Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

After lunch, worn out by the morning’s exertions, we would lie in the sun on big blue mats at the bow of the boat, and usually we would sail on to yet another wonder. Later we would have tea and biscuits and halvah and then disembark for the day’s site. Once it was a Greek theater built into the hillside, and once it was an eerie necropolis of the ancient Lycians, where the wealthy had had themselves placed in rock tombs that would last forever. We examined the inscriptions in the lost language of Lycia, and Andrew Hobson told us about modern efforts to break the code. Tom Johnson puzzled out the Greek epitaphs and translated them for us as we climbed with him to hear what funny things had happened on the way to a polis here, an acropolis there. Near Demre, Tom showed us where Gelasius the nut seller had carved his name into a theater wall, to claim a prime position at the top of the stairs in the main vomitory. Tom led us to the altar in Arykanda where the ancients worshipped Helios in the fifth century BC; and he sat with us beside the tomb of Archemdemos, son of Ermapios, in Üçağız.

Nothing was behind wire. Once or twice we had to pay an entrance fee at a famous site, but mostly the ruins we visited were empty, with wild thyme and clover growing between the stones. As we scrambled around, we felt as if we were the first travelers in these virgin realms of gold. It was the ancient world as it was discovered by the Romantics, and not the Disneyland museology of Pompeii or the scrubbed self-importance of tourist-trodden Delphi. Like the Victorians Sir Charles Fellows and Captain Spratt, we came upon the magnificent Roman theater at Myra and saw the church of St. Nicholas and the spectacular integrity of Arykanda, where Alexander the Great conquered and where Hadrian dallied. At the stadium there, a shepherd stumbled through with his flock; two old women in head scarves moved on to tilled fields below; and we were the only other human beings. Each place we saw was magnificent in its decay, and we felt how the mighty must once have looked on all this and despaired. We regarded it more humbly, carrying on with our watercolors but leaving no further marks on so rich a palimpsest.

The hills we painted were everywhere purple with blossom, and the red-roofed village houses were weighted with bougainvillea. No one had ever been more free from gray than we were as we sat here or there, recording our impressions of the crenellated rocks, while Susannah looked over our shoulders. “I want to see what the form of that pediment makes you feel,” said Susannah. “Think from the edges in.” Our work was quick, sketchy, expressive.

Then we would leave, perhaps to see another tomb with a view; or perhaps if we were near a village, we would sit in a bar and drink aniseed-perfumed raki. We might buy kilims and postcards and old Armenian silver belts, or we might run into some local who was a friend of Tom’s or of a crew member’s and climb with him into hidden streets where women with a few gold teeth were doing laundry and cooking, and where men, fat with success, sat smoking and playing backgammon. “A man without a belly,” our captain, Hasan, told us, “is like a house without a balcony.” Sometimes the chaps in our party went to see the village barber, who would shave us with a straight razor, massage our faces and shoulders, and comb and oil our hair. Consuming plates of Turkish delight back on the boat, we balconied ourselves like some sultan’s palace, then went swimming in the lingering twilight, our paintings strewn about the deck.

Usually around nine, we sat outside again. The sun would at last be setting, and Ibrahim would bring us more wonders from the kitchen below: roasted meats and spiced chicken and stuffed eggplant. When the moon was up, we played charades or told stories, and we drank more raki, and talked more about art or lapsed into epigrams and aphorisms, everyone’s wits sharpened by our intense pleasure. On the night of the full moon, we turned off all the electricity; the crew put orange peel on the candles to scent the air, and Andrew Hobson picked up The Iliad and read us the narration of Hera’s seduction of Zeus. Then we went for a midnight swim, splashing one another with luminescent water. Even the crew joined in the fun: the captain did a belly dance that put us all to shame.

“Listen,” someone said in the small hours. “You can hear the bells the goats are wearing. They’re awake, too.”

We were all silent for a moment.

“That’s the ice jingling in Jasper’s glass,” someone else said.

So it was, that time. But in the light of the moon we did see the goats, wild goats without bells, climbing up and down the hills. That night, most of us slept side by side on the foredeck, waking up suddenly when rosy-fingered dawn touched us and turned the stones all around an unsaturated pink. We drifted back in and then out of sleep until Ibrahim brought our coffee.