The Orpheus Descent (23 page)

We trudged up a stony gorge and made camp on the riverbed. The wind roared through the gorge in the night, as if a great wave was massing just around the corner: I had horrible dreams. Next day, we continued up the river, twisting through thickly wooded slopes, always climbing. When I looked up, I despaired at how high we had to climb – and even those summits were only steps on the way to the true peak, hidden behind them.

My head throbbed. By mid-morning, the sun had forced the shadows out of the valley. The stones baked; the air boiled. Now we walked in the stream, to wet our feet and keep them cool. I was parched with thirst, but whenever I knelt to quench it, the icy water sent needles through my skull.

In the afternoon, we left the river and struck out up a flank of the mountain, where fire had burned the trees away. The slope was brutal, steep and utterly featureless. We walked, hour after hour without water, kicking up plumes of ash until our legs turned black.

Halfway up, I started to shiver uncontrollably as if I had a fever. Despite the sun, the world seemed dark to my eyes. As the dust blew by, I imagined I saw Socrates walking beside me. Even on that mountainside he moved with graceful, effortless strides.

‘I wish you were really here,’ I told him.

I couldn’t see his face, but I think he smiled. ‘I’d have stuck with the city. Trees and pretty views are all very well, but they don’t teach you much.’

‘Do you think I’ll find Agathon if I get to Rhegion?’

‘Do you trust Timaeus?’

‘Not really,’ I admitted.

‘You knew that when you set out.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Starting the journey is what matters.’

‘I know that. I’ve heard the
Odyssey
.’

‘You just have to keep going. However steep the climb.’

‘It’s hard when you can’t see the top of the mountain.’

‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why I always stayed at the bottom.’

‘Should I turn back?’

He didn’t answer. I tried to read his face, but the dust hid it.

‘It’s a long, weary road before you reach the truth,’ he said at last.

‘Is there a shorter way?’

‘I suppose not. Though you might manage better if you stick to the task at hand.’

Somehow, I knew he was talking about Diotima.

‘She knew where Agathon had gone,’ I pointed out.

‘Is that
all
you wanted from her?’

‘I know I should have better self-control.’

‘Not at all. Every philosopher should fall in love, or he wouldn’t know his subject.’

‘Loving wisdom isn’t quite the same thing.’

‘But we need the other kind too. The sticky, sweaty, human kind. It opens our eyes.’

‘To what?’

‘Beauty. And that’s the first step into a much wider world.’

‘What world?’

He shook his head. ‘You know what I told them. How did you put it in the dialogue?’

‘
If I have any wisdom, it’s that I don’t claim to know what I don’t.
’ It felt absurd to be quoting me quoting him. The incongruity amused him.

‘I showed people they didn’t know anything – and they didn’t thank me for it. You want to show them
what
they don’t know, and that’s much harder.’

‘They probably won’t thank me, either.’

‘You’ll find what you’re looking for,’ Socrates said. And even though he wasn’t there, it lifted my spirits.

All the while we’d been talking, I’d been climbing. It was late in the day, but at last we were getting somewhere. The first I noticed was the air growing cooler. Even without looking back, I could tell we’d reached a high place by the silence around me. The light had softened. For a few minutes, the dreary mountainside became a magical place.

We crested a ridge and the world opened out to the horizon. The sun had begun to set: the sky was a crimson canvas stretched from the earth to the heavens, with a low line of purple cloud pencilled across. And in its centre, a crown.

At first I thought it was just another cloud. But the lines were too clear, the shape too exact. I looked closer, and realised it was the top of a mountain. In the evening light, it seemed to float in mid-air.

‘Etna,’ said my guide.

There are lots of stories about Etna. Some I knew then; others, I learned later. That it’s the home of Hephaestus, the gods’ craftsman. That an ancient Titan, the hundred-headed Typhos, lies in Tartarus pinned down by the mountain, causing its eruptions as he writhes under its weight. That Empedocles the philosopher hurled himself into its crater in hopes of becoming a god, leaving behind only a single bronze sandal. That it’s the gateway to Hell.

Lines from Pindar I learned at school came back to me:

There were no fountains of fire now, just a thin wisp of smoke rising off the summit. In a way, I was disappointed.

‘We’d better get down,’ said the guide. ‘You freeze up here at night.’

Etna faded into the twilight as we began our descent. In the cool evening, my head had stopped throbbing. The awe of seeing Etna seemed to have cleaned something out of me.

We reached a grove of oaks and chestnuts, and called a halt. The others unloaded the donkeys and turned them out to pasture on the mountain grass; someone made a fire. I took a bucket and went to find water. The sun had vanished, but the night didn’t frighten me. Not far off, I could hear the chatter of a stream. I followed the sound to the source and crouched to fill the bucket, scooping up handfuls to wash the ash off my face.

Stars were coming out. I sat back on the rocks and stared up at them. The world looks different at night. By moonlight or starlight, we see it dimly or not at all – even though we’re looking at the same things we’d see clearly in daylight. The world hasn’t changed. Our eyes are the same. It’s just the lack of light.

What if there was a different sort of sun? A sun that didn’t illuminate the world with light, but with reason? Are there things that we’d see differently, things we grasp dimly or not at all at the moment? What
would
we see?

My breath quickened. I was groping towards something in the darkness – I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it was important. Something I’d been searching for all my life.

Heraclitus says we can’t know the world because it’s in constant motion. The sophists say we can’t know it because we only know what our senses tell us – and they’re so inadequate they tell us different things at different times of day.

Ten feet away from where I’m sitting, there’s an oak tree split by lightning. I can’t see it at the moment, but I know it’s there: I remember it from when I was coming down the hill. Even if my eyes don’t see it, my mind does. It knows.

If there’s a sun that could rise on the mind, how much more would we perceive instead of the twilight shadows of this world we live in?

And if the things we apprehend in this world are just shadows, what are they shadows
of
?

I heard shouts from back at the campsite. The others must have been getting impatient. Reluctantly, I scrambled to my feet, lifted the bucket and carefully retraced my steps back towards the fire that flickered between the trees.

I stepped into the glade. The fire had taken well: it leaped into the night, throwing long shadows across the earth. Figures of men and animals, some talking, others silent. If I’d have bothered to count, I might have noticed there were more than when I’d left.

There must have been a struggle. One of my companions lay on the ground, bleeding; the others had been herded against the trees. A dozen soldiers in bronze armour and red tunics guarded them. I’d been so busy dreaming of other worlds I hadn’t paid attention to what was happening right behind me.

I told you so
, Euphemus said.

I didn’t try to run. I wouldn’t have got ten paces.

They bound me, gagged me, and marched me off into the darkness.

Don’t you get it? They were all in this together. All college friends, all in each other’s pockets.

He stood in the street outside Paddington, in the maze of money shops, newsagents and dry cleaners. He needed a drink. He found a pub and sank a pint of beer without tasting it. He needed something stronger. He went back to the bar and got two vodka tonics.

Lily went to Athens to see Adam
. That was why she didn’t tell him. They came back together, and Adam fired Sandi because she objected to their plan to steal the tablet. Then Lily stole the tablet and disappeared.

He told himself he didn’t believe it.

Really?
For four days he’d insisted that Lily was the victim. He’d clung to the certainty, clear and hard as glass, ignoring the cracks that were beginning to spread. But there were only so many hits it could take before it shattered.

He had to speak to Adam, but the last number he had for Adam was in Oxford. He tried Charis, but her phone was off – he remembered she’d said she was going out.

The Eikasia Foundation website didn’t give much away, but it did provide a phone number in Athens. Jonah rang it, and got an answering machine babbling in Greek. He checked the time. It was seven o’clock, nine in Athens. He guessed it was telling him the office was shut.

He couldn’t call Richard. There was only one other person he could think of. He only had an office number, but that didn’t matter because he was usually there. At this time of night, the secretaries had gone home and he answered the phone himself.

‘Julian?’

‘Jonah.’ A rich voice, booming through the little speaker. ‘How the hell are you?’

‘I’ve been better.’

‘Any joy with Lily?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sure she’ll turn up.’

From anyone else, it would have sounded like a platitude. When Julian said it, you believed he really meant it. His world was a comfortable, well-upholstered place, where people behaved properly and bad things only happened on the pages of the
Telegraph
.

‘I need to speak to Adam. Do you have a number for him?’

A
you’d-be-lucky
sort of laugh. ‘Somewhere.’ A pause. ‘Not in my phone. Might have it in an e-mail. God knows the last time I used it. Not really one for chitchat, is our Adam.’

‘If you can find it, I could really use it. I think he might know something about Lily.’

‘Not a problem.’ Silence, punctuated by clicks as Julian did something with his computer. ‘Listen, I’m actually heading out your way this evening. Shall I pop by? You sound as if you need a shoulder to cry on – or a pint to cry into, at any rate.’

Of all the people he knew, Julian was one of the last he could imagine opening his heart to. But the alcohol was dissolving all the certainties he’d clung to, leaving a desolate void inside. He’d never been so lonely.

He named a pub in Wandsworth and agreed to meet in an hour.

Some people said Oxford was a city of dreams. For Jonah, it was a slow, fantastical nightmare.

His mother cried when he told her he was going. His friends back home told him it would be full of southern wankers. The band almost split up. He went anyway – because he wanted to be with Lily, and because he was stubborn. After two months, trying to squeeze in moments with Lily between her lectures and his shifts behind the bar at The Bear, he was almost ready to admit they’d been right. In Greece it had seemed so natural. In Oxford, nothing was easy. The students acted as if they knew a secret you didn’t; they hurried wherever they went with hidden purpose, and spoke a strange language riddled with medievalisms like ‘Michaelmas’ and ‘subfusc’ and ‘quads’. Older, harder, uninterested in the schools where they’d been or the jobs where they’d go, he didn’t belong in their universe, however much Lily tried to make him fit.

By December, he knew that if he went home for Christmas, he wouldn’t come back.

Lily had other friends at Oxford, but it was the ones who’d been in Greece he saw most often. Unexpectedly, it was Adam he got closest to. He couldn’t say he liked him, and never got anything like warmth or friendliness in return. But there was something inside each of them, an intensity of purpose, that they responded to in each other.

‘We’re both following our muses,’ was how Adam put it, one time when Charis asked. And Jonah thought he was right.

One day in December, Adam came to Jonah’s room with a large shopping bag. Jonah sat on the one chair and drank a beer; Adam perched on the bed with a glass of water.

‘What’s in the bag?’

Adam ignored the question. ‘Do you know what a symposium is?’

‘Some kind of party?’

‘In ancient Greece, it was a drinking party. Plato and Xenophon both wrote famous descriptions of them. Cultured men would get together in their homes and discuss the great questions of philosophy.’

‘Sounds like a hoot.’

‘I’m going to have one. On Thursday.’ He pushed down the sides of the bag. Inside stood a strange instrument: a rounded wooden bowl that tapered up to two arms, with seven strings stretched across the opening.

‘Do you know what this is?’

‘A sort of mandolin?’ Jonah guessed.

‘It’s an ancient Greek lyre.’

‘Did you dig it up under the college lawn?’

‘It’s a replica. I borrowed it from the Classics faculty.’

He passed it across. Jonah felt the weight of it, the sturdy construction, and guessed it had been built as a science project rather than an instrument. But when he plucked the first string, the note sounded clear and in tune. Less resonant than a guitar, less depth than a harp, it had a flat, cold quality.

‘Can you play it?’

Jonah rummaged in his guitar case for a plectrum. He picked a few of the strings, then strummed them together, damping the notes with his fingers. Even cradled against his chest, the music sounded strangely removed.