We go into parish churches when we find them open. St. Kenelm in Minster Lovell may be our favorite. Minster Lovell's long street of thatched houses could win any "tidy" award. "Too much," Ed says. "d.a.m.n, can you believe yet another idyllic hamlet?" A fantastic ruined manor house's partial walls stand behind St. Kenelm. A remaining roof section looks precipitous. Two small girls in sundresses climb among the foundation rocks while their mother reads on a picnic blanket in the overgrown gra.s.s. I recognize the cover of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. A small river, the Windrush, now with new ducks and two white swans, must have been a pleasure to those who lived in the house in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A plaque says the house was dismantled in 1747. The stone walls remain over two and a half centuries later.

Inside the church Ed sees a list of vicars since 1184. A shaft of morning light strikes the tomb of a praying knight, turning the cold alabaster waxy and gleaming. Each of the box pews has six needlepoint cushions for kneeling. Some have names and dates worked into the patterns. In winter the worshipers must need them on the stone floors. Near the altar I run my fingers over the carving in a wooden chair. On the back, The same yesterday, and down the arms, Jesus Christ, today and tomorrow. How perfect for this hallowed place where the vicars go back to 1184 and the precipitous roof of the manor house peaks as it did yesterday, and the day before and before and before.

In nearby Burford, another bustling market town, we have an excellent dinner with an Australian Shiraz. Pubs, many mourn, are disappearing. But good numbers of them are converting to restaurants, like this one, with an emphasis on local products and traditional fare reinterpreted without the instant-cardiac-arrest fat factor. These are bistro or trattoria equivalents-homey atmosphere and honest food. There's nothing wrong at all with good pub food, but often you find microwaved, processed bangers, whipped potatoes from a box, and scary salads. We've seen several signs announcing PUB GRUB. We have come to know what that indicates. But the pub tradition is a hub of community. And the low-ceilinged, dark-wood atmosphere makes you feel that you've paused in a horse-drawn coach and alighted for a rest. Even though I don't often drink beer, I felt the impulse to order the amber foamy ales that Ed did. The pub/restaurant in Burford kept its cozy bar area but only as a place to wait for a table and have a drink. The local mates no longer gather there for a pint. Burford in the dark was deserted except for the warmly lighted Copper Kettle tearoom. I thought of Christmas Eve, of buying pastry and bells and wrapping paper and socks, then stopping for soup there. The Cotswolds for the holidays-a perfect place.

Our last three gardens all have the highly personal touch. I am glad to get to see the garden of Rosemary Verey. Since her death Barnsley has been sold, fated to become an inn. Already the tennis court is seedy. The front yard, bordering a rather busy road, presents nothing special, but the back is eccentrically off-kilter and appealing. I sense the person who wanted the informality of a rope swing and a small wooden summerhouse on one side of the garden and a columned pavilion and pond on the other. Against the back wall, splayed bamboo trellises fan out for roses to climb. The garden is not large, but she has managed to squeeze in a small allee.

Her kitchen garden-such fun. Boxwood outlines beds, as in knot gardens, but she filled each bed with a taggy mix of vegetables and flowers. Simple flowers such as mallow, sweetpea, larkspur, and cosmos go wild with onions or artichokes or corn. Tangles of parsley, a scarecrow with a bird on top of his head, four-foot-tall gone-to-seed lettuces, mint-a little paradiso. We laugh when Ed points to a bed of roses, garlic, and onions. What a sure hand shaped this potager. As at Rousham, I like the mind I see behind the composition. What pleasure it must have given her.

In the village of Barnsley we find one of those pubs gone gourmet. No bubble and squeak here. Ed orders seared pigeon breast with grilled pineapple, and I have artichoke, asparagus, and pea salad. I suddenly order a Wadsworth, the first whole beer of my life. Ed has a Hook Norton Bitter, and I like his, too.

Today we return to the schoolhouse to read, write, and sip one of the lightly sparkling organic Belvoir Presse juices we're loving here. Nonalcoholic and not too sweet, they occupy the heretofore empty s.p.a.ce between a soda and a gla.s.s of wine. The ginger and lime and the lime and lemongra.s.s are perfect for enjoying the late sun in the garden. The tame northern sun feels like a balm.

English p.r.o.nunciations often surprise, beginning with Worcestershire, which was fully p.r.o.nounced in Georgia, where we used the sauce over steak, in oyster stew, and lord knows where else. Wooster! My great-great-grandparents' town of Loughborough is p.r.o.nounced Luftsborough. At the winsome garden and house of Snowshill Manor, the ticket taker p.r.o.nounces the name snozzle. I rather like snozzle. Sounds like the activity of garden voles or moles; they snozzle under the plants. We adore this cla.s.sic cottage garden with foxgloves, ferns, lavender. Ed remarks that Snowshill is totally organic. Many gardens must remain only fantasies, but this two-acre plot, with a few years of diligence, seems within reach for a good gardener. Like an added-on farm, the house has the same haphazard charm as the garden. Did the original owner, Charles Wade, nail a line of horseshoes over a door? I read that he didn't sleep in the house but instead slept in what looks like a shed. The house had to be given over to his various collections. Ah, a proper eccentric. He thought only apricot, creamy yellow, blue, and mauve looked best against stone walls. Orange was banned from his garden. Boxwood b.a.l.l.s grow in wine barrels. The garden descends a hill, which always interests me, pa.s.sing stone steps and little ponds and garden houses and hollow places in walls for birds to nest. Again the room concept, as if the house simply opened to other rooms furnished by arranging nature. And beyond the garden, the vegetable garden. Mr. McGregor, where are you? The hills beckon. Requisite sheep roam about, ignoring all of us trooping up and down the hill.

Kelmscott, the summer home of William Morris, has quite a modest garden, with a three-hole privy in the back-more than you want to know about the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. The gift shop is quite an ambitious enterprise, selling needlepoint, postcards, tea cozies, dish towels, wrapping paper, and the like, all in Morris's designs. Morris took his inspiration from the past, and to me, his stylized medieval patterns and muted colors become claustrophobic if taken in these large doses. We flee the gift shop and enter the garden, in search of the foliage, strawberries, rabbits, and flowers that inspired him.

Jane Burden, Morris's wife, had been the model for the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti-the pin-up girl for the pre-Raphaelites-when Morris met her. Rossetti painted her more than a hundred times. Morris fell for her even though he was from the upper cla.s.s and she was the daughter of a stable groom. Rossetti and Morris leased Kelmscott House together, and despite the presence of William and Jane's two daughters, Jane and Rossetti conducted a flagrant love affair. Morris put up with their liaison for years, running off to Iceland when the heat became too much. Finally Jane tired of Rossetti. The rooms give no indication of extreme natures, but hers must have been. She is the beauty of the Arts and Crafts era. When Henry James met her, he found her mysterious, "a wonder," "a figure cut out of a missal," "a tall lean woman in a dress of some dead purple stuff . . . a thin pale face, a pair of strange, sad, deep, dark, Swinburnian eyes, and with great thick black oblique brows." Those five adjectives for her eyes reveal how hard James had to work to approach a description. As La Belle Iseult, she survives as Morris's only painting. When he died, the doctor said the cause was "being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men." But maybe life with Jane wore him out.

Morris was a person who lived on many creative levels at once, from typography to roses to gutters to textiles to stained gla.s.s. George Bernard Shaw's eloquent tribute took only two sentences: "You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his. And so, until then, let us rejoice in him."

As we walk around and look at the rooms, we think a vicar and his family could have lived here. Odd to think of a menage a trois in this staid house and village. The gossip must have warmed the whole village on winter nights. Odd to think, too, of the fermenting artistic fervor, with influence on Europe, North America, and the far antipodes.

Ed notices the odd wooden gutters that jut way out from the house and pour into the yard. A stone walk lined with rose topiaries leads to the door, as it does in thousands of gardens where no Jane ever juggled two men. William and Jane must have forged a truce because they're sleeping soundly together on the edge of the churchyard.

On the last night in England, I order bangers and mash at the pub in Stow-on-the-Wold. I walk out feeling as though I'd swallowed a handful of lead sinkers. "I did it! It was great and greasy. A million grams of fat." We take a last walk around the shut village. No sheep are expected at market. Wine store, cheese store, drugstore, antique shops, bookstore, and the place with hats Queen Elizabeth might wear-all asleep, deeply asleep.

Washed by

Time's Waters

Islands

of Greece

At sea, the first surprise: the horizon becomes a circle. From land, the horizon seems ruler-drawn between ocean and sky. As I walk from stern to bow and back, thinking of intrepid explorers who feared the world was flat and sailed anyway, I watch the steady brushstroke of the horizon line, a curving cobalt mark overstruck with purple. Clearly, we could drop over that edge, our tiny ship falling through s.p.a.ce forever. But we are sailing in the center of a blown-gla.s.s bowl filled to the brim.

Just yesterday the ship slipped out of the lagoon into the Adriatic. Already I see that something happens to time because I feel that we set sail a full moon ago and must be over to the next lat.i.tude.

"Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu," Lawrence Durrell writes, "the blue really begins." A few hours out of Venice the churning green-gray Adriatic shifted to intense blue and the water smoothed. I could walk or roll across this water. Our prow slicing the swells trailed scrolls of white marble. Easy to see how, when Saint Augustine touched something smooth, he began to think of music and G.o.d. I saw as far as I could see shimmering blue, out to that finite line navigators through the centuries aimed toward and beyond.

Because we're in high summer, friends in Cortona were astonished that we planned to travel in this direction. "You're going to Greece? Greece is finished," my friend Alain announced at dinner, his perfect French a.s.surance combined with the throat-cutting gesture that years of living in Italy have made natural to his speech.

"Finished?" I said. "That can't be; I've never been."

"And summer-it is impossible," he continues. "Heat and mobs, mobs and heat." He plans to spend the summer at his stone house in the serene hills above Cortona. "Swarms," he emphasized.

This I knew, but I had been invited to speak on a cruise ship, and of all their trips, only the blue Aegean pulled me. To sail out of La Serenissima! An old dream, to ply these waters: Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Santorini, Piraeus, Nafplio, Volos, then over to the other side of the Aegean-Bodrum, Kusadasi, up to the fabled Bosporus. Irresistible-to disembark in Istanbul!

At first I refused the offer. My mother used to take cruises in the Carribean. I remember her talking about the constant eating-I'm easily tempted-and duplicate bridge games on the deck, with rum drinks arriving between every rubber. There was one incident in Barbados when her group was pelted with rotten oranges by the locals. Fortunately the stains came out of my mother's pink linen dress.

But recently two friends took a Mediterranean cruise and came home raving about it. As I looked through their photographs of yellow and purple fish in the limpid waters of the Sinai, the moon-white cubical houses of Mykonos at sunset, and Peter perched on a camel, I started to dream of dropping anchor off Corfu's coast, sailing into the Rhodes harbor where the Colossus once stood, rocking to sleep in the ancient waters where Jason sailed, and of seaside tavernas with silhouettes of Knights Templar castles in the distance.

Finally I said yes because I have been haunted forever by the fateful pentameter lines: And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium, from W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." When I think of the poem, the images of saffron-colored sails at sunrise and the reflection of a sleek white sailboat skim across the waves of my mind. All of Western history criss-crossed this sea. I too want to follow in the troughs of the Argonauts' wake.

With such lofty aspirations, I did not expect to make my mythic voyage on a ship that is twin to an American convention hotel. This giant floating tub is nautical on its decks, which are polished and furnished with proper teak chairs with proper marine-blue cushions. Inside, crystal chandeliers remain steady, miles of floral teal carpet cushion every step, and guests lounge on curved upholstered sofas designed to absorb sloshed drinks without stains. We are eight hundred on board, which seems like a floating town but is actually a midsize cruise ship.

In our cabin I can also feel that we are on a ship. Through our blurry porthole we see the water not far below. I hear odd sluicing sounds running under our beds. Those old navigators with their s.e.xtants, hourgla.s.ses, astrolabes, and gimbaled barometers surely slept in more comfortable quarters. We do have a little marble bath with a tub. The water flows clearly for a minute, then turns the hue of tea. Hepat.i.tis? Staph infection? In the tiny room, about twice the size of my closet in California, each bed is narrow as a coffin. When Ed stands, the ceiling almost grazes the top of his head, and when he lies down, his feet hit the desk. My looming Gulliver. Last night he woke from a nightmare that the room was filling with water. Doesn't matter, we tell each other; we'll be on deck most of the time.

We arrived in Venice with more luggage than we've ever hauled on a trip. Having been on month-long book tours with carry-on luggage, I am the master of light packing, but because the cruise has five formal events, we have brought a tuxedo (sleeves stuffed with tissue) with its starched shirts, my evening bags, dresses, and strappy high heels. All the paraphernalia required a bag of its own. I broke my own rules and also brought a bathrobe and too many linens that wrinkle. And we are a travelling library-guides, histories, and books of poetry stuffed in all the luggage pockets, lining the bottoms of bags and weighing down carry-ons. Ed, ever optimistic that he will have time to study Italian verbs, packed workbooks and texts, as well as the laptop, voice recorder, and earphones. Hannibal over the Alps-we almost sank the water taxi. "The word portage comes to mind," Ed said, as the driver lowered a bag into the boat in a controlled fall. He groaned and clutched his shoulder. Disembarking at the fondamenta, we fortunately had help hoisting the four bags to the hotel.

Looking for the camera, Ed rummaged to the bottom of one bag and said, "Do you know you have brought twelve pairs of shoes." We stashed three bags in the closet and walked out into Venice. We love this city. It is the walking city. The Basilica di San Marco could have been transported on a flying carpet from Constantinople/Byzantium and deposited in front of the million pigeons waiting for biscotti crumbs. The five domes and the church's rhythmic exterior look strangely squat, with that feeling of low horizontal spread that in mosques invites Muslims to fall to the floor in prayer. With the construction of this holy building beginning in 829, Venice became the first moment of the East. The four bronze horses, cut apart for the journey to Venice then reconnected, could rear and fly home to Constantinople. Many of the church's ornaments and crown jewels are spoils brought home to glorify the city by the Republic of Venice's aggressive conquerors of the Mediterranean. A glance, however, into the San Marco area on a steamy August day made us determined to stay away from the centro. Even in summer, that's easy. We visited the Rialto market for the buckets of breathing silver eels, the virtuoso artichoke peelers-thirty seconds and voila! the clean heart-and the live spider crabs, and to inhale the briny sea smell from rainbow arrays of spiny, rocky, scaly fish and mollusks on ice.

I thought of all the shops for heavenly silks and cut velvet, the luxurious velour robes and pillows, and the artisan shops with vellum-bound books of paper that looks like communion wafers. With our bulging suitcases in mind, I didn't even mention those directions.

We walked to the Basilica di San Pietro, Venice's cathedral before San Marco landed from the skies. St. Peter's bell tower leans slightly, and the grounds are weedy. No one was there except a monk nodding in a chair tipped back against the outside wall. The throne chair inside, fit for Saint Peter, was made from a Muslim funeral stele and is inscribed with lines from the Koran. Look under anything religious in Italy, and you find the previous civilization's religious stones. The holy hot spots remain. Spoglia, a word I like, an object incorporated into a new use. The site of this St. Peter's was originally occupied by a shrine to Bacchus. There, we're already linking to our voyage, to myth, and to the desert fathers.

We walked, just walked, anywhere but the infested San Marco area. The a.r.s.enal and San Pietro in the Castello area were curiously deserted. Families disembarked from serviceable blue or red boats, holding their bathing suits and baskets and shuffling in beach shoes, which they wore from a day at the Lido. Everyone dropped away except for a man walking his dog. Late in the afternoon we stopped for a Tintoretto-champagne and pomegranate juice-at a bar and watched a miniature crane mounted on a flat boat dig silt from a small ca.n.a.l. Barriers on two ends blocked the area where the crane worked, and the water had been pumped out. How difficult and specialized, the work of keeping Venice afloat.

At dinnertime we chose a restaurant new to us, Acquapazza, crazy water, what a good name for a restaurant in Venice. The Santo Stefano area is one of my favorite parts of Venice. After zucchini gnocchi and a platter of fried sh.e.l.lfish, we were served a tiny gla.s.s of basilicocello, like limoncello only made with basil leaves and steeped for two months before being poured into icy, icy gla.s.ses. Venice always lures us to walk even late at night, especially a night with a full August moon, but we would board the ship early tomorrow and so went back to our hotel, where we leaned out of the window before we sank into bed, looking at the trillion ribboned reflections of moonlight in the ca.n.a.l. A window opened in an adjacent house, and a man lifted a small dog out onto the tile rooftop. The dog pattered a few feet away. He squatted, peering down into the Grand Ca.n.a.l, while his quivering backside deposited merde onto the roof.

Sailing out of Venice would excite the heart of a robot. The watery city of sublime Tiepolo-to-Turner colors and shapes slid away like a good dream upon waking, as the ship met the open sea. Venice, I realized, is a fabulous idea. Like nowhere else in the world, it suggests human imagination-how the irrational is sometimes the best idea. Centuries of people have lived their lives on these unlikely earth platforms in the tides. From birth they were saturated with beauty, their first patterning was beauty, their last breath drawn with beauty.

What was known, known well and loved, receded, and what was unknown and alluring beckoned. We left the stern and moved up to the bow, listening to the chuff-chuff of waves against the hull as the ship picked up speed.

At sea, at first light, I look out the porthole and see that we are in the craggy shadow of what must be Albania. And what a grim historical shadow the hills cast. The water seems darker, the coast formidable, but breakfast in the dining room throws me from any dour reflections to a comfortable midwestern motel-waffles, pancakes, French toast. We resolve immediately not to fall into the severe temptation of two-thousand-calorie breakfasts. "Fruit," I tell our Italian waiter. "Every day, fruit, please, coffee, perhaps a little cheese and bread." In the vast dining room we are a.s.signed to a table for two and are relieved. What if you had two weeks of meals with great bores? But we wonder-what if we were at a table of eight potential lifelong friends? Ed signs up for a ma.s.sage, and I head for the deck chairs with my notebook and several books. In the afternoon we have a swim, lounging on deck while unidentified coasts and islands swim by us. We are moving over ancient wrecks that lie far below, far below the nets of fishermen, a mile, two miles deep, the golden sand bottom littered with barnacled amphorae, anchors, a cooking pot. We're plowing in the watery furrows of old trade routes. Silks, wines, and spices transported to Venice for the pleasure of doges and merchants and courtesans. I begin The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes, written three centuries before Christ, in the time of the Ptolemies, the introduction tells me. It has stood on my bookshelf for a decade, unread. Now I am interested in Jason and the Argonauts, brave as astronauts in our time, from the moment the Argo was hoisted into the sea until it returned, after epic adventures, from the quest for the Golden Fleece.

We have no such mission on this ship, although individually, I imagine, many have embarked with some private quest. I have. Martin Buber said, "All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware." This voyage I'm taking in honor of my youth. At nineteen I dreamed of Greece. If there is another inner destination, I will wait for it to be revealed. All the reasons I dreamed of Greece that year influenced my whole life, though until now I have never travelled east of Slovenia.

It's exhilarating simply to sit on deck looking out at the Homeric sea. I would not be surprised to see a mermaid surface, flip up her fish tail, and disappear. Sungla.s.ses, hat, and the vantage point of my deck chair give me the chance to observe my fellow pa.s.sengers. I see many miniwomen, eighty or so and weighing about the same. Two of these ladies fascinate me. They are twins and wear identical white lace cover-ups over two-piece suits. Their bluish hair is cut in a cap of curls, and one has painted her eyebrows in an ogival arch; the other paints hers in a horseshoe extending far above a usual eyebrow. One looks demonic, the other as though she is always about to ask a question. They leave a wake of dense floral perfume with a metallic edge cutting the sea air. No beach thongs or deck shoes for them; they walk steadily in high-heeled backless clear plastic, decorated with a puff of pink feathers. They don't seem to speak to each other; perhaps they don't have to.

At earliest dawn we dock at Corfu. I first heard of this island from my Greek professor when I was a soph.o.m.ore in college. I'd conceived a pa.s.sion for Greece, a transference of my intense crush on the professor. From him I took a course in Greek and Roman history, followed by Greek tragedies, then Greek and Latin etymology. I was ignoring the mundane requirements in plain old humanities and science courses after seeing the lost expression in Professor Hunter's eyes as he p.r.o.nounced Byron's line , my life, I love you. In the summer, babysitting for my two-year-old nephew, I taught him, instead of Mother Goose, Byron's verses about Greece: The mountains look on Marathon And Marathon looks on the sea And dreaming there an hour alone I thought that Greece might still be free.

All his dissolute life behind him, the poet drowned swimming the straits at Missolonghi while fighting with his life and his fortune for Greece's freedom. A dreamer who plunged into action. That I liked.

The professor had spent time on Corfu, which he p.r.o.nounced Corfee. When I later read Lawrence Durrell, it was the professor's face that I superimposed on the author's. I was someone very young who never had been anywhere, except for a few twirls around the South, once to New York, and once for three days to Pennsylvania to retrace the Confederates' b.l.o.o.d.y battle at Gettysburg. Never forget, never, my mother said. Professor Hunter was something so very special, a cla.s.sicist. The word spun in my mind. I wanted that world in my voice, in my eyes. I wanted his wisdom and a sense of beauty. I fixated too on his big tanned hands and crisp shirts. In the tiny cla.s.sroom, where the six other students seemed actually interested in the texts, I dreamed of Greek light. I wrote verses from the plays on index cards and kept them with me to memorize. I charged the terra-cottabound, boxed edition of the Greek plays, volumes of poetry, and ancient histories to my bookstore account, causing a nasty letter to arrive from my grandfather, which ended, "Get your head out of the clouds. Now." If only he'd known that I wove garlands of laurel and wildflowers and left them at night on the professor's office doork.n.o.b. That I waited in the rose garden under the full moon, hoping he'd stroll by. Now I should say how mortifying memory can be, but instead I'm happy to have slipped anonymous poems, the edges of the paper burned, under his door, to have been called "our Maenad." Me, editor of the yearbook at Fitzgerald High School, referred to as a member of the ecstatic Bacchic chorus. Corfeeeee, the professor intoned. He remembered the Aegean wind, falling asleep in a small boat. I imagined my sunburned lips on his warm back. But I loved as well the chiseled cadences of Aeschylus (he said Ice-q-loss), and the sensuous whimsy of Sappho, and the reverberating phrases the house of Thebes, the Argive host, on ye Bacchae. The bas.e.m.e.nt cla.s.sroom floated in a cla.s.sical sea. I rocked in that sea as if in the small boat. Exiting was a shock-into the late autumn Virginia day, the ginkgo trees a riot of yellow.

We disembark at Corfeeeee, and the boat crowd moves in a lumpen ma.s.s toward town. Hoping to circ.u.mvent the group and see something on our own, Ed and I immediately take a taxi to our farthest point, the seventeenth-century monastery of Vlaherna. We need not have bothered because busloads of other tourists are already there. Looking down, we see the monastery, pure and white, on its own tiny island ringed by boats. Pondikonissi, another small island, greener, lies beyond. According to local legend, the island formed when Poseidon turned Odysseus's ship to stone. The walkway to the monastery might sink under its load of visitors. We jump in another taxi and drive back to the old town. Corfu looks Italian. I knew of the Neapolitan and more profoundly influential Venetian dominations, but did not expect the extent of that heritage. The colors are those of Italy: sun-warmed peach, ripe mango, lemon, darkened apricot, and cream. I feel instantly at home among balconies dripping vines, arcades along a plaza, and tiny piazzas ringed with houses where the inhabitants can smell the lamb the neighbors are roasting. The town feels like a swatch of Venice.

Pulled into a small Orthodox church by the sound of a priest chanting, we are suddenly in a dim crowded s.p.a.ce heavy with the smell of wax and incense, moving in a line toward a coffin, where people are leaning down to kiss the body. It is too late to exit. I'm crushed between the large rump of the man in front of me and the copious bosom of the woman behind. "It's a saint," Ed whispers, "not a corpse." Soon we are leaning to kiss a robe, and the priest breathes in my face, "Spyridon." He is dressed in about a hundred pounds of robes himself but does not sweat. He hands Ed a square of blue folded paper. Conveyed outside, we unwrap it and find a tiny sc.r.a.p of the saint's robe. Everyone coming out buys thin tallow candles like long pencils, lights them, and stands them in a tin box filled with sand. I do the same, saying to Ed, "Make a wish." In an antique shop down the street, the owner tells us that half the men he knows are named for the saint who'd saved the island many times. We were lucky-Spyridon is only brought out four times a year. I had read about the saint in Durrell, never suspecting that someday I would keep a smidgen of his robe in my jewelry drawer.

At lunch I learn my first Greek working words-mono nero, only water, and the word for Greek salad, , which I copy in my notebook. Ed is impressed that I can sound out all the Greek letters, a benefit of having been in a sorority. I learned to draw the chi () and omega () letters at five, when my older sister pledged at the University of Georgia. Being able to read the letters unlocks cognate words. But almost everything remains impenetrable. It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible. Is this one of the mysteries of travel? One returns to preverbal pointing, smiling, shaping the air with gestures.

This first day off the ship, I see how the trip will be. We may choose one dish from a whole menu, one sip from a great bottle of wine. One monastery, not ten. The sublime Byzantine icon museum, but not the Archaeology Museum. We'll have a glimpse, a taste, a few impressions to memorize, and then we go back on board, flashing our ID cards, and sail on. As the ship pulls away from the dock, Corfu recedes, becoming a smear of gold; then the island is eclipsed by distance and disappears. I explore the rest of the island in my imagination: coves and beaches, a goat tethered to an olive tree, remote overgrown gardens, a dangling ripe tomato splitting in the sun, a decadent villa where an ancient woman writes her memoirs.

At sea, c.o.c.ktail hour begins early, ends late, and reappears at unexpected times of the day. "Gentlemen hosts," who probably retired from teaching or sales and finally get to go out to see the world, mix with the many single women and ask them to dance to "it's cherry pink and apple blossom white . . . when you're in love" and "Racing with the Moon," and, oh no, the tinkly bars of "tea for two and two for tea." This seems ludicrous at first, then tragic, then ludicrous. But from whose point of view? The women probably were married to men who danced only reluctantly. Now they can dance, rediscovering the tango and jitterbug from college days, and the hosts dance so well, unlike their husbands, who huffed at weddings and followed the box step. Not like the Florida boy I met early in my senior year of college. My roommate Saralynn and I stopped by a table in the student union where a bunch of s were playing cards. Only Frank stood up. He and I both felt electricity between us. Later he told me he said to himself the moment we met that I was the girl he would marry. He knew how to dance with such ease and grace that we danced into marriage the summer after graduation, and eons later I have a recurrent dream of dancing with him.

The hosts look so professional, whereas there's a way of dancing that exudes a sense of life. When I try to express this to Ed, he says, "You're taking this a bit seriously. Let's go in the casino and win a million dollars." Ten quarters later we find the deliciously comfortable and empty movie theatre and watch two movies we missed when they first came around.

Crete-I love the word. We board a bus for a land tour and head out of Agios Nikolaos toward Heraklion and Knossos. I am doused in number-fifty sunblock because when I stepped out on deck at seven A.M., the sun felt like a branding iron. "You're well acquainted with A.D., I expect," the guide announces. "Everything you'll see today will all be B.C." We turn into the grounds of the legendary Minoan ruins and pour off the bus into a steaming lot packed with other people streaming out of other heaving buses. Stained backpacks, water bottles, fat rear ends, pale flesh oozing out of tank tops, sweat, exhaust, belching, cameras-we herd into the beginnings of myth, the palace of King Minos.

In protest, the cicadas are shrieking, drowning out the voices of the guides. I've heard cicadas all my life; I never have heard them tune up to this break-the-sound-barrier decibel level. How spooky, as though a mad Greek chorus has been activated. The guide pauses at the snaking queue for the labyrinthine palace, then says that because of the crowds we won't be seeing this, this, and that. She lingers before a row of terra-cotta pots and explains at length that their use is disputed. I try to focus on the fact that the pots are older than the oldest Etruscans. The wall behind them-painted with soot and bulls' blood? But instead I'm remembering the myth of Talos, who was made of bronze. He heated himself until he glowed and almost turned molten, then stepped up to grab and embrace strangers as they arrived on the island. We are in his arms. The cicadas tw.a.n.g with a primitive, rhythmic cadence. The guide's voice can't reach beyond the third layer of people surrounding her. "Can you speak louder?" I ask. I'm anxious to hear everything about this place.

"Oh, no," she responds, waving her hand toward the cicada-infested trees. "They'll just screech louder." So the latter-day chorus continues its commentary. I may turn molten. Everywhere the dusty caper plants sprawl. I pick a pod to take home to Bramasole. If I blow the seed through a straw into the crevice of a stone wall, it might sprout.

The famous labyrinth never has been found. I am sure it existed and was not simply this intricate palace itself, as one of my books suggests. The labyrinth-one of our oldest stories. That it has been repeated through the centuries means that elements of the story strike lightning in the collective psyche. Theseus: lost in a maze, you are given by your lover a ball of white thread (the mitos), and you find your way out, having slain the dark force that pulled you in there. Daedalus: locked inside a labyrinth of your own creation, you therefore must escape by your own wits. The messages are clear enough.

Early in the myth, Poseidon gave a fabulous white bull to Minos, who was supposed to sacrifice it. He did not. He sacrificed a lesser bull. To punish Minos, Poseidon caused Minos's wife, Pasiphae, to become enamored of the white bull. She coaxed Daedalus to build a wooden cow, where she could hide and s.e.xually encounter the bull. The product of that union was the half-bull, half-man, the Minotaur. This gets murky. Parts of the myth do not yield easy metaphorical meanings.

Instead of all the things we came to see, we see the oldest road in Europe, complete with side channels for drainage. Under the hooves of today's herds, the white stones are getting about a hundred years of wear. I stand off to the side, fanning with a guidebook. This sun is a bull. I could be trampled by heat-incensed tourists. Ed looks stricken. Alain, you are so right. Mobs in heat. Lord.

We drive on to the museum in Heraklion, a further exercise in frustration. Here's the fabulous Minoan collection, and I do see it-through the crook of an elbow, over a shoulder, and as someone steps on my feet. I imagine myself wearing blinders in order to see the pitted ivory acrobat at full stretch before executing a somersault off the bull's back. This acrobatic bull leaping recurs in Minoan art and appears to connect with worship of the bull. Although some scholars find the feat an aerodynamic, physical impossibility, the representation makes the leap look quite plausible. One painting shows three figures, fore, on, and aft the bull. Two of the androgynous figures are white, the other is red, also probably painted with bull blood. While some consider color to reveal gender, maybe instead the figure in red, the one flipping over the bull, is transformed for the moment of sympathetic magic with the bull, and becomes white again when back on the ground. The art emits energy, as though these people still were among us.

Oddly, the galleries are hushed, only a faint hum like a faraway hive. In the afternoon's intense heat we are Minoan zombies moving from room to room.

The bull symbol, heavily potent. This early bull mythology caused the powerful corno (horn) symbolism throughout the Mediterranean world-the crescent moon, the forefinger-pinkie sign which, when raised, is used to denote a cuckold, when pushed outward from the body to poke out the eyes of a witch, and when pointed at the ground a.s.sures that something will not happen here, to us.

In the back of the bus I'm trying to solve part of the old labyrinthine myth. The cryptic part is Pasiphae, all fired up, creeping inside Daedalus's wooden bull, positioning herself so she could mate with the bull her husband was supposed to have sacrificed but didn't. The physical logistics are hard to picture. And how to read that myth? If a woman goes for the purely s.e.xual, there's h.e.l.l to pay? l.u.s.t can drive you to far extremes? The oldest stories are usually ill.u.s.trative, as are frescoes for the illiterate, those visual stories that show within the same frame a span of narrative time-the life of a saint from birth, including his miracles and death. Visual aids, teaching tools. The myth of the mating of Pasiphae and the white bull stumps me. Surely there's more to it than her scarlet ways or the punishment of Minos.

Much more appealing and understandable that careless exuberance of Icarus, who flew out of Knossos on wings of wax and feathers designed by his father, the ever-inventive Daedalus. A sun like today's would surely melt his wings and send him plunging into the sea.

Myths must have grown out of the lives of actual humans. Some were elevated over time into G.o.ds; others, such as Icarus, remained touchingly human. Someone named Icarus once mysteriously disappeared from Knossos without a trace. A visitor trading oil or wine later reported a body washing up near a small island. The small curved scar on his forehead, the hand clutching a carved dowel, the clay pendant of a bull still around his neck-why, it must be that crazy boy, Icarus. He flew. His old man Daedalus was pushy, an entrepreneur whose social climbing almost did him in. He was always involved in some disaster. No wonder the king imprisoned him. The father-son story was told a thousand times, evolving them into myth. Daedalus flew on, after the death of his son, and landed in Sicily. If you're smart enough, you escape.

At sea, the water is lighter than lapis. Endless blue, the bluest blue, forget-me-not blue. If only I could find a word to anneal to the blue, a lucid, gossamer word. The ship's bow raises a V of foam that folds over into the blue. I could stand on deck all day, just looking at this endless shift of patterning on the surface of the sea. Vinca, periwinkle-not quite. A lively blue, a wet enamel shine, a depth of blue. Sapphire-yes, that much play of light. A mystery with all the weight and expanse of land. In summer calm, exuberant.

At the first of the five formal evenings, the twins wear their preferred white lace, this time as strapless, fitted long dresses, time-warped from senior prom in Yonkers, circa 1945. With strands and dangles of rhinestones, they sparkle into the dining room and find their table for two. We enjoy the cold champagne, the resplendent captain graciously welcoming us, and the unruffled sea. How glamorous Ed looks in his Italian tuxedo, his "smoking" as it's called by Italians who frequently leave off the second word of an imported term: basket, instead of basketball, night instead of nightclub. The band advances a few decades and plays "Sat.u.r.day Night Fever," then lapses back to "Misty."

We board a bus in the port of Piraeus and drive through shady streets into Athens, calm in early morning, plumbago falling over fences. Ed says, "Remember the line in The Graduate? The old guy advises Dustin Hoffman that the future is in plastics? Look at this." Only ten million people live in Greece; five million live in Athens. Half of them have unloaded bags of trash along the road. We see startling litter everywhere: tires, barrels, crates, plastic sheeting, conduits, plastic bottles, plastic everything.

Suddenly we're in the country, dusty olive trees, ma.s.sive, maybe as old as the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta. We pa.s.s Thebes. Thebes. The cotton fields of Thebes, blue beehives, apartment blocks, Tiresias in the road. We cross plains planted with wheat and tomatoes. Along the edges of the fields, women sit behind blue boxes mounded with San Marzano tomatoes for sale. There-broken towers, a blue tractor, a man in a blue cap, then jumps into view an Austrian chalet selling Asian antiques.

We're en route to Delphi, with perhaps a few questions for the oracle. When Jupiter wanted to find the center of the world, the omphalos, he released two eagles at the far corners. Where they met was Delphi. Would that we had oracles, who gave absolute, if often ambiguous, answers to essential questions for twelve centuries. Our guide for today looks bored. At the front of the bus with her microphone, she lurches with every pothole. Already she has irked me by asking how many of us have heard of Delphi. Then she asks, "Have you seen a map of Greece?"

I want to shout, I was studying Greece before you were born.

"Don't say Del-fie!" she admonishes someone who has ventured a question. "It's Del-fee!" I want to smack her for condescending, even though I did p.r.o.nounce it Del-fie. As soon as we leave the bus, we break off from her strident voice. We have our own books to consult, with the imagined tones of an oracle reading to us, not her sandpaper voice. Proper pilgrims, we have brought a small bottle to collect some water from the holy spring, although we have brought no propitiatory honeypies for the snakes. We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat. On walls of Delphi were inscribed: , sigma, meaning "energy" and "one's own force." They also carved Know Thyself and Nothing to Excess, all still valid, though I've always been a fan of excess, siding with Colette, who said, "It's no good having any unless you can have too much." Blake went farther: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

The ruins-more extensive than I imagined-look like rocks picked up and made into walls and houses that are returning to their natural positions in the fields.

My grandmother, who died when I was eleven, waits on a rock outside the entrance. I spotted her on the bus, her very body, bosomy but thin and spongy, deer legs, white hair fluffed just right, and her little pointed chin and watery, sad blue eyes. She wore high heels to Delphi and could not climb up to see where the oracle held forth for all those centuries. Instead, she bought a hamburger and sat on a stone feeding it to the birds. The voile print dress is the same, and the bony ankles. I know she will smell of Shalimar, exotic and cloying. As we reboard the bus, she sits in front of me. I see that her hair grows low on her nape, as mine does. I expect her to turn around, recognize me, and say, "Why, Frances, my dear, after so many years," but instead she swivels in the bus seat and says, "Darlin', could you unhook my bra? I'm sure as h.e.l.l not riding all the way back to the ship in the heat with this thing stranglin' me." My wafty grandmother, Frances Smith Mayes, whose mother was so importantly named Sarah America Gray. I oblige. And remember Apollo, G.o.d of prophecy, and all the G.o.ds who extract revenge if you come too close. Memory is like that, too. The layers unshuffle, about to reveal something, then show you only a wild card.

On the way back to the ship, I catch a glimpse of the Acropolis at sunset, far away, and lines by Kostos Kariotakis rise in my mind: "And there beyond, the Akropolis like a Queen/wears all the sunset like a crimson robe."

At sea, at night, women's fantasies come alive. The deep rhythms of the sea must retrieve primal longings. By day, they lounge or walk or attend lectures and performances in muted linen pants or shorts and simple shirts. At the dances and candlelight dinners on board, our main delight is not the good food or the music. It is the fabulous sight of a large Dutch woman in blue taffeta with puffed sleeves and a little bustle. A bustle! A straight yellow dress with an Empire waist reminds me of the bridesmaid's dress I wore at my friend Anne's wedding when she fainted from the heat and the priest just kept on with the ceremony until she revived. The twins, with upsweeps and dangling rhinestones, have switched for this gala, to black lace numbers with fake red roses around the scooped necks. Ed and I are in our anonymous Italian black. Others, too, are in this minimalist mode, tasteful, fitted sheaths, the discreet powdery colors and simple cuts. There's the Isabella Rosselini look-alike, with tanned perfect shoulders and arms, riding into the ballroom like Aphrodite on the waves, her cloud of pink chiffon drifting from her ankles. There's the young daughter of hefty, blond South Africans in her sea-foam silk dress with billowing sleeves, who looks like an Annunciation angel except for the dragon tattoo on her shoulder.

Our eyes are drawn to the flamboyant, the ravishing variety of the species on show. Ed likes a three-tiered muu-muu with enough fringe around the hem to bind a five-by-six rug. Following her, on the arm of her handsome husband, a red-haired beauty who looks as though she has somehow been expanded by a bicycle pump wears white Lycra so tight it fits like a plaster cast over her blimp-sized b.u.t.tocks. The neck is V-ed to the last possible moment, revealing generous slices of Cycladic b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Where did she get long white gloves with diamond-shaped cutouts? I'm drawn to the woman with hair piled high, then cascading into curls. She's in voluminous ruffles splotched with red flowers and what might be banana leaves. At around three hundred pounds, she looks like a moving garden. The gentlemen hosts go to work, and the band saws away at tunes the dolphins must dive far under the waves to escape.

In Santorini the paint stores don't have to stock a range of colors. Shelves of Aegean blue and stark white will do. White, white houses, white as bleached bones, with gates, windows, and doors of blue, a vibrating blue when fresh, fading through the seasons to chalky gray. The blue-trimmed domed churches are profoundly appealing, not only for their stark purity and isolation but because at a subconscious level they must remind us of the dome of the skull and the interior life. An occasional iconoclast has painted a door green or a fence lavender. Still, those are sea colors in shallows or at twilight. We are let loose for the day and have rented a car. Here I experience the legendary Greek light in the harsh landscape, which looks unbenevolent but also s.p.a.ciously opens to the sun. The hills, almost treeless except for the fig, hardly intrude on essential sky and sea, and the lava-scoured land looks as plain as the sea. Few trees escape from the volcanic soil, except the fig. Stubby, but proof that this tree will have its way with rock or mountain or field anywhere in the Mediterranean world. Ed pulls over, and I get out to watch grape-pickers loading baskets with dusky fruit. The vines sprawl on the ground, as though unable to stand up against the hard sun. Even the middle distance shimmers in the heat, warping the lines of grapes. My head feels struck by the sun, the rays warping my skull. The Praxitilean ideals must have come from standing in a field in Greece, from realizing that finding the essentials of beauty is a reductive process. Take away the extras-but leave the hot wind, the hand cutting the grape, the sun filling your bones with arid light.

At sea, I am loving the days. Blue, blue, we're skimming, sliding over blue. At times I see rivers running in the sea, angling across the choppy tides. The color of blue-immortal. Cheery orange and yellow tenders with names like Herakles and Perikles toot out to meet us as we approach an island, then tug or guide us into harbor.

On deck in hard sunlight, the worshipers reveal their quadruple bypa.s.s scars (one fresh, puckered red), knees swollen and purple, withered cesarean slashes. On California beaches I'm used to seeing the gorgeous. Here, alongside those at the peak of perfection, the ancient, the obese, the damaged shed their clothes and forget their vein-popped legs, horn-thick toenails, liver-spotted skin. Facing the human's last or ruined or excessive forms contrasts sharply with the archaic statues of human perfection we are seeing in the museums. The man we call Mr. Good Morning, for his enthusiastic greeting, lets out a long toot every time he stands. His posture makes the letter lambda, . My eyes are riveted by a scarecrow man whose withered p.e.n.i.s, so huge, hangs from the side of his wide-legged bathing trunks. I suddenly recall my daughter's horse, Chelsea. One crane-legged man raises his drink and says, "Let's party." Yes, let's.

Wanting to lose twelve pounds, I am especially drawn to the grandly obese. The loving mother with two frisky children lowers herself into the pool. Good for her, I think. The h.e.l.l with people like me who feel as though a spotlight shines on them if they carry a bulge on the thigh, if the stomach is not concave. Her ankles merge seamlessly into Colossus of Rhodes thighs, overlapped at the knees as though a meltdown has begun. She has, remarkably, chosen a white suit. Backing down the ladder into the water, she looks like an albino hippopotamus; b.r.e.a.s.t.s, stomach, hips converge, hiding even from her the cleft of her s.e.x. How light she becomes in the salt water. She frolics with her blond boy, her skinny girl, tossing them in the air, letting them splash with a shriek, until she hoists herself out with heavy effort. Luxuriating on a chaise longue, she falls asleep. The girl's head rests on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, in this life or the next the softest pillow she ever will feel against her face.

Late at night when I am alone on deck, I see the woman again near the rail in a red caftan, arms spread, dancing alone. A pleasure to the eye. At sea, she is G.o.ddess of the waves. Her heart is working overtime. Is she sleeping in the same bunk-width beds everyone else is?

We love Nafplio, named for Nafplios, the son of Poseidon, on the coast of mainland Greece. Long shady esplanade along the sea, a sand-castle-type castle just offsh.o.r.e, pastel houses, and boisterous people. By chance we find the museum of the komboloi (worry beads). I've watched men fingering those beads in the cafes. The museum is Aris Evangelinos's lifetime collection, displayed in a small house. He also makes and sells them. He has stories to tell. His fierce black eyebrows shoot up and down. "The beads are nonreligious in Greece," he explains; "they are a friend, they are for the comfort of touch, for the clacking noise they make, for the color." He holds up an antique komboloi made of amber. "In Muslim countries, often you find three sets of thirty-three beads for three prayers. The Hindus call them mala, meaning 'prayer book.' But in Greece they are companions to life. Friends. Many men are buried holding their komboloi. If you wear one around your neck, the evil eye knows to stay away from you."

His collection includes beads made of snakes' backbones, black coral, olive pits, ebony, flower seeds, mother of pearl, thread knots, yak horn, rare green amber, aromatic wood, ivory, and amber powder. Some are incised, limned with secret symbols. I pick out a bracelet-size komboloi of pale yellow onyx. I'm a paperclip-bender at my desk. I'll try picking up this instead. We buy his book, and he signs it for us. At lunch I open it and read, "To my friends Frances and Edward with love, Aris." Such moments make travel a deep pleasure.

Nafplio elicits the word charming. The major industry seems to be the benign production of gold jewelry. I look in several shops, admiring the hammered Byzantine crosses, rings of many-colored semiprecious stones, and coral pins. You can imagine living here, strolling along the water, sitting in the piazza listening to the wandering minstrels with their open guitar cases spotted with coins, which is what I do until time to dash to the ship, already sounding its bellowing horn for departure. Ed goes off to mail some cards, gets lost, and barely runs across the gangplank in time.

We like getting dressed for dinner as we slip out of a harbor every night. Our mood as we enter the dining room shifts to celebratory. We're having great dates. I begin to remember that I was quite good at flirting. Ed becomes more romantic, swooping out of his jacket pocket a small blue-velvet box. Inside I find gold earrings with round sapphires-the very ones I'd coveted in a jewelry shop. And I thought he was off looking for stamps. They will remind me of the color of the sea. After dinner we walk all around the deck. The stars are enough to break your heart, so intensely present, close enough to reach. They do not seem like the same stars that hang over the rest of the planet.

At sea, in the night, Ed dreams again of water pouring into the cabin. "Remember the old Paul Newman movie? When he's in a cistern and the water starts to rise and someone covers the top with steel and the water keeps coming up?"

"No. Why was he in a cistern?"

"I don't know. Anyway, the water comes almost to the top where he has only a tiny s.p.a.ce to breathe."

"How did he get out?"

"That's not the point. The point is the feeling. I can't take this." I too sometimes wake in the night feeling as though I am inside an egg.

Out on deck early, I spot people thrashing in the water. Suicides? Two at once? Crazies on speed? Just then a life preserver is thrown from our boat, and the two swim toward it. Soon two crewmen haul them out of the water into a dinghy. Later I hear that they are two Afghan or Albanian or Kurdish refugees, now recovering in the ship infirmary. Rumors buzz around the decks. A nearby sailboat picked up three men in the night when they were dumped by the person they'd paid to take them to safety. Were there seventeen originally? One refugee said so. If so, twelve have drowned and possibly we have sailed over their bodies.

This rescue is a brutal reminder of the sc.r.a.ppy courage of those caught in the crosshairs of world events not of their making. And also a reminder of privilege and luck. We stared down into the water where two flecks were adrift. How surreal their night, landing in the sharp water and treading until morning. Death was right there in a lungful of salt water, a pa.s.sing shark, or the failure of the body to keep on moving. Suddenly they are saved. Then we necessarily move on through the day, gnawed at (for years) by the image of the two faces looking up.

My talk is late morning. I see in the daily program that it has not been listed among the day's activities, and at eleven I face an audience of five. Unsettling, because I am on board as a guest in exchange for speaking. We have an intimate little chat, and then everyone is back to sunning and reading on this day at sea. The entertainment director says not to worry, but I feel as though I've slipped into a theatre without a ticket.

All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words? Beneath my vision of this sea, the green waters of Angel Island wash, weekends at anchor in Alaya cove with my first husband and daughter on our sailboat, Primavera. Often we were the only boat. After four, when the last tourist ferry departed, the deer came out, dozens of them, to drink from the sprinklers on the caretaker's lawns. We rowed the dinghy to sh.o.r.e and walked around the island for the sunset views of San Francisco, which looked like a fabled city rising white out of the ocean. The always-improbable span of the Golden Gate seemed like some link between memories rather than a practical bridge that is constantly being repainted. Those Primavera evenings were close to sublime. In the tiny galley I made dinner, then we watched for falling stars on clear nights or slipped early into the nifty beds below, where we were rocked all night like newborns in the treetops before the cradle fell.