Just below him Mars Hill looked like a shiny, rose-tintedwalnut, and the words from the book of Acts that Paul theapostle had spoken there ran through his mind.'I see that in every way you Athenians are veryreligious. For as I walked through your city andlooked at the places where you worship, I foundan altar on which is written, ‘To an UnknownGod.’ That which you worship, then, eventhough you do not know it, is what I nowproclaim to you.

South of Larissa the landscape began to change. Jude watched an irrigation machine like a giant stick insect creeping over a field, and a tractor racing across another, raking up a dust cloud behind in a brown jet stream.

As they climbed towards Delphi, the cypress trees lined the road like javelin heads, and when they passed its sanctuary of Apollo, a place pagans once thought of as the navel of the world, the light was beginning to fade with the sun…

Jude leant on the hotel balcony railing looking down over the rooftops of central Athens. Below him was a dense plantation of TV aerials, and a building with air-con units slung on the side like finger holds up a climbing wall.

Out past the pimple of Lycabettus Hill the concrete apartment blocks in shades of beige, grey and white glinted in the morning sunlight, as if shards of broken glass had been strewn in among them.

I was just thinking about Byron,’ said Jude. ‘He went to Greece, you know, Athens, during his gap years. A young man doing the grand tour; loved ancient Greece and all it stood for; put it all down in a poetic travelogue, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage … yeah. There’s a bit about Albania in it too.’ Jude covered his mouth and coughed lightly. ‘“Morn dawns and with it stern Albania’s hills … birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear … and gathering storms around, convulse the closing year.