halfway up the hill, intrigued by the sight ahead of her. Calli stood in the shade of the rocks and looked up. If not for their size they could be a pile of pebbles balanced one on top of the other, but these ancient boulders rose to a height of some twenty feet. No one could have arranged them one above the other without the aid of modern technology. As she snapped away, she fancied that the hand of a giant had playfully piled them up in a childish game.
They arrived back at the village in the early afternoon, in good time for a siesta before the evening celebrations on the beach. They had stopped for lunch at a roadside taverna, Maya relieved to see Calli’s mood restored, and feasted as usual on whatever had been cooked that day. They drank Maya’s preferred infusion of ice-cold herbal mountain tea whose benefits she was always praising.
‘Mint is an antioxidant, rosemary stimulates the immune system, dandelion cleans the liver . . . I could go on and on,’ she laughed, ‘but no one else seems to drink it cold here,’ she told Calli as the old man serving them pulled a face when Maya asked for iced tea.
‘We don’t keep cold tea,’ he told her, ‘we have to boil the water to make it.’
‘By the time you bring us the meal, the tea will have cooled down . . . Put some ice cubes in it and a little honey, that will do it!’ She gave the old man a broad smile. ‘Just wait and see,’ she turned to Calli, ‘they will be so slow in bringing us the food, the tea will be cold whether I wanted it so or not!’
Like everything else on the island, nothing was done in a hurry, but when the food eventually arrived it was well worth the wait. A Greek salad of home-grown vegetables and feta cheese, black olives and chunks of sourdough village bread were the first dishes to arrive on the table. Kyria Elpiniki, the owner and cook, was a little slow at preparing the food today, the old man told them, so they would have to be patient. It wasn’t difficult, and above all it was expected. The new friends were content to sit in the gentle breeze, shaded by the ubiquitous green canopy of a vine, and snack on whatever they were given.
‘There is no rush,’ Maya told Calli, ‘this is Ikaria. We have all the time in the world.’
Next came a large bowl of chickpeas cooked in a tomato sauce, followed by a plate of horta – field greens – in olive oil and lemon dressing. By then Maya’s sage tea had arrived, chilled and fragrant. They ate at a leisurely pace, drank and chatted for as long as it took and by the end of their meal the blues and sadness Calli had felt earlier had totally lifted. For the second time since arriving on the island, she was infused with a sense of hope for what might be ahead of her.
When Calli awoke from her siesta the preparations for the lunar eclipse celebrations on the beach had already begun. She felt refreshed even though it had taken a while for her to fall asleep, her head whirling with the dazzling and confusing events of the day. Maya was indeed a strange woman; Calli wanted to reject her reasoning and her words which echoed confusingly in her ears, but she found she could not. Eventually she fell asleep and dreamed of Icarus and angel wings.
She stood on her hotel balcony and watched the stream of people carrying food, drink and preparations down to the shore. She dressed quickly, remembering to wear her bikini for a moonlit swim under her shorts and T-shirt, and hurried to join the others. She found Christian and Sylvie, the telescope already in place, filling a cool-box with drinks and snacks.
‘What can I contribute?’ Calli asked, aware that she had been a guest since she arrived.
‘Nothing,’ Sylvie told her, ‘it’s all in hand, just enjoy yourself.’
‘It’s going to be a long night,’ added Christian, ‘so we are making sure we have everything we need.’
‘Why? How long will the whole thing last?’ she enquired, curious to see people arriving on the beach with yet more baskets of food, drink, and blankets to lie back on, in order to gaze at the night sky. She had assumed that this evening’s event would last two or three hours