The long path zigzagged up a cliff-face, and leaving the lower world behind, we came over the top into the upper Parnassus. A vernally cool wind blew across two or three miles of meadowland. Beyond, sombre black firwoods and grey buttresses of rock climbed, arched and finally disappeared into fleecy white clouds. Alison dismounted and we walked over the turf beside the muleteer. He was about forty, with a fierce moustache under a broken nose and a fine air of independence about him. He told us about the shepherd life; a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars and chilling winds, endless silences broken only by bells, alarms against wolves and eagles; a life unchanged in the last six thousand years. I translated for Alison. She warmed to him at once, establishing a half-sexual, half-philanthropic rapport across the language barrier.

He said he had worked in Athens for a time, but then hyparchi esychia, there was no silent peace there. Alison liked the word: esychìa, esychìa, she kept on repeating. He laughed and corrected her pronunciation; stopping and conducting her, as if she were an orchestra. Her eyes flicked defiantly at me, to see if she was behaving properly in my eyes. I kept a neutral face; but I liked the man, one of those fine rural Greeks who constitute the least servile and most likeable peasantry in Europe, and I couldn’t help liking Alison for liking him back.

On the far side of the grassland we came to two kalyvia, rough stone huts, by a spring. Our muleteer was taking another path from then on. Alison fished impulsively in her red Greek shoulder-bag, and pressed on him two packets of airline cigarettes. ‘Esychia,’ the muleteer said. He and Alison stood interminably shaking hands, while I took their photo.

‘Esychia, esychia. Tell him I know what he means.’

‘He knows you know. That’s why he likes you.’

At last we set off through the firs.

‘You think I’m just sentimental.’

‘No, I don’t. But one packet would have been enough.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. I felt two packets fond of him.’

Later she said, ‘That beautiful word.’

‘It’s doomed.’

We climbed a little way. ‘Listen.’

We stopped on the stony track and listened and there was nothing but silence, esychia, the breeze in the fir-branches. She took my hand and we walked on.

The path mounted interminably through the trees, through clearings alive with butterflies, over rocky stretches where we several times lost the path. As we came higher, it grew cooler, and the mountain ahead, a damp polar grey, disappeared completely into the cloud. We spoke very little because we seldom had breath to speak. But the solitude, the effort, the need I had continually to take her hand to help her when the path became, as it frequently did, a rough staircase rather than a path – all this broke some of the physical reserve between us; instituted a sort of sexless camaraderie that we both accepted as the form.

It was about six when we came to the refuge. It was tucked away above the tree-line in a goyal, a minute windowless building with a barrel-vaulted roof and a chimney. The door was of rusty iron, perforated with jagged bullet-holes from some battle with the Communist andarte during the Civil War: we saw four bunks, a pile of old red blankets, a stove, a lamp, a saw and an axe, even a pair of skis. But it looked as if no one had stayed there for years.

I said, ‘I’m game to call it a day here.’ But she didn’t even answer; simply pulled on a jumper.

The clouds canopied us, it began to drizzle, and as we turned up over a crest, the wind cut like January in England. Then suddenly the clouds were all around us, a swirling mist that cut visibility down to thirty yards or less. I turned to look at Alison. Her nose had gone red and she looked very cold. But she pointed up the next boulder-strewn slope.

At the top of it we came to a col and miraculously, as if the mist and the cold had been a small test, the sky began to clear. The clouds thinned, were perfused by oblique sunlight, then burst open into great pools of serene blue. Soon we were walking in sunshine again. Before us lay a wide basin of green turf, ringed with peaks and festooned by streaks of snow still clinging to the screes and hollows of the steeper slopes. Everywhere there were flowers – harebells, gentians, deep magenta-red alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage. They burst out of every cranny in the rocks, they enamelled every stretch of turf. It was like stepping back a season. Alison ran on ahead, wildly, and turned, grinning, her arms held out, like a bird about to take wing; then ran on again, dark-blue and jeans-blue, in absurd childish swoops.

Lykeri, the highest peak, was too steep to be climbed quickly. We had to scramble up, using our hands, resting frequently. Near the top we came on beds of violets in bloom, huge purple flowers that had a delicate scent; and then at last, hand in hand, we struggled up the last few yards and stood on the little platform with its crowning cairn.

Alison said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

On the far side a huge chasm plunged down two thousand feet of shadowy air. The westering sun was still just above the horizon, but the clouds had vanished. The sky was a pale, absolutely dustless, absolutely pure, azure. There were no other mountains near to crowd the distances out. We seemed to stand immeasurably high, where land and substance drew up to a narrow zenith, remote from all towns, all society, all drought and defect. Purged.

Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colours. There were deep-blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-coloured earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters ÖÙÓ –‘light’. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light. It didn’t touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.

We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences ; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its un-inducedness, its being-now-ness.

I looked covertly at Alison; the tip of her nose was bright red. But I was thinking that after all she had guts; that if it hadn’t been for her we wouldn’t have been there, this world at our feet, this sense of triumph – this transcendent crystallization of all I felt for Greece.

‘You must see things like this every day.’

‘Never like this. Never even beginning to be like this.’ Two or three minutes later she said, ‘This is the first decent thing that’s happened to me for months. Today. And this.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And you.’

‘Don’t say that. I’m just a mess. A defilement.’

‘I still wouldn’t want to be here with anyone else.’ She stared out towards Euboea; bruised face, being dispassionate for once. She turned and looked at me. ‘Would you?’

‘I can’t think of any other girl I’ve ever known who could walk this far.’

She thought it over, then looked at me again. ‘What an evasive answer that was.’

‘I’m glad we came. You’re a trouper, Kelly.’

‘And you’re a bastard, Urfe.’

But I could see that she wasn’t offended.