UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Pythian Pilgrimage
By PETERBISHOP (Pembroke Co!lege, Oxford) THE rusty biscuit-tin contained cures and antidotes for dysentery, malaria, snake-bites and every tropical disease we might conceivably meet with in Greece. So we reminded ourselves, as the four of us sat huddled in the back of a seventeen-year-old London taxi, listening to the wind and rain beating on the windows and watching the rhythmic beam of the slowly receding lighthouse at Calais. Pythia we had called the taxi, after the prophetess of ancient Delphi who was installed only in extreme old age and who used to be seized by a quivering frenzy every time she performed her sacred duties. Suddenly Pythia stopped. The driver and the poor wretch who had to sit beside him, in a very small deck-chair on the luggage-platform, burst in from opposite doors. They were getting soaked, they explained; we should have to wait till the weather improved. They were soaked already, the rest of us vigorously pointed out as we squashed together to make room for them, and that being the case, why on earth couldn't they push on, instead of making everyone else damp and miser- able as well ? We argued the point till the rain stopped.
A kindly farmer beyond Abbeville said we could use his barn for the night, and offered to dry our clothes. He was immensely witty about Pythia and we took his photograph the next morning sitting in her. All across France, Pythia was received kindly. The South was outspoken: " La voiture de Napoleon," they yelled merrily at us, and we horrified one old gentleman iri.Nimes by telling him all taxis in London were like this. At least half the Englishmen who overtook us shouted out " Taxi ! Going to Piccadilly ? " obviously delighted at their own fun. Most of the other half did the V sign on their horn. Outside Frejus we met another old taxi and compared notes. " What's your oil-pressure ? " we asked. They said it fluctuated between eight and thirty. " Ours keeps at a steady eighty "; and we drove off smugly towards Genoa and the Piraeus boat.
Things were very different in Greece. If anything, Pythia was more up-to-date than most of the Greek cars, and the Customs were most suspicious of the rich English milords with their enormous Morrees. It required thirty-seven signatures to get Pythia out of their clutches. We had a celebration dinner in Corinth. Originally we had planned to cook all our meals ourselves but by the time we'd cooked a dozen we hit on the excuse of celebration dinners. Something generally happened by dinner-time that required celebrating. Outside the restau- rant Pythia had attracted an enormous crowd. " She is very beautiful," a Corinthian told us. From the opulence of our car and the fact that we spoke English, everybody concluded that we were American. In Tripolis, before we set out across Arcadia to Olympia, we selected the cheapest café we could see to have e drink. " Your country is too rich," the pro- prietress hissed at us, " and my country is too poor. All Americans are too rich." We explained we were English and that, owing to the adverse balance of trade, we also were too poor. She looked at us for a minute: " Ah, English, yes, yes, but English is America too."
We had breakfast the next day in a village on Mount Maenalus, overlooking Tripolis. One of the crowd round Pythia shook his head sadly : " Olympia ? You will find the road is very bad, especially with your grand lux-wagon." It was a polite understatement : we found the roads appalling. As it was, Pythia's differential, like a swollen udder, hung dangerously near the ground, and an average-sized boulder com- bined with an average-sized rut would rip it off. However after ten anxious hours through the brown valleys of Arcadia and along barren mountain-sides, like slag-heaps, we drove into the Alpheus valley, past the cracked marble of the torch-stand of the modern Olympic games. We spent the next morning trying to admire the statue of Hermes; and having filled Pythia's radiator with water from the sacred river, we set off towards the Gulf of Corinth. Between Patras and Aegion workmen were mending the road. The whole of one side was up and at one point there was a trench, several inches deep, stretching right across. The driver applied the brakes just too late : Pythia gave an enormous jolt and the brakes jammed. Behind, there were two immense buses, and a bus and a lorry were approaching in front. It was quite impossible for anything to get past. But the driver of the bus directly behind was a man of action rather than words : he simply revved his engine and bulldozed Pythia briskly twenty yards to the side of the road, beyond the workmen's obstruc- tion. We took off a back wheel, to get at its brake, and dis- covered a broken spring. The bus-driver passed us on his way back about four hours later: we could see him through his window, shaking with laughter. Eventually we got Pythia to a garage, and the spring was mended. And when we reached Athens she was thoroughly overhauled.
We climbed the Acropolis one morning. If you have been learning Greek since the age of ten, it's the sort of moment you come to dream about. However, I was quite unimpressed; I think it was the heat. I went up again, alone, the next day at sunset. It made all the difference.
So, after two thousand years and more, Pythia set out on the last stage of her journey, back home to Delphi. Delphi really did live up to its reputation : the oracle of Apollo; the theatre, still in use; the beautiful, mysterious tholos whose pur- pose still baffles classical scholars; Zeus's holy eagles even, which appeared fortunately on our right, swooping down from Parnas- sus. And there was a stone; just lying there at random among a lot of other stones; aimlessly I read the inscription : it was the pedestal of a statue, I gathered, to Demeter and Persephone. There was a long blurb about the donor and then in small letters at the bottom : " Praxitcles epoiesen "—Praxiteles was the maker.
We had often gaily speculated whether we would ever get Pythia to leave Delphi; but we were less gay when, in fact, she refused to do so. People gathered from all sides like flies round a sore. It turned out eventually to be only the self-starter; but from then on we had laboriously to crank Pythia. It took us two days to reach the Yugoslav border. Just north of Pharsala vultures were feeding on a horse. Idly they flapped a few yards off, watching us till we passed. Not fifty miles inside Yugo- slavia we were stopped at a check-point where the road ran beside a labour-camp. One man was standing only a few yards from the car. He was the typical starved prisoner one is accustomed to know from photographs, but there was a look in his eyes that a photograph fails to reproduce. Our Yugoslav visas were only valid for a week, so we hardly had time to stop anywhere. Even in Dubrovnik we only stopped to buy post- cards. " The natives seem friendly," I wrote on all mine, together with extracts from our various polyglot conversations with them. Money was rapidly running out. We sold Nescafii and china tea at one-hundred-per-cent. profit in a village out- side Split; for the next two days we lived on bread and (repul- sive) goat's cheese. We reached Sibenik on Sunday and went to Mass there : we were the youngest in the church by about forty years. The priest took us to his house afterwards, into a small dining-room. He pointed to a painting on the wall : " Tintoretto," he said, " and Titian. . .and Titian." The room was full of old masters.
It took two full days from the Yugoslav border to the foot of the Simplon. Half way down the other side the battery was smashed by a boulder on the edge of a hairpin bend. That was the end, we thought, as we sat dazed, watching the sulphuric acid drip fizzling down the precipice. But a cheap and compe- tent garage in Brig produced another.
.There was rain and a violent wind all the way through France, and we arrived in Dunkirk damp and cold. With our few remaining francs we went into a café. " Tea, coffee, cog- nac ? " asked the waiter. We replied in unison : " Tea."
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