weary to separate. Water had once run there, or been stored nearby. Salt crusted the stone. Roots entered through cracks in thin brown threads. Our lamps found niches, tool marks, mineral stains, and the pale blind bodies of small insects disturbed by light. Vezzi was pleased. He spoke of drainage, stability, and the likelihood that several “superstitious” closures could be explained by earth tremors and water damage. I nodded, though I no longer listened as a colleague listens. I listened as a condemned man listens to the reading of a familiar charge.

After perhaps fifty yards the first workman stopped.

He set down his pick, kissed a little object at his neck, and began to walk back toward the light. Vezzi cursed him with more irritation than anger. The second workman lasted until the next bend, where the corridor narrowed and the ceiling dipped. There he lifted his lamp, saw something on the left-hand wall, and went very still.

“What is it?” Vezzi demanded.

The man answered in Greek too rapid for me, but I understood one phrase: old dead.

Then he too went back.

The soldier, young enough to be ashamed of fear and foolish enough to mistake shame for courage, remained.

We went on.

Beyond that bend the passage became a record of interruptions. Blocks of excellent ancient cutting alternated with rougher medieval repairs, then with fills of brick and plaster, then with stone so worn by water or pressure that it seemed less placed than grown. Symbols had been incised and recut across centuries: crosses, Greek letters, Arabic invocations, Latin abbreviations, deer, antlers, eyes, serpentine coils, hands, suns split by vertical wounds. They overlapped without respect for doctrine. No faith had erased the last. Each had added its own prohibition to the same surface.

Then the masonry opened upon a metal face.

At first I mistook it for a great retaining plate set into the wall. It rose from the floor to above the reach of our lamps and extended laterally into the stone on either side, so that none of its true edges could be seen. Its visible surface was almost featureless. Dust and mineral deposits dulled it to the colour of old anchors, yet where centuries of pressure or rubbing had polished narrow places, there showed beneath the blackness a muted red-gold unlike bronze as I knew it.

The plate itself bore no seam, rivet, or maker’s mark. Around it, however, every later age had left evidence of anxiety.

Green bands of ancient alloy had been fitted across its margins. Iron collars black with age gripped it where the masonry narrowed. Wedges of lead and hammered bronze filled spaces between metal and stone. A Hospitaller brace had been fixed against one side; an Ottoman binding crossed it at another. Mortar had been pressed over older ironwork, then cut with antlers, crosses, invocations, and the split sun. None of these additions had pierced the original surface. They clasped it, leaned against it, and transferred whatever burden it carried into the surrounding rock.

Vezzi held up his lamp.

“Foundation tie,” he said.

“For what foundation?”

“The one we have not yet mapped.”

He drew the hardened point of a compass across the exposed surface. It made a dry, shrill sound but left no visible line. He tried again with more pressure.

Nothing.

When he examined the compass, its point had bent slightly.

“An unusual bronze,” he said. “What’s this?”

A body lay partly within the masonry beside it.

It had not been exposed when death came. That much was plain. It had been deliberately placed inside an earlier repair and only revealed by later subsidence, so that the right side of the skeleton showed through cracked mortar like an object trapped in cloudy glass. The skull was turned inward toward the deeper passage. Into the mortar around it, someone had fixed a half-circle of small antler tines, framing the brow without touching it—a warning repeated in bone, not a crown. The jaw hung slightly open. Between the teeth was a thin mineral growth the colour of old salt.

Vezzi lifted his lamp.

“Medieval,” he said.

“Possibly.”

“A burial?”

“In a wall?”

He said nothing.

Beyond the body, the passage turned sharply and opened upon a collapse.

The greater part of the fallen masonry had been driven sideways across the corridor, as though one wall had lurched into the other while the ceiling remained largely intact. Blocks lay piled against the deeper side. An iron brace thicker than my wrist had folded toward the passage ahead, its bolts still clinging to the stone behind it. Another lay several feet from the socket meant to hold it.

Beneath the rubble were the remains of an Ottoman work party.

There were five that I could distinguish. Two had been crushed beneath the displaced stone. One had been driven against the wall so violently that his ribs and spine had become part of a later repair. Another lay beside a half-fitted collar of black iron, one hand still closed around a hammer whose head had split upon something harder than itself. The fifth had fallen across a shallow recess in which tools and materials had been stored. His body had shielded a flattened brass case from the worst of the collapse.

Vezzi retrieved it.

Inside lay a notebook wrapped in rotted cloth.

The surviving pages contained little I could read with certainty. There were quantities of iron, stone and wedges; names of men; complaints that the older metal took neither tool nor binding; and repeated instructions concerning the fastening. One entry claimed that the metal had shifted three finger-widths during the night, though the masonry around it had not settled. In one margin appeared a single Greek word:

Orichalcum.

The same hand had crossed it through so violently that the pen had torn the paper.

Beneath it, in Ottoman Turkish, another writer had added:

The name is no craft. We cannot replace it. Brace the old fastening before it takes the weight again.

There was no account of the collapse.

That lay around us.

Near the dead men, later hands had resumed the work. Newer masonry enclosed part of the ruin. A second collar had been fitted across the one left unfinished. The bodies had not been removed. They had been built around, as the earlier body had been built around, and the reinforcement continued. It was not slaughter we were seeing. 

Maintenance interrupted by catastrophe, resumed by strangers, interrupted again, resumed again by men who prayed in other words and feared, perhaps, under other names.

This, more than any monstrous sight, was the first true blow to my mind. I had sought continuity in texts, and now the stone itself proclaimed one. Greek, Christian, Hospitaller, Ottoman, local: all had been brought there by the same recurring panic. The passage was an argument conducted across two thousand years by men who could not agree on heaven, law, empire, or salvation, but who had agreed on one thing only: the old fastening must continue to bear its burden.

Vezzi, to his credit, grew silent.

We left the notebook with the dead. I do not remember deciding to do so. It seemed already part of the repair.

Beyond the collapse the passage narrowed, then descended more steeply. Our lamps burned lower than they should have, though the soldier swore he had trimmed them properly. The salt deposits diminished upon the walls. The air became warmer, then abruptly cold.

A second metal face emerged from the floor ahead of us and vanished into the opposite wall at an angle no foundation should have required. It was of the same substance and, where the masonry permitted comparison, the same breadth as the first. Its supports belonged to several periods, but were fewer here and more desperate: an iron collar bent inward, hammered wedges, a buttress built across an older opening, strips of inscribed metal folded beneath the bindings.

Vezzi measured the exposed breadth and compared it with his earlier notes.

“The same,” he said.

“You are certain?”

“Within a finger.”

He crouched to examine the angle at which it entered the floor.

“Another foundation tie?”

He did not answer.

The corridor bent around it and continued downward.

Once I heard, far below or ahead, a sound like water withdrawing through a throat. Once the wall beside me seemed to tighten with an almost muscular contraction, wholly unlike the crack and complaint of settling masonry. Dust descended in a thin curtain. From somewhere within the rock came a deep metallic complaint, so low that I felt it in my teeth before I heard it.

Vezzi placed his palm against the metal, then removed it quickly.

“Pressure,” he said.

The soldier whispered a prayer.

We came at last to a chamber so regular that for one foolish instant I felt relief. It was circular, domed, and lined with stone benches or ledges. A cistern, perhaps. A ritual chamber, perhaps. Some later adaptation of an older hydraulic work. My mind reached greedily for categories and found none that would hold.

The floor was dry except at the centre, where a black aperture opened within a rim of stones carved so heavily that their original forms had been nearly destroyed by repetition. Every age had cut something there. I saw Greek letters, crosses, antlers, crescent-like curves, names, dates, hands, eyes, and certain marks belonging to no script I knew but whose arrangement produced in me an immediate nausea. They were attempts to make thought difficult at that spot.

The cuts around the rim were not the same as those I had seen around the widow’s sealed well in Rhodes City, yet they belonged to the same family of gesture: repeated, anxious, practical, made by hands that trusted neither stone nor prayer by itself.

Two of the huge ancient metal members entered the chamber.

One emerged obliquely from the floor and disappeared into the wall beside the aperture. The other presented only a broad, dark face along the far side of the room, half concealed by braces, collars, masonry and hammered bands. The original metal remained featureless beneath that accumulated labour.

Vezzi set down his lamp and measured.

He measured the chamber wall, the diameter of the floor, the breadth of the exposed members and the angles at which they entered and vanished. The act steadied him. His hands became competent again. Terror, in a man like Vezzi, could be postponed by instruments.

“There were works here,” he said. “Several phases.”

“Yes.”

“Greek beneath medieval. Later reinforcement.”

“Yes.”

“This is important.”

His voice had changed. It no longer belonged to a bored officer or practical surveyor. It had acquired the hushed greed of the discoverer.

He crossed between the two exposed surfaces, comparing figures in his notebook.

“The same dimensions,” he said.

“As the others?”

“As each other.”

“Then they belong to one structure.”

He looked at the angles again.

“They cannot.”

Before I could ask what he meant, the vibration returned.

It began below hearing. The stone benches shivered. Fine dust lifted from the floor. Somewhere in the passage behind us, an iron collar groaned. Another answered, farther away.

The soldier raised his lamp.

“What is that?”

No one answered.

A band along the far wall drew taut with a shriek. One rivet tore free and rang upon the floor. Mortar opened in a thin line along the edge of the dark metal.

The ancient material moved.

No more than the breadth of my hand.

Several stones slipped from above it and broke upon the floor. The supporting masonry settled with a heavy inward thud. Through the narrow gap thus exposed I saw that the supposed slab did not continue as a solid mass. Its inner edge turned sharply away, enclosing a darkness bounded by the same red-gold metal.

It was the side of an enormous opening.

Through that opening passed the other metal member.

For one instant my mind refused the relation. I saw a plate, a void, another plate, and the masonry fitted about them. Then scale and geometry assembled themselves against my will.

They were not plates.

They were not ribs.

They were links.

Angular and straight-sided, each large enough that a man might have stood within its central opening without touching either side.

The passage had not been reinforced with metal.

It had been built around a chain.