CHAPTER 20: Sounion.

I peek out the window as the walls of the cabin begin to creak; sure enough, we’re on the move, the dock lights falling away behind us. This will be my last and longest voyage by ferry, my first overnighter. I sit on my bed hoping the chubby Greek will return, so we can talk some more. When he doesn’t, I shower and walk the long tunnel-like hall to the lobby, search the ritzy dining room, cocktail lounge. He’s nowhere in sight.

I go out on deck and stand at the rail staring at the evening lights of the island floating past, the brimy smell of sea lofting toward me. During the siege of Troy, Locrian Aias raped Priam’s daughter, the princess Cassandra, on the steps of Athena’s temple. Athena was so enraged by the sacrilege that even though she had supported the Greeks in their siege of Troy, she joined forces with Poseidon to scatter the Greek ships upon their return home. Poseidon, who had staunchly supported the Greeks during the war, turned vengefully against them once he saw Troy burn. He and Apollo had built the walls around the city. He agreed to help Athena wreak havoc on the returning ships for desecrating of her temple. Evil days came upon the Greeks, and they fought amongst themselves. Agamemnon and Menelaus argued. Some mustered their ships with Menelaus on Lesbos, others with Agamemnon. Odysseus at first sailed with Nestor, then had second thoughts and went back to join forces with Agamemnon. They all sailed the same part of the Aegean I’m sailing tonight, but few of them would see home again.

Odysseus was gone from Ithaca for twenty years, ten at Troy and ten blown about the Mediterranean trying to get back to Ithaca. Odysseus had reached mid-life, somewhere in his early forties, when he left Troy. I'd also just turned forty when I started my wandering after my wife left. After losing all but one ship, Odysseus came to the island of Aeaea off the west coast of Italy where the goddess Circe lived. Seeing Odysseus was in over his head with the goddess, Hermes came to his great grandson and told him how to deal with the spellbinding goddess so as not to be tricked by her drugs and magic. She had already turned his men to swine. Odysseus tells of his encounter with Hermes:  

... Hermes met me, with his golden wand,
barring the way--a boy whose lip was downy
in the first bloom of manhood, so he seemed.
He took my hand and spoke as though he knew me ...[1]

Odysseus obviously didn’t know Hermes was his great grandfather. Hermes was still young with a downy lip even though Odysseus had entered midlife. Hermes knew that Odysseus, without proper protection, would fall under Circe’s evil spell and never leave her island. He gave Odysseus instructions on how to deal with her, specifically stating he must not decline the offer of her bed. When Circe saw Hermes had protected Odysseus from her spells, she took him to bed and cared for him and his men for an entire year.

My second marriage was reminiscent of this episode in Odysseus’ life. I was irresistibly drawn to a young woman and eventually married her. Perhaps I was still trying to replace my ex-wife, trying to tie myself to something substantial to keep from floating. I had entered a state where I felt I had no internal reference, that I was losing contact with who I had been. But some part of me thrived on this state of liminality and demanded a new identity, one more closely aligned with who I was, perhaps the person I was becoming before I had the confrontation with my father. Chaos reined. Everything inside me was being reordered. I no longer knew myself and experienced an anxiety that culminated in hot flashes of anger, eventually ending in the panic attacks in the Alps.

When I moved from Phoenix to San Diego, my new wife refused to go and requested a divorce. As with Odysseus and Circe, we were only together a year, two years if you count the one we lived together. I took my new wife’s suggestion as a godsend, jumped at the chance and have never regretted it. I’ve learned to live in a transient state, one that’s brought me here to Greece, this home on the road.

Finally Odysseus’ men grew restless for Ithaca, and Odysseus went to Circe to see if she would tell him the way home. She said he could only learn his fate from the blind seer of Thebes, Teiresias, who had died years before. Odysseus would have to descend into the Underworld.

Following Circe’s instructions, Odysseus sailed a dark ship without a helmsman out of the Mediterranean to the abyss of Ocean running round the world to the crumbling homes of Death where no sun shines. Shrouded in darkness, he dug a trough in the black earth and, while facing inky Erebos, slit the throats of a black ewe and a black ram, and filled it with sacrificial blood as swarms of ghosts hovered about. He prayed with all his heart to the faint dead. From the great depths, the rapt shade of Lord Teiresias came from the darkness carrying a golden staff to sip from the rich black blood. After sipping the crimson broth, he prophesied to Odysseus of his journey home.

While in the Underworld, Odysseus also learned of his mother’s death. She had been alive when he left Ithaca and seeing her soul among the other shades was devastating. He allowed her to drink, and she too spoke:  

                                  ... my mother stirred,  
moving to sip the black blood; then she knew me
and called out sorrowfully to me: ‘Child,
how could you cross alive into this gloom
at the world’s end?[2]

Odysseus asked her how she died, what had sent her to the undergloom? She first told him of his father, how he lived the life of a recluse, sleeping among the slaves on a bed of leaves, his heart aching for Odysseus. Then she spoke of herself:  

So I too pined away, so doom befell me,
not that the keen-eyed huntress [Artemis] with her shafts
had marked me down and shot to kill me; not
that illness overtook me--no true illness
wasting the body to undo the spirit;
only my loneliness for you, Odysseus,
for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus,
took my own life away.[3]

Odysseus was overcome with sadness and wished to hold her:  

                                            I bit my lip,
rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her,
and tried three times, putting my arms around her,
but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable
as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.[4]

Unlike Odysseus’ mother, my mother was the one who encouraged me to leave home. After I quit college, she was pleased I got married and advised me to join the Air Force. The woman who rarely left home and was too nervous to drive an automobile, encouraged me to set out on a life of adventure.

My father was a different story. After spending the summer farming with him, he was disappointed to see me leave. My older brother had made the same decision a couple years before. In the years to come, my two younger brothers would also farm with him for a while, then leave, unable to get along with him. It broke his heart. His dream of seeing us all farming as one large clan was never to be. Life drained from him, and he became sullen and remote. He took up the bottle and visited the local bars, a trap he had vowed never to fall into. Eventually he came out the other side of the drunken tunnel. Finally one of my brothers returned to farm again and finally forged a workable partnership with him.

Perhaps it’s my guilt talking, but I’ve always felt I was the one he really wanted to stay. If I, like Odysseus, had descended into the Underworld, I wouldn’t have met the soul of my mother pining away for my return but that of my father, the man who came within the squeeze of a trigger of murdering me.

I go to bed early, lie awake feeling the long loping strides of the ferry gently rock me. I drop off to sleep worrying how I’ll get from the dock in Piraeus to the airport south of Athens to stow my backpack. At the airport, I plan to put a change of clothes and some toilette articles in my daypack and strike out for the temple of Poseidon at Sounion on the southern tip of Attica.

Sometime during the night, the Greek wakes me entering the cabin. He tiptoes into the bathroom, then slips into bed. Shortly he’s snoring. I lie awake listening to the soft hum of the ferry motor superimposed on the sea’s long song and think of my daughter. Suddenly the door opens to that space of terror within me, panic. I feel claustrophobic. It’s the monstrous snoring of the man two meters away, the close walls, the long hall to the outside world, the gently-rocking sea that has me trapped aboard this vessel, trapped within myself, the madness going on inside my own head. Images of death flower in the graveyard of my thoughts.

I control my breathing, take deep breaths and exhale slowly. To divert my thoughts from cascading images of the dead, I exert all my mental effort in plotting my itinerary for the next couple of days, think of my pending visit to Sounion and the night I’ll spend in Chalkis, the town closest Aulis where the Greeks mustered their forces before sailing to Troy and where Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia.

Then comes a dream of a motorbike accident. The accident occurs on a bend in a road, a wide sweep on an incline. Three motorbikes are involved with bodies strewn along the landscape. I hear no sounds, no screams, no wails, no anxious voices, just silence. First I run to a baby girl. She’s bloody and has an eye missing from its socket. The situation is far beyond my capability to help, and I’m engulfed in feelings of inadequacy.

I wake again, still anxious, on the edge of some terrible hysteria.

My car ride across the Mojave desert from San Diego to Phoenix to search for my runaway daughter was at night. Off to the south blinking in and out of sight behind saguaros and Joshua trees, I saw the lights of homes across the border in the badlands of Mexico, and I arrived at my son’s apartment in a daze of midnight anxiousness. The next morning I roamed the streets of Phoenix in a desperate search for her friend, Danielle. That afternoon after hours of fruitless searching, I went into a screaming rage. My daughter’s life hung in the balance, and I was wasting my time in this endless search for a teenage derelict who probably couldn’t help me anyway.

At sunset, I went back to north Phoenix to find Troy, the leader of the New Age church. He was a baby-faced young man in his mid twenties, and as he stood before me in dirty pants and T-shirt, he looked tired and frustrated himself. Three other young men milled about in the background. I explained that I was Cynthia’s father and needed to get in touch with her.

He was unimpressed. “Look Mister Sheppard, I don’t know anything about your daughter,” he told me with convincing disinterest and increasing anger. “I’ve had a hard day, and I don’t need your problems.”

I was desperate. Troy was my last hope. I didn’t know where to go from there. I felt whipped and started to cry. “If I could only get word to her that she doesn’t have to run, that she’s not a fugitive. If Bear is in trouble, I want to help.”

Troy changed, a look of fresh energy came over him. His face softened. Calling my daughter “Bear” had worked a miracle. “You really are concerned about her aren’t you?” He sounded puzzled, as if it wasn’t possible for a father to care for his daughter.

I was all choked up and couldn’t answer.

“Look, Bear left with Vicki five days ago. I don’t know where they went, but Danielle might. I’ll take you to where she lives.

Cynthia had always been an animal lover. When she was learning to crawl, it was ants, crickets and spiders. As she grew older, goldfish, gerbils, and hamsters found their way into our home, and we had many disastrous episodes with rabbits and wounded birds. I remember a little green snake smacking water from a spoon. Later, it was dogs and cats. When she graduated to horses, we gave her riding lessons but drew the line at buying a horse. She had an unexcelled collection of plastic horses, which I still have boxed in storage. When we moved to Colorado, she spent hours watching the deer that came into our yard in the evenings to eat from our garden and flower bed. She was a mistress of all things wild. I found out later, her nickname had come from her collection of teddy bears.

A few minutes later, we parked at the edge of a ravine and walked down a dead-grass embankment to an old dilapidated shack. It reminded me of the makeshift home we lived in when I was a kid after our home burned. He knocked at the screen then pulled it open, motioning me to follow him inside.

The three people didn’t acknowledge us, just kept talking. Finally Troy got their attention. One was a man about my age, brown graying hair and full beard, sipping a can of Coors. An aging hippie, I thought. The woman had obviously just come from work. She still wore heels and a dress, and looked about nervously at the cluttered living room. Through the doorway I saw the kitchen stacked to the ceiling with dirty dishes. Both of them looked tired and old beyond their years.

The third person in the room was the sixteen year old I was looking for, Danielle. She was dressed in a cycling stretch suit. Her hair was golden brown and fell in ringlets about a beautiful face. Troy spoke to her. “This is Bear’s father,” he said motioning to me. Danielle looked up and a winning smile spread across her face. “Ya,” she said. “He looks just like her.”

2 Dec, Thursday

The low rumble of the ferry motor wakes me at five AM, and I dress quietly so as not to wake my roommate. I ask a man at the reception desk what time we’ll get into Piraeus. “Ti wra PeiraioV;” I ask. He replies, but I have no idea what his words mean. I thank him and walk off. I feel much better than I did last night but still on the edge of something dark. If this had happened at Delphi my journey would have been over.

I walk out on deck, which is dark and enclosed by green wood walls with huge hinged windows that swing in and upward. Some have been opened to expose the night air and a cold brisk breeze blows through, the ferry slicing swiftly through the dark sea. I stand, arms akimbo at the wood rail, trying to startle myself awake, and greateful for the expanse before me to allay the claustrophobia. I listen to the dull roar of the motor forcing us forward. To starboard, the southern tip of the long island of Euboea, called Cape Caphareus, presents a dark face. This coast is where most of the Greeks returning from the Trojan War lost their lives, so close to home.

                                                          All the isles
And mainlands round were lashed by leaping seas
Nigh to Euboea, where the Power divine
Scourged most with unrelenting stroke on stroke
The Argives. Groan and shriek of perishing men
Ranging through the ships; started great beams and snapped
With ominous sound, for ever ship on ship
With shivering timbers crashed. With hopeless toil
Men strained with oars to thrust back hulls that reeled
Down on their own, but with the shattered planks
Were hurled into the abyss, to perish there
By pitiless doom ...[5]

I breathe in the fresh air as Cape Caphareus floats out of sight in the dark behind us, and the lights on the tip of Attica, Cape Sounion, come into view. Scattered lights of homes sprinkle the shore. Sounion is the very tip of the Attic peninsula and the magnificent setting for the temple of Poseidon, lord of the sea and bringer of earthquakes. Sounion is where Menelaus and Helen were blown off course and spent seven years trying to get back to Sparta. The ferry rounds the cape and heads north along the western coast of Attica. The lights of airliners rise up from darkness, conjuring themselves from the Underworld, bright blinking sparks of life rising into the dark sky.

This darkness and rocky shoreline bring to mind an event that occurred in the 1st century AD, shortly after the crucifixion of Christ. It’s a dark story about the freedom-seeking human spirit. The story is about the death of Pan and according to Plutarch was told by Epitherses, a teacher of literature:

... [Epitherses] was once sailing to Italy on board a ship carrying merchandise and a large number of passengers. In the evening, off the Echinades, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted close to Paxi.[6] Most of them were awake, and some were still having their after-dinner drinks. Suddenly a voice was heard from the island of Paxi, calling out for someone named Thamous. It was amazing. Thamous was the Egyptian helmsman, whom few of the passengers or crew knew by name. Twice he was summoned, and did not reply. At the third call, he answered. The voice then grew louder. “When you reach Palodes”, it cried, “announce that Great Pan is dead.” ...they were all amazed when they heard this, and discussed among themselves whether it would be best to obey or to let the matter rest and not get involved. Thamous decided that if there was a wind, he would sail quietly by, but if there was no wind and the sea was calm in the area, he would announce what he had been told. When they arrived off Palodes, there was no wind and no swell. So Thamous looked out from the stern towards the land and cried, just as he had been told, “Great Pan is dead!” Scarcely had he spoken, when a great cry of lamentation and surprise arouse, not of one voice but of many.[7]

Of all the gods, the death of Pan was the most grievous to immortals and mortals alike because no other god had been so universally loved. But all the gods had been under attack for some time. Even during Sophocles’ day, the people no longer heeded them. Sophocles was an evangelist of sorts. His plays were a call to the return to worship, a battle he lost. Since Pan means “all,” symbolically all the Greek gods had died, and man, the product of Christ-like Prometheus, had at last been freed into the hands of the Christian God in accordance with Prometheus’ prophecy. Christian legend says Pan died on the day Christ was crucified.[8]

But some maintain the gods are immortal and our awareness of their presence has only been suppressed in man’s great striving for freedom. The primary obstacle to man’s freedom is the sacred. And in what some have termed the “Post Christian Era,” we’ve become a non-religious society. The fall of religion is in many ways chronicled by the rise of mankind’s arrogance. I’m reminded of the statue of Liberty I saw at dockside on Lesbos and that tremendous structure in New York City given to us by the French. We’ve learned to sail the religious sea without a helmsman as did Odysseus on his way to the Underworld. All this, signaled by the death of Pan.

When I get back to the cabin, the Greek is up and gone. While I’m packing, the steward knocks on my cabin door to make sure I’m up. I make a final pass through the cabin to gather any overlooked possessions, then, humped under the weight of my backpack, I make the long trek along the tunnel-like hall and down the flights of metal stairs. While waiting in the oppressive, bitter-cold hold for the gangway to lower, trucks belch clouds of carbon monoxide, and a great commotion erupts from the ferry: the rumble of the engine, the scream of machinery, the bang, whir, whine, chatter, and squeal mixing with the excited shouts of dock men. In my state of hypersensitivity it's like all the madness of the world turned loose upon the ship. I take a deep breath and start forward.

It’s still dark outside. I walk through the dim glow of dock lights, the flurry of passengers bumping into me, the chaos of arrival. Cars come from everywhere, herds of taxis.

I find the bus station, but in spite of Let’s Go’s directions, I can’t locate the bus to the airport. I’m lost and feeling disillusioned. Am I to become incapacitated here on the last stages of my journey? Suddenly a young man appears out of the dark, asks if he can help me, then directs me to a bus stop close by. He stands and talks to me for a while, as if to calm me the disappears into the crowd. I wait, sitting on my backpack in the dark across the street from a kiosk.

A heavy overcast sky masks sunrise, the pale morning light gradually seeping into the space around me. A taxi stops, and the driver asks if I want a ride. When I say no thanks, he replies that no busses will go to the airport this morning because of a strike. I repeat my no thanks, and he drives on to leave me downhearted and questioning. But ten minutes later a minibus arrives, and as the dim light of morning slowly becomes day, I listen to creaking bus noises and the whiz of morning traffic on the way to the airport. I feel better in the van, finding comfort in the sound of the heater running and the hum of the city coming to life.

The international airport (East Terminal) looks newer than I remember when I arrived two months ago. I wonder if they’ve cleaned it up since the deluge of summer tourists or if my expectations have changed? I walk south to a white flattop storage building, slip a couple changes of clothes, toilet articles and film into my daypack and repack my backpack for its stay in storage. Then I walk to the arrivals lounge and have a cup of coffee, sit where I sat when I first came to Greece, and plot my last week of travel.

I sip the hot brew while looking through the huge glass windows to the runway where the Olympic Airlines planes streak by, watch ferries and fishing boats in the Saronic Gulf. The haze is thick under full cloud cover. Even though it’s light, I’ve yet to see the sun.

While sipping the deep rich coffee, I remember when I first came to Greece, sitting here with the Americans who were to board a cruise boat that morning. I've fully recovered from my bout aboard the ferry and think how fortunate I am to have traveled Greece on my own. I’ve been lonely, but now I’ll be home in less than a week. I have a great sense of accomplishment. I don’t feel like the same person who set foot here two months ago.

But now it's off to the temple of Poseidon. I’ll travel down the coast of Attica, the Apollo coast, to Sounion. I take the shuttle to the west terminal (domestic), stand for forty-five minutes in the cold drizzle only to watch the orange-and-white bus slip past without even slowing. For some reason, I believed if I waited under the orange “Sounion” sign, the bus would stop. Not so in Greece. I’ll have to wait another hour in the gloomy weather. Hermes let me down this time. Sometimes Hermes makes his contrary presence known through such trickery.

I walk to the sparkling Olympic Airways terminal and have a small pizza. I’m travel-worn in my scruffy clothes, and everyone else looks spiffy in their dark suits, sports coats and tight dresses. The building glistens as though it’s been spit shined. I walk back into the cold and wait the remaining part of the hour. This time when I see the bus to Sounion, I wave my arms and step out in front of it.

The Apollo Coast from Athens down to Cape Sounion is replete with small peninsulas jutting out into the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf. Small villages sprawl along the coves. Traffic quickly thins once we’re out of Athens, and villages appear suddenly as the bus rounds turns in the road, their sparse buildings riddled with signs for gyros, souvlaki, ice cream. As with everywhere else in Greece, the abandoned partially-complete construction of apartment complexes, homes and businesses casts a desolate feeling over the landscape.

The bus rounds a corner to the south, the land flattens, becomes chalky clay covered with scrubby bushes, and suddenly there's Sounion, temple columns perched on the edge of a cliff. The tourist center is under renovation. I’m the only visitor to the windswept site and wonder if anyone is manning it at all. I knock at a small building at the entrance, and two young people huddled inside swing open a wood window to accept my money.

I walk up the paved walkway to the high-rising, dramatic headland. 

This is the most desolate site I’ve visited. Menelaus and Helen made an unscheduled stop here on their way back home to Sparta, before they were swept out to sea, when their helmsman died suddenly. Hector tells the story:

... when we came off Sunion Point in Attika,

the ships still running free, Onetor’s son

Phrontis, the steersman of Menelaos’ ship,

fell over with a death grip on the tiller:

some unseen arrow from Apollo hit him.

No man handled a ship better than he did

in a high wind and sea, so Menelaos

put down his longing to get on and landed

to give this man full honor in funeral.[9]  

The temple of Poseidon rests majestically on a cliff at the edge of the sea, the threshold of the Cyclades. Colossal marble columns tower skyward above the coastline, a quiet temple standing high above the sea.

This is a temple to the god who prevented Odysseus and Menelaus from going home. Sounion is Poseidon’s most famous temple, but even here, Athena haunts him. A scattering of stones from her temple are only a few meters from it. But the site is a strange wasteland, barren of the archaeological activity that I’ve see at most other sites. No dig, no stone walls, no cobblestone streets of an ancient city, just hard packed earth two kilometers from a tiny coastal village. Brush on the mountain has been burned off, as has been much of the surrounding countryside.

In antiquity, Sounion was an important landmark for those sailing to and from Attica. The coast here has been settled since the Bronze Age. The temple was built in 444 BC at the same time as the Parthenon on the Akropolis in Athens.

 Actually, more recent research indicates the temple probably originally belonged to Apollo instead of Poseidon. This would make considerable sense, because, according to Homer, Menelaus’ helmsman was killed by an arrow from Apollo as they rounded the Cape on their way back to Ithaca.

I sit on a large slab of marble looking across the Aegean at a small island in the distance with the sun peeking through a cloud. The sun glistens off the rippled water’s surface.

I see two fishing boats, one large and moving slowly through the water, the other small and stationary, floating aimlessly between me and the island. A gusty breeze buffets me from the west. With Phrontis buried, Menelaus took to sea again only to be blown off course:

... Zeus who views the wide world sent a gloom over the ocean, and a howling gale came on with seas increasing, mountainous, parting the ships ...[10]     The winds of Zeus blew Menelaus and Helen to the coast of Crete where they shipwrecked on a reef. They floundered in Egypt, visiting many places along its coast, many now attested to locally even if they are little more than local wishful thinking.

Menelaus and Helen wandered for seven years before once again returning to Sparta. Still, they made it home three years before Odysseus and hosted Odysseus' son Telemachus when he came searching for news of his long lost father.

Mid afternoon, I sit on steps beside the tourist center with the banging and clanging of workmen renovating the building, awaiting the bus to Markopoulo and Chalkis, writing in my journal.

The wind here on Cape Sounion rakes this stark landscape with huge gusts. Suddenly a wave of sand descends on me, all over my journal, down the back of my neck. I rise to see what gust could have cause this but realize it’s the workmen. They’ve swept sand from the rooftop down on the steps where I’m writing. Another wave of sand sends me running from the building. A man stands on the edge of the flat roof, waving his arms at the realization of what he’s done. A great gush of apologetic Greek comes from him. Another man comes to stand beside him laughing.

Finally, the bus to Markopoulo. We travel up the east coast of shadow-shrounded Attica, turn inland through trees and small villages. As I pick out our route on my map, the man sitting next to me, speaks to me in Greek. I believe he’s asked where I’m going. I tell him, “CalkiV.” He doesn’t understand, so I tell him, “Markopoulo, Calkis.” He understands Markopoulo but is confused about Chalkis. I show him my map. “Oci, oci Chalkis,” he says, “Calkida” (Halkitha). I drag out another map which has the names in Greek, and sure enough he’s right. The name of the town is listed as Halkitha. “Markopoulo, Calkida,” I tell him. He looks at me again with bewilderment. “Markopoulo, Aqna, Calkida.” He points to my map indicating I must go to Athens before Halkitha. He shouts something at the bus driver and a great commotion results including several passengers. Everyone has an opinion. Turns out he’s right again. I can’t get a bus in Markopoulo for Halkitha. I must go to Athens first. “Liosson StaqmoV,” he says. This is not good news. He’s telling me I have to go to the bus station on Liosson Street, Terminal B. I hoped to be in Halkitha before nightfall. I might have to spend the night in Athens. Not a pleasant thought.

Just before Markopoulo, the bus stops. Up ahead a flatbed truck, loaded with fresh-cut timber, blocks the road and a crowd has gathered. Another bus, stopped in the opposing lane, blocks my view. We pull forward to pass the timber truck. Suddenly pandemonium breaks out inside the bus. Women behind me start shouting and run to the front, crowd to the windows. The bus moves forward a little more, and I looked over the edge of the road down into a culvert. A woman screams. A man lies on the ground spread out face down shaking, heaving as though he’s crying. I see a car, twisted and upside down in the culvert, smoke billowing from it. Several men stand at the edge of the road looking down at him. The accident is fresh as a butchered animal. Two women stand a few yards from the injured man, but no one goes to him. All are frozen with horror.

And then I see it, what has turned these people to stone. At the side of the road where the car went over the edge, lying on his back on a hill of fresh dirt, is a dead man, face pointed to the sky. His unmoving, badly-damaged body has turned the men to zombies, and given the women inside the bus a raving, screaming madness. It’s a primordial scene, blood-drenched carnage.

My desire to help is overwhelming. I had emergency first aid in the Air Force. I grab my daypack and move into the isle as the bus starts forward again. I shout at the driver to stop. “Stasi!” I yell, but a woman scolds me and motions for me to get back in my seat. This is my worst nightmare. For decades I’ve dreamed of coming upon an automobile accident with bodies littering the landscape and not being able to get to the victims. Finally, it’s happened, as if all those dreams have converged at this one instant in my life.

The bus moves swiftly through villages, zipping along the streets. The driver turns on the radio, and music fills the bus, but it can’t soften the image of the wreck, the young man in Levis lying in the road with no one to help him or cover his dead companion.

Where the bus drops me off in Athens, I have no idea. I fiddle with my map for a while checking street signs, find I’m somewhere north of Syntagma. I walk for half an hour through failing light, construction, traffic, dark drab buildings, still shaken from the accident. The failing sun casts an eerie glow over the dilapidated buildings, and I descend within myself, lost in thought. In the fading light of the streets of Athens, dark shapes mill about like mythical images.

As darkness takes command of the city, I arrive at Terminal B, where I got lost two months ago and ended up out in the country. The terminal is cold, wind-blown and consumed by darkness. I buy my ticket for Halkitha and have only five minutes before the bus leaves. I’ll arrive late, but at least I won’t have to spend the night in Athens.

The dome light casts a dim glow, barely breaking the darkness inside the bus, and outside, a thin sprinkle of sparkling lights spreads along the coast of Euboea and across the black water of the strait of the Euripus. Euboea is a long thin island paralleling the coast of Attica and Boiotia. Between the island and the mainland stretches the blackness of Evoikos Bay to the north and south. Here, in the center of the island, on a small peninsula jutting out from Euboea towards Attica, lies the ancient city of Chalkis. It occupied a commercial and strategic position in Greek history and ranked among well-known cities like Thebes, Megara, Corinth and Argos.[11] Where the two shores pucker to kiss each other, the Euripus Bridge spans the thirty meters of dark water, and on the Euboian side of the bridge lies Halkitha, where the ancient city of Chalkis was located. Water changes directions in this narrow channel as often as fourteen times per day.[12] Just south of this strait on the mainland side of the gulf, lie ruins of the ancient village of Aulis, where the Greek fleet mustered its forces before sailing to Troy, where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter. I don’t yet know how I’ll get to Aulis, whether it’ll be possible to walk or if I’ll have to find some means of transportation. I’ve decided to go to Halkitha and see if I can find a way. Hermes hasn’t let me down yet.

Just to the north, on the Attica side of the Euboian Sea is Locris, the home of Locrian Aias, who raped Cassandra. Athena demanded[13] the Locrians send two sacrificial maidens a year to the temple of Athena at Troy for 1000 years.[14] Trojans came out to meet the maidens as they arrived and tried to stone them. If they escaped death, they served as Trojan slaves within Athena’s temple. Maidens who were killed were not buried but cremated and their ashes thrown into the sea.[15]

The bus descends the hilly countryside, turns east and the city of Halkitha comes into view, a sparkling array of city lights reflecting in the gulf. The bus crosses the rattling, shaking bridge into the hillside city, the windows of tall multistory buildings glowing down upon us, streets filled with the roar of motorbikes, hordes of milling people.