Literary Indulgence

Chapter 8

The wind that had whipped up the sea the day before had eased, and the Aegean was its trademark blue. As we began our ascent, the view was stunning and the cape, where the island’s mountain chain came to a rugged end, had the look of a racked and life-beaten soul. On a small plateau, before the descent to the hot springs of Thermes, wild goats grazed while their kids played in the stones and tufts of the coastal grasses.

I pulled into a car park to join two other hire cars. From the top of the worn and precarious staircase we could see four women lying in the shallows where hot water seeped through small vents near the shore. We descended, gripping at the rusted and brittle rail. The sheer cliff face opposite us loomed over the stony beach. Here, the seep of hot water at the cliff’s base reminded me of the awesome force that lay beneath, like the tic of a madman.

If my sister was threatened by this brutal beauty, she didn’t appear so. No sooner had we chosen our place among the pebbles than she was stripping to her bathers and tottering barefoot to the vaporising shallows. She had already taken up position with the other women when I reached the water that immediately fizzed around my feet.

The prone, silent women unnerved me, and when they opened their eyes to take me in, I self-consciously lowered myself into the water’s warmth and lay on my back next to Madeleine.

It was a surreal moment, lying in silence in a type of sisterhood with the women, and I wondered if we were re-enacting a similar scene two-and-a-half thousand years earlier. As I lay in the sulphurous balm, I took in those boulders that lay at the cliff’s feet and looked for their origins on the face, tracking my eyes up and up to the towering summit and to the impossibly blue sky. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth seeping into my limbs, the sulphur into my nose and I imagined myself slowly disassembling in this stew, returning my molecules to the whole.

I felt weightless, borderless. Through my hooded lids, I took in again the summit of the cliff and saw a movement among the straggling vegetation. A small rock dislodged and trickled to a shelf below. When I looked up again, a mountain goat stood looking out to sea.

Madeleine continued to meditate in her bath, but two of the other women began to murmur softly to each other in German. I closed my eyes again and soaked up the heat, the peace and the sound of them, and thought of my childhood holidays spent on the beaches of one of Melbourne’s own peninsulas.

I thought of the hours spent swimming in the bay during the seemingly endless summer days of my youth and how, exhausted from swimming, I would throw myself on to the sand and listen to the sounds of the beach – the gulls fighting each other over the scraps from someone’s fishing bucket; of other children playing in the water’s safe aqua zone, and the drumming of the hulls of hire boats anchored just offshore. I remembered that freedom, the complete happiness of it. And I felt it here too, in the hot springs of a foreign island.

* * *

For the rest of that day, our muscles revived and feeling a luxurious calm, we toured the length of the island, marvelling at its history, in awe of the olive trees that resembled the animated trees of fantasy. Cultivated in groves hundreds of years before and now growing wild, they would have been witness to generations of change. When we returned at sunset, we decided to try out our local restaurant. Alexander greeted us with the same effusive enthusiasm as he had the previous day.

“Geddayyyy Ossies!”

Madeleine was intrigued. “Alexander, how do you know we’re Australian?”

He looked at her in mock bewilderment.

“How you talk! Must be how you look!” he said, waving his arms up and down. He guided us to an outdoor table.

“Do we really sound like that?” Madeleine persisted.

“No whurrreees,” Alexander laughed. “When I was in Melborrrne,” he confided, “everybody,” he added, moving his arms like windmills to make his point, “speak same.”

“You’ve been to Melbourne?” I said, the world feeling smaller to me all the time.

“Of course! My aunteee, uncle, my cousins all live there. I stay for six month… for geology.”

“Geology?”

“Alexander is not just a fabulous waiter,” he boasted. “I also nearly a geologist.”

I stored this information away for the moment thinking of the tiny stone stored in my room.

“Why do you come all the way to Kos?”

Between us Madeleine and I told him, in our broken version of English that we had come to learn about Hippocrates.

“Ahhhh, great man,” Alexander said dreamily,” but, for me, not so great as Asklepios.”

I knew that Asklepios had been worshipped by Hippocrates, who honoured the god in the first line of his Oath, and that he was included in the recounting of Hippocrates’ dream that I had read on the plane. I thought that I knew him, too, from another source, but couldn’t think of it then.

“He was greatest healer,” Alexander continued, “long, long time. Even before great battle of Troy.” A family arrived and he apologised as he left to attend to them.

“Interesting,” Madeleine said, spreading hummus on thick slices of bread.

“Yes.” Asklepios, I resolved, would have my attention.

Back in the room, while Madeleine introduced herself to the “feet” next door, I resumed my research, from a different angle. The books in my possession made only fleeting reference to Asklepios and there seemed to be some confusion whether he had been a man or a god. His origins, though, were in Thessaly and there was a temple dedicated to him there, in Epidaurus and in Kos at the site known as the Asklepion. Although Asklepios had been worshipped on Kos, and that Hippocrates himself was an Asklepiad – a supposed descendant – the younger physician was the main hero of this island. The next day, I decided, I would go to the Asklepion.